Going Right When We Meant To Go Left

As David Brooks points out, this should be a defining time for the left, if not an era for the left. Yet what we get is a staggering win for the right. This whirlwind of motion and change is left in a dark caldron to be sealed for as long as people let others run …

Thinking Out Loud

Only citizens through their responsive government can monitor and guide the behaviour of corporations and their interaction with people and the natural, fragile earth. We need more people who are intelligent, informed, and unbiased and who articulate the truths that media won't.-rlw

Going To The Sun

The Stranger by Albert Camus - Impressions 1942 Prose that is crisp and spare and precise. Fragments of humanity that are turned this way and that to develop a character in time and place. Meursault is detached and self-sufficient. His social needs are minimal. He is authentic and sure of his senses and is comfortable …

Huang Po (Huangbo Xiyun) ~ 黄檗希運 ~ zen buddhist ~ Chinese ~ Tang Dynasty ~ 850AD

Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love Huang Po taught his students they were already enlightened. I know of one student of Zen who threw a translation of Huang Po out of his apartment window, and the book, like a block of wood, made it, on more than one occasion, into an open trash can …

Poetics of Imagination – Northrop Frye

Frye stumbles on the idea of archetypal structure in literature. It resonates with Jungian thought, Gaston Bachelard, James Hillman and others in that poetics comes before philosophy or psychology. It seems to me that there is biological, deep structure, integration of the image and poetics, a structure that cannot be deconstructed but is elemental to human …

Italo Calvino – Mr Palomar’s Philosophical Book of Mental Illustrations, Or Poets, Take Back The World.

Mr Palomar is an accomplished practitioner of zen buddhism. He is astute at seeing what is before him as it is. Where he gets into trouble is when seeing, or being, is not enough and he needs to develop his strategies and plans together with his angst at trying to do the right thing in …

Czeslaw Milosz – Biography – The Wilno Poet Under California Skies

Czeslaw Milosz - The Wilno Poet Under California Skies November 2012 It is not an anomaly to be transformed by the breadth and scope of the Northern California landscape. To stand on a mountain and look over the rocky shore and the expanse of the blue Pacific is a powerful sensation. While one's awe eventually …

Seattle and Its Mayor, Mike McGinn – Were We Ever a Civilized Part of the World?

  Seattle and Its Mayor - Were We Ever a Civilized Part of the World? Seattle, like the rest of the nation, has decided that cordiality - respect of opinion and differences - is yesterday's practice. Several months ago a local journalist said this: "I honestly believe that Mayor Mike McGinn is the worst office …

Dongshan’s Five Ranks: A Zen Teaching on Nonduality

http://www.judithragir.org/2012/06/dongshans-five-ranks/ Dongshan’s Five Ranks There is some disagreements over the 5 Ranks of Dongshan within the Soto School. Some people say that it is too much of a developmental step-ladder and loses the “nowness” and immediacy of “each moment is enlightenment”. In my lineage, the labeling of a “kensho” is looked down upon because we …

Lincoln – Poetics, Character, Precipice of War and Human Design.

Lincoln - Poetics, Character, Precipice of War and Human Design. Upon reading Edmund Wilson's profile of Lincoln in "Patriotic Gore - Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War," I am taken by the literary and poetic drama of the account. Lincoln is shown to be chiefly literary in character — it is what …