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 27 Jan 2007 @ 05:57
On a grass leaf, awaiting the morning sun,
The dew is melting.
Do not stir the field so soon, wind of winter!
---Dogen
Tozan asked Sozan: "Where are you going?"
"To an unchanging place," Sozan said.
"If it's unchanging, how could there be any going?" asked Tozan.
Sozan said: "Going, too, is unchanging."
---Zen mondo
When we are mired in the relative world, never lifting our gaze to the mystery, our life is stunted, incomplete; we are filled with yearning for that paradise that is lost when, as young children, we replace with words and ideas and abstractions---such as merit, such as past, present and future---our direct, spontaneous experience of the thing itself, in the beauty and precision of this present moment.
---Peter Matthiessen
The painting is called Regaling the Commander, and was created by Alphonse-Marie-Adolphe de Neuville in 1875.
I understand an element of basic military training stays with you forever. I work with a guy who saw action as a Marine Corps sergeant in Viet Nam some 35 years go. He likes to snap me a salute in the school hallway, partly out of respect I guess but also to show off his machismo. The whole military thing is such a definition of manhood that a guy actually can feel discomfort for having gone through adolescence in relative Peacetime, as my generation did. I made it all the way through with a 1-A classification, but never was drafted---although the Cuban Missile Crisis came close.
No such problems of Peacetime nowdays though...or in the forseeable future, with eternal war declared on any opposition to Yankee globalization. Even our army supposedly has a private army of contracted protectors...although they don't seem as efficient at doing that job as they do guarding scouts for various corporations. Reagan was not a real soldier but he played one in the movies. Nixon got off on splendid uniforms. Bush and Cheney ducked duty but work ceaselessly to convince the world they're true commanders of democracy. They so love their armed contractors in Iraq and New Orleans (was NO or Katrina mentioned in the State of the Union?) that we now are hearing proposals for a new private army in the US to do all those pesky menial chores that so plague the luxury class.
As Bush looks for more people to command, which of course is the mark of a Real Man, I'm relieved to get a history lesson from Garry Wills today in the NY Times. He reviews for us what Commander in Chief really means in historical and Constitutional context. This White House seems to care little for either history or the Constitution, but the rest of us can benefit from a little review. Garry Wills, a professor emeritus of history at Northwestern, is the author, most recently, of “What Paul Meant.” More >
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 11 Jan 2007 @ 10:42
The mountain grows darker,
taking the scarlet
from the autumn leaves.
---Buson
Cooking, eating, sleeping, every deed of everyday life is nothing else than the Great Matter. Realize this! So we extend tender care with a worshipping heart even to such beings as beasts and birds---but not only to beasts, not only to birds, but to insects too, ok? Even to grass, to one blade of grass, even to dust, to one speck of dust. Sometimes I bow to the dust...
---Soen Nakagawa
The fundamental delusion of reality is to suppose that I am HERE and you are out there.
---Yasutani
Wow, how about those gas prices yesterday!
Maybe Bush should give a TV speech every night.
Hopefully you're showing up at a rally somewhere this evening to question the use of American troops, at taxpayer expense, to secure the private reserves, profits and markets of all these oilmen. Check the balance sheets of corporations "cleaning up" (in) Iraq:
their continuing bid free, tax-exempt megaprofits tell the real story of what Victory means to this Executive.
The Enron philosophy lives on! More >
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 26 Dec 2006 @ 11:29
Jump into salvation while you are alive. What you call "salvation" belongs to the time before death.
---Kabir
To be enlightened is to be intimate with all things.
---Dogen
God whose love and joy are everywhere can't come to visit unless you aren't there.
---Angelus Silesius
The image accompanying is from a 2004 calendar entitled A Year Of Agony, which was put out by Sourcefire, a network security company. [link] The caption reads "I've locked down my host to the point where it's unusable."
Our computer is the same one we had in 2004 (we're window-shopping eagerly for a new one) but in the meantime has developed so many knots in its processing that I feel we're losing this war almost as badly as the invasion of Iraq. For indeed what other appliance do you buy for your household that comes under actual attack from parties known and unknown the moment you connect it up to use? Say what you will about the malicious geeks out there, they're brought planned obsolescence to an art form. Of course neocons preach the consumer needs no help battling this army all by yourself in your tilty deskchair.
I spend at least a half hour a day doing routine maintenance on this thing. We have dialup but I can't blame all the weirdness in the machine on that. I've been struggling for 2 months to get my Norton scan to work properly again. I suspect a Microsoft Priority Update as the culprit...but maybe it's an undetectable worm picked up at MySpace. I seem to be spending more time worrying about what's infecting our computer than my own bodily health! But like that organism, it seems the more I try to do about it, the worse everything gets. Thus the illustration here. More >
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 22 Dec 2006 @ 09:54
If you want to know who I am, don't ask me where I live and what I do, but rather ask me what I am living for and ask me in very small particulars why I am doing so little about it.
---Thomas Merton
The gift given to us comes struggling to escape from the tinsel and wrapping that disguises its coming and is the gift of Hope. It comes simply, in the form of a child, born into stark poverty, without a glimmer of material excess. Here is the very heart of the Christian faith: not a threat, but an invitation. God coming to us as a baby to do for us that which we could not do for ourselves. Offering us his very life of love and justice.
---John Sentamu, Archbishop of York
The sign of Christmas is a star, a light in darkness. See it not outside of yourself, but shining in the Heaven within, and accept it as the sign the time of Christ has come.
---A Course In Miracles
The 12-wheeler roaring over that rise bears down on a scattering herd of reindeer. Do you think it's pretty certain the heavy piece of equipment on it hardly is intended for improvement of life in the Sami culture that depends on those animals? Or are these Santa's reindeer stampeding away from commercialization? But wait, those reindeer and the truck are headed straight for me, standing in the way with a camera in hand! The whole image struck me as particularly appropriate to how I feel about the approach of Christmas this year. "Christ is born" replaced by borne down upon: not good. Let me see what I can do to lift the heavy load. More >
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 17 Dec 2006 @ 12:40
I have just three things to teach:
Simplicity, patience, compassion.
These three are your greatest treasures.
Simple in actions and in thoughts, you return to the source of your being.
Patient with both friends and enemies, you accord with the way things are.
Compassionate toward yourself, you reconcile all beings in the world.
---Tao Te Ching
In this life we cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love.
---Mother Teresa
And as to me, I know nothing else but miracles.
---Walt Whitman
Here I am, in a condition not that unusual for me: I came to the computer with a pile of catch-up to do...and have ended up sleuthing down a couple of stories I couldn't resist. In this case I've been out of circulation since Wednesday, when a flu-bug that'd been after me for at least a week finally found the way in and laid me out. If there's a pandemic, which some media are hinting at again, I now can rest easy with the certainty either my immunity is strengthened to resist it or shattered so I'll be the first to go.
Dana decided I'd face this one with Vitamin C, a witches brew she makes with vodka and roots, hot pepper tea, and coma. For some reason I decided I had it coming to me, did not call Dr. Conjeevaram for the help 50 years of medical progress has achieved, and prepared instead to suffer. The various 'cillin drugs usually send me to Cloud 9, while the physical battle wages, where at least I can mope around somewhat in human fashion. But they also prolong the sickness (it is said) and strengthen (they say further) the little beasties trying so hard to kill us off. So I went through a bout with the flu I haven't experienced since I was a kid: flat on my back in bed for over 2 days, alternating chills and sweats, merciless headache, pains in lower regions, dozing sleep whenever. One time long ago I faced scarlet fever with only shades drawn, icepacks, and Aspergum. I didn't even get Aspergum with this thing.
This morning I feel sorta normal again and so I came downstairs to the computer room with arms loaded of stuff to get done, most of it for gifts I want to mail out immediately. But Dana had emailed a story last night about continued attempts even to identify the dead from Hurricane Katrina that hooked me hard. Now, another thing Dana does, besides torture me with ancient remedies, is send out stories without identifying links...and in this case not even an author's name. This piece was written with such brilliance I just had hit the search engines. I proved to myself why Microsoft is slipping away and Google reigns supreme. The author's name is Rukmini Callimachi---and I finally gave up on MSN when from 5 pages of links I couldn't find out if the writer is a man or a woman. Google solved that mystery in its first offering and gave the only online picture of her, which looks to be her college yearbook photo. More >
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I don't know about you, but sometimes I work a long time, cumulatively for hours, on comments I make on these News Logs. I plan to edit this Log regularly and delete things. Before I do that, I want to assure you, I shall notify each commentator of such an amendment so you may have time to copy anything you wish to save and paste somewhere else. Create your own News Log in your profile. |
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