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 15 Apr 2006 @ 11:39
A photo of a churchyard in Lascun
How can I construct my humble hut right here in the midst of Oxford Circus? How can I do that in the confusion of cars and buses? How can I listen to the singing of birds and also to the leaping of fish? How can one turn all the showings of the shop window displays into the freshness of green leaves swayed by the morning breeze? How am I to find the naturalness, artlessness, utter self-abandonment of nature in the utmost artificiality of human works? This is the great problem set before us these days.
---D.T. Suzuki, addressing a conference of world religions in London, 1936
Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.
---Rainer Maria Rilke
Winter having come,
the crows perch
on the scarecrow.
---Kikaku
Ilona is in the Pyranees this Easter weekend, where snow may cover the mountaintops all the time...so Kikaku's observation may not be completely inappropriate today. Besides, the cross is something of a scarecrow too...and in the winter of our discontent the crows sit on it and caw away.
No more sermons today in this quiet day of expectation and hope---unless I can't help it. The 6:00 morning here was utter mystery. We have a new pup that Jeroch rescued, as his chain had become entangled in a bridgepost. He must have broken loose with no ID, so we've welcomed him in. We named him Jacques in honor of Ilona's school quarter in France...and that was before the vet told us he's mostly Jack Russell terrier. Down the hill he went after a herd of deer breakfasting in the meadow, waking the late risers among the bird population. More >
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 8 Apr 2006 @ 08:06
No matter how much I contemplate this tea bowl
It is still---a tea bowl!
THUS I arrive in San Francisco.
---Soen Nakagawa
At first you will think of practice as a limited part of your life. In time you will realize that everything you do is part of your practice.
---Baba Ram Dass
Living beings are numberless; I vow to serve until all are liberated.
Ignorance and grasping is boundless; I vow to transform and uproot it all.
---Vows of the Boddhisattvas
Chris Mackler / Senior Photographer / cm285504@ohiou.edu
School nurse Janalee Stock administers a color blindness screening to Jared Ricadonna, a student at Morrison Elementary. Stock has been a nurse for the Athens’ City Public School system for 13 years. Stretching her skills among seven schools, Stock spends much of her work week juggling medical emergencies with everyday scrapes and bruises.
Wow, this must be the season of features about esteemed friends! I hope this auspicious Spring is the sign of a stirring and fertile change. First it was a treat to see the article in the Athens News about Elisa Young, and her struggle to farm simply down on the Ohio River in the shadow of more and more power plants crowding the territory. [link] The very next day, yesterday, Ohio University's daily The Post ran a front page story on Janalee Stock, whose nursing serves the Athens School District.
One becomes friends with Janalee in a very practical way. You could be doing almost anything...as long as it is a help somehow to someone else...and you look up, and there she happens to be, doing it too. It could be washing dishes after a community dinner of some kind. It could be setting up for a bake sale or selling the cookies on a street corner. It could be putting away folding chairs from a town meeting. You exchange pleasantries to ease the work, and before you know it and if you discover each other this way enough times, you're friends.
But there's a mystery of some kind to it, a spiritual quality to what Janalee does and how she does it. In the dozen years I've known her, I doubt I've ever talked to her about religious things. She even may shy away from topics like that a bit. (And I mean "shy" in a very good way.) If you say something "spiritual" to her she usually definitely gets it. Mostly she is very down to earth and practical...but in an impressively spiritual way. Let me explain that: as my mother-in-law, Esther Kuhre, and I were talking about Janalee and this article last evening at dinner, I found myself saying, "Janalee never complains." She states facts, she emphasizes goals and objectives, she plans for change...but I think she feels inherently nothing is accomplished by complaining. In fact, that activity can only be negative, spread more exhausting negativity, and ultimately alienate people with its destructiveness. And she just goes around living that way! I look at her do that, and I think, "Janalee is a miracle of some kind!" I hope you take a look at this very impressive piece and feel inspired too~~~ More >
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 5 Apr 2006 @ 10:01
Man is the matter of the cosmos, contemplating itself.
---Carl Sagan
Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.
---Carl Gustav Jung
I never look at the masses as my responsibility; I look at the individual. I can only love one person at a time---just one, one, one. So you begin. I began---I picked up one person. Maybe if I didn't pick up that one person, I wouldn't have picked up forty-two thousand.... The same thing goes for you, the same thing in your family, the same thing in your church, your community. Just begin---one, one, one.
---Mother Teresa
AFP/PIERRE ANDRIEU
Après leur succès du 4 avril, les syndicats se réunissent mercredi 5 avril pour fixer une ligne commune pour les futures négociations sur le CPE.
I feel as if I'm in a unique position this morning. Essentially I'm trying to get all the information I can on 2 stories of concern, strangely related. Of major interest to me is what's going on in France. Our daughter is completing her high school freshman year in Pau, a short distance west of Toulouse. She is a bit young to be doing this, but she is in the care of a family that is there under the auspices of Ohio University. Now in her 3rd week, and 2nd week of classes, she has made adjustments very well and seems (on the telephone) to be having a wonderful time.
I talked with her last evening (her time), and again yesterday she and her friend found most of their classes were not in session, as the teachers were participating in demonstrations downtown. Despite US State Department warnings [link] , which I made sure they knew about, they went to the rallies both this week and last. Ilona says the "parades" have been happy, peaceful and impressive. She told me yesterday's march appeared larger than last Tuesday's, when the unions claimed 40,000 people participated in Pau...which number is half the population. More >
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 2 Apr 2006 @ 10:00
Only those concerned with the matter of life and death need enter here.
---Inscription on a plaque at the entrance to Eihei-Ji Monastery
The higher part of contemplation is wholly caught up in darkness and in this cloud of unknowing, with an outreaching of love and a blind groping for the naked being of God, himself and him alone.
---The Cloud Of Unknowing
Which do you think is larger, the highest mountain on earth or the pile of bones that represents the lives that you have lived over and over in every realm governed by the patterns of your own karma? Greater, my friends, is the pile of bones than the highest mountain on earth.
---The Buddha
Last weekend we met for coffee and conversation at a quiet pastry shop in Athens, with a friend we made during the 2004 election campaign. I hadn't seen Dick McGinn since the election, partly because he left pretty quick for Indonesia where his work often takes him. He's Associate Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Southeast Asian Studies, which combination or parts thereof he directed or chaired for at least 15 years. He had emailed to suggest we get together to catch up on things political, share what groups we've gotten involved in, and see if there's any hope anywhere.
After some chitchat he brought out a folder and produced a letter he just had written to the Dean of Engineering at Brigham Young University. In it he uncovers a sort of interdepartmental feud he claims has been going on there, in which the College of Engineering and Technology publicly disavows research done by a professor of physics and astronomy in the College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences. I'm sure I'd be the last person on earth to know if some facts were wrong in a dispute like that; but our friend pointed out the issue that concerns him here has to do with academic freedom to pursue the research in the field where you have expertise...and not be bound by government grant funding politics. In this case, the BYU professor's field is metal-catalyzed fusion and his presentation is about melting metal at the World Trade Center on 9/11. [link]
I knew nothing about any 9/11 conspiracy theories...and have to confess I didn't want to know. I had had enough trouble with all the assassinations in the '60s, and have ended up like the Joe Pesci character in Oliver Stone's movie about JFK: "It's all a conundrum inside an enigma," or whatever he says. The letter, and a petition to sign about release of government information on 9/11, are part of a campaign by Scholars for 9/11 Truth ( [link] ), which according to a Popular Mechanics article last year is only one of 628,000 web sites about the "World Trade Center conspiracy." Google it yourself and see. Besides that, there are 3000 books on the subject. [link] More >
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 28 Mar 2006 @ 10:06
I have deceived the Buddha
For seventy-three years;
at the end there remains only this---
What is it? What is it?
---Suio's Death Poem
Let us endeavor to live so that when we come to die, even the undertaker will be sorry.
---Mark Twain
The snow whisk,
sweeping sweeping,
forgets the snow.
---Basho
Beth Skabar/Athens News Photographer
Elisa Young, a resident of Racine, Ohio, stands in front of American Electric Power's Gavin power plant, a coal fired facility in Gallia County. Young, a member of the SierraClub's executive committee, is concerned about the impact of the coal industry along the Ohio River on the health of her neighbors and the area environment.
As if divinely ordained, on each side of the United States run mountain ranges known as the Appalachians and the Rockies. The symmetry of the arrangement is satisfying to an element of the American character. So far as I know there is no section of the Rocky Mountains known as Rockalalia or Rockyland or some such. But over here there's Appalachia. The exact boundaries of the region are vague and open to dispute. The mountains themselves run from Maine to Georgia, but "outsiders" tend to think of Appalachia as the place where Lil Abner and Snuffy Smith live...and the people must be poor, lazy hillbillies like them. Popular songs of the '40s gave them attributes of a-feudin', a-fussin' and a-fightin', and doin' what comes natur'ly.
It's true the people are independent, strong of opinion (and prejudice---often proud of it: witness the hilarity of redneck humor), and wary of the government and regulation. They're quick to judge whether or not someone is an "outsider" and often put up little tests to check you out---like for instance even how you pronounce the word "Appalachia." You may come from an area of Appalachia yourself, as I do, but still be considered an outsider if your family hasn't been in the region you're in now for a couple hundred years. Where I grew up we didn't think of ourselves as Appalachia because there was no mining there, and for better or worse it's the poverty left by mining that constitutes in the American mind what Appalachia is. At first, coal and timber promised a lasting livelihood, but exhaustion of reserves and technological progress quickly changed the prospects of entire communities. There are towns around where I live now that haven't had real job opportunities in 3 generations...mostly since the mines pulled out and moved on.
Now our locally owned newspaper, The Athens News, has begun a 3 part series entitled "Cradle to grave: Tracking coal's journey through Appalachia." Its author is Katie S. Brandt, an Ohio University graduate student, who comes from Vernon Hills, Illinois, north of Chicago. Even though she's probably been a student here for half a dozen years, she still might be considered an outsider. But the fact is she's been shown around by someone whose credentials are impeccable...and that's Elisa Young. Elisa lives at Racine, by the Ohio River, trying to work a farm organically that's been in the family for generations. She's surrounded by electric companies, powered by coal, that supply an astonishing array of American towns and cities. Her dilemma has become typical of people whose families have owned land in Appalachia---and increasingly everywhere in the US---which is somehow in the path of commercial development. Do you sell out or stay and fight? More >
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