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 14 Feb 2006 @ 09:08
All the way to Heaven is Heaven.
---St.Catherine of Siena
If only I may grow: firmer, simpler---quieter, warmer.
---Dag Hammarskjold
Since everything is none other than exactly as it is, one may well just break out in laughter.
---Long Chen Pa
Dana in courtship decor, 1981. Somehow my escape plan never materialized.
The marriage had lasted but 5 years. The exterior usually was ideal. Photos of us look perfect. Wonderful job, nice home, great friends, and most important 2 magnificent children. But there was discontent---unacknowledged, and it had spread fatally. The year was 1968, the sexual revolution just had begun, and there had to be a first victim. We were it.
I didn't take the divorce well. I didn't think it was right. I was ashamed. There never had been divorce on either side of my family---that I know of. That's the point: where I came from, dairyfarming and grapegrowing Western New York, such a thing was a disgrace. She was from Connecticut, where you took "incompatability" in your stride. When she remarried 4 years later she said cheerily, "Now the children will have TWO fathers." I didn't look at it as a grand opportunity. I was bereft not to be raising those kids under my own roof.
My journey of wild wander and mythic monsters had begun in a Bridgeport courtroom. Fifteen years later I was wreckage on a distant shore. There had been tumultuous relationships, all failed. Jobs came and went. In 1974, I found myself in Houston, at John Lomax Jr.'s funeral, sitting in a corner on the floor, weeping. I wanted to go home. I did. More >
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 13 Feb 2006 @ 10:54
There is neither heaven nor earth,
only snow,
falling incessantly.
---Hashin
Life is this simple: We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and the Divine is shining through it all the time. This is not just a nice story or a fable. It is true.
---Thomas Merton
Don't play as if you've swallowed the metronome!
---Nadia Boulanger
OK, the letter is from Bernard-Henri Lévy...which may be a problem over here. The first a lot of us probably heard of him was due to a review by Garrison Keillor of American Vertigo on the front page in the New York Times last month. [link] I didn't like the review and thought it revealed Keillor at his uptight-pretending-to-be-cool worst. Levy responded to it a little in an interview, but appears not really to know who Keillor is. [link] So they're even. I doubt Garrison did much more, besides reading the book under review, than Google BHL up...an exhausting proposition.
Bernard-Henri Lévy is one of France's leading philosophers and one of the most esteemed writers in Europe. After starting his career as a war reporter for Combat, the legendary newspaper founded by Albert Camus during the Nazi occupation of France, Lévy became famous as the founder of the New Philosophers group. He's the author of 30 books, including works of philosophy, fiction, and biography and is an activist and filmmaker. His books include Barbarism with a Human Face, Reflections on War, Century of Sartre, Evil and the End of History, Who Killed Daniel Pearl?, and American Vertigo. His films include the documentaries Bosna! and A Day in the Death of Sarajevo. Lévy is co-founder of the antiracist group SOS Racism and has served on diplomatic missions for the French government, most recently heading a fact finding mission to Afghanistan in the wake of the war against the Taliban. For at least a dozen years he's been married to Arielle Dombasle, who regularly is voted in France to be the most beautiful woman in the world. I think he's being truthful when he says he really loves the United States. The letter that follows will be in the February 27th issue of The Nation. More >
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 12 Feb 2006 @ 10:42
The first thing you learn in life is you're a fool. The last thing you learn is you're the same fool. Sometimes I think I understand everything. Then I regain consciousness.
---Ray Bradbury
I embrace emerging experience. I participate in discovery. I am a butterfly. I am not a butterfly collector.
---William Stafford
One day a student asked Taiga, "What is the most difficult part of painting?"
Taiga answered: "The part of the paper where nothing is painted is the most difficult."
---Artist Zen
Graduating from Middle School last year, Ilona and Keenan, with one of his sisters Ameena.
Yesterday I was sitting around the faculty lounge of one of the Ohio University colleges with a friend. He's a professor and director of graduate programs there. We were drinking some coffee, eating chocolate, and watching the Winter Olympics. Mostly we were talking though. Maybe that combination got us into the topic of early love affairs, but that's what happened. We were comparing our high school experiences. They were rather different, as he was born in Bangladesh.
This morning I'm trying to think back to my very first days of spending time with girls. One time, possibly during the summer vacation between 4th and 5th grade, I went over to see what my little blue-eyed, blonde-haired girlfriend (that my mother approved of a lot) was doing...and as usual her kinda large, faithful, possessive friend Jeannie was there. They were playing house. Being the open-minded, already-liberated guy you know, even in the late '40s, I offered to play. Well...I asked if I could play. Carol and Jeannie whispered together a while, and then said yes. They said I should get up on the porch railing and stand there. I could be Air.
One autumn day in 7th grade social studies class, Miss Weatherly seized a note Carol was passing to Jeannie...and made her stand up in front of the class and read it. She turned the color of a strawberry and with trembling voice did so. It said that her mother didn't want her to be my girlfriend anymore and that she was making her break up with me. Mom feared it would get too serious and we were too young. Then she sat down, put her head in her arms on her desk, and wept ferociously. I was shattered---and part of me still is. Carol married a guy from West Point...and I don't know what happened to Miss Weatherly. More >
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 9 Feb 2006 @ 09:33
There's no need to discuss the principles of koan study;
just listen carefully
to the wind outside
the pines and cedars.
---Ryonen
Someone else
looked at the sky
with the same rapture
when the moon
crossed the dawn.
---Izumi Shikibu
What silence can there be,
What lack of sound compare
to a snowfall from dark air
falling quietly to sea?
---H. D. Eshleman
The lovers last summer, together in Kinzua, Pennsylvania.
Yesterday a letter arrived from Espana. It is from a university student who has become very dear to our family these past several months. She is my son's young lady, finishing her advanced degree in Pamplona. He remains here, helping to manage his business. They both are 22.
How well I remember separation at 22. I was at Harvard and she was in Maine, not so far apart as Jeroch and Karen (pronounced KARR-in, as they do in Norway---although few in her life have learned to say it that way). There was a 4-lane highway a few miles outside Cambridge that went right up there. Maybe that made it worse. I only had a bicycle though. Some nights I used to ride it all the way out to that road, and just stand on an overpass, looking North...howling at the moon. More >
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 29 Jan 2006 @ 10:28
To the right, books; to the left, a tea-cup. In front of me, the fireplace; behind me, the post. There is no greater happiness than this.
---Teiga
We are living in a historical period in which we understand that it is necessary for all of us to be conscious and active in our world. None of us can ignore this call to action. And yet, if we do not practice zazen, whether we call it zazen or whatever we call it and however we do it, we cannot act in any accurate way. There has been plenty of action---too much action. What we need is not more action, we need enlightened action. And this means letting go of action.
---Norman Fischer
Swallow the stars until you are one with the universe, with all-pervading universal life.
---Soen Nakagawa
Alabama artist Frank Bear illustrated support for George W. Bush as a follower of Jesus Christ by this work, titled "Our Christian President." The artist pieced together individual portraits of Jesus Christ to make the image of President Bush.
FOXNews has begun the drone repetition of the word "optimism" to prep its millions of viewers for what has become the annual crock in America known as The State Of The Union Address. Obviously I'm not responding well. And thus I place myself in my own concentration camp of negativists and boat-rockers. Such people are not well liked in America, which is why they must be put in detention. They're depressing and they slow us down. People who try to rock the boat are dangerous. Our tradition in these United States is optimism! Naysayers can go someplace else to live---like over to France for instance. More >
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