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 27 May 2004 @ 02:08
The quest for certainty blocks the quest for meaning.
---Erich Fromm
Without raising a foot we are there already;
The tongue has not moved, but the teaching is finished.
Though each move is ahead of the next,
Know there is still another way up.
---Wu-Men
As for me, I delight in the everyday Way,
Among mist-wrapped vines and rocky caves.
Here in the wilderness I am completely free,
With my friends, the white clouds, idling forever.
There are roads, but they do not reach my world;
Since I am mindless, who can rouse my thoughts?
On a bed of stone I sit, alone in the night,
While the round moon climbs up Cold Mountain.
---Han-Shan
The gentleman who graces this final update on the major surgery I underwent early this month is Dr. William Batten, who has been my specialist through the whole ordeal. I want to express my appreciation to him for his skills, his personal approach, and his continuing openness to me for many basic needs. I must say as well I was astonished at the reasonableness of his charges---especially compared to the costs of hospital services.
Let me fill you in on where we are, tell you a bit more about Dr. Batten, and get specific about treatments and what comes next. Some of this we'll rate at PG-13, and you're welcome to skim through and drop out at any point. The last couple weeks have been a lot of work for me at home. I think we made it more difficult, in a way, by trying to get me off the potentially addictive pain-killers and onto ibuprofen before I was ready physically. This was a personal decision, because Dr. Batten wrote prescriptions for levels of medication from which we could choose. Yesterday the catheter was removed, concluding the mopping-up that began at the previous appointment, when stitches and 2 1/2 feet of drainage tubing were taken out. Dana got to watch that, while I just lay there---eyes shut. This means I retrain myself now to various inner workings, and in a couple more weeks enter the ongoing phase of monitoring for any appearance of cancer activity. That's why I think this can be the end of the journey, so to speak, with hopefully no more health news to report for a while. More >
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 20 May 2004 @ 17:27
Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow.
---Oscar Wilde
And a man shall be free, and as pure as the day prior
to his conception in his mother's womb,
when he has nothing, wants nothing and knows nothing.
---Meister Eckhart
I would believe only in a god who could dance.
---Friedrich Nietzsche
Paul Quintanilla and Frederik Rusch, standing 2nd and 3rd from left, in Maine, September 1958
In the Fall of 1958 I took my cool self on the road. I had worked increasingly hard to get cool. True, I lived in a small city in western New York, but I'd listened to and collected lots of jazz, tuned in Jean Shepherd most nights on WOR-AM (all 365 miles from Manhattan), and had subscribed to The Village Voice for 5 years. I had taken to our Senior Prom a sorta former girl friend who had gone off to Chatham in Pittsburgh the year before, and she remarked I was "so cool." And now I was going to a small, unknown college in Maine, which had to be one of the more uncool places on earth. So I figured I'd come on pretty strong at that campus.
What I hadn't counted on at Bates College in Lewiston, was meeting a small contingent of fellow freshmen who'd been raised in New York City. Well---I was from the same state at least, so I figured I'd fit right in with them. Most of the students at Bates were from Massachusetts and Maine and New Hampshire---you know, rustic sorts of places. But to my astonishment the New Yorkers thought I was kind of a hick. John Tagliabue wrote of me at the time that I was a "vague boy from the weeds"~~~ More >
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 20 May 2004 @ 09:33
Clouds come from time to time---
and bring a chance to rest
from looking at the moon.
---Basho
True words always seem paradoxical but no other form of teaching can take their place.
---Lao-Tzu
Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.
---E.M. Forster
There were 2 photographs that ended the United States involvement in the Viet Nam Civil War. One was of a Vietnamese citizen an instant before his execution by an officer of the army of his country. The other was of a child---a naked little girl running down a road crying. More >
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 19 May 2004 @ 03:02
A billion stars go spinning through the night,
blazing high above your head.
But IN you is the presence that
will be, when the stars are dead.
---Rainer Maria Rilke
On a journey, ill---
and my dreams, on withered fields,
are wandering still.
---Basho
Everything you know is wrong.
---Firesign Theatre
The weakest link. More >
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 18 May 2004 @ 10:51
The nature of the mind, when understood,
No human words can compass or disclose.
Enlightenment is naught to be obtained,
And he that gains it does not say he knows.
---Bodhidharma
It is the stars not known to science that I would know,
the stars which the lonely traveler knows.
---Henry David Thoreau
As long as you haven't experienced
This: to die and so to grow,
You are only a troubled guest
On the dark earth.
---Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
A glorious tiger swallowtail photographed by Tomm Lorenzin
For Martha~~~
This morning, beautiful and clear after a night of roaming thunderstorms, I walked slowly down to the garden with a container of eggshells, coffee and tea grounds. This we deposit on the soil for its enrichment. There at one end were 5 perfect tiger swallowtails in a cluster, feeding in one spot. What could it mean, and what could they be doing? There was dampness there, but no more or less particularly than anywhere else. Their amazing tongues were exploring and enjoying something seemingly...but who knows? Maybe they have a season of their lives in which they simply want to gather as a species, to appreciate themselves and each other. But is that too much emotion with which to credit an insect...especially a solitary one? It might be that in the next day or 2, there will be great mating activity and our garden was like a soda fountain or dance at which young butterflies check each other out. More >
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This is my News Log, actually the second manifestation of jazzoLOG. I moved the first edition to another site, where those articles still are archived and available for continued comment if you wish. Please copy and paste to access~~~ http://web.archive.org/web/20060315012857/http://www.upsaid.com/jazzolog/ |
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Comments made herein are available for view and appreciation to members and the general public. JazzoLOG also is open for comment contribution to all who are willing to identify themselves in the usual ways.
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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