Endgame/Fin de partie
The new year approaches and I come upon this perfect bit of dialogue from Samuel Beckett's Endgame: Clor: Do you believe in the life to come? Hamm: Mine was always that. I wonder about mine. And yours?
décembre 2008
Silent night
It's a silent night. After all the giving and getting, the expectations and preparations, the obligations, inspirations, connections, separations, exaggerations, what is left tonight of Christmas? Who gave, and what was given? Who received it? Christ stood on the Mount of Olives not long before his death and wept as he overlooked the teeming city, [...]
Une vision immédiate
Winter sun in my eyes casts long shadows of tea cup, pile of papers, hand moving with pen, sesame seed, crumb. Bright is bright, darkness dark in this pale season. The vine climbs the stone wall without leaves so brilliantly. I keep looking to see what it is. But it is so naked that it [...]
Seeing and being seen (one big blue ocean world)
The latest installment on stilltv.com from my dear friend Peter (KuKu) Cunningham, longtime dharma bum/photographer/clown with Bernie Glassman Roshi, is of a heart/mind project with his photo students during a workshop in Shanghai last month. His one big blue ocean world is, as ever, well worth a look: http://www.stilltv.com/china/2008/seeing-seen/
Where my life turns
My teacher wrote this verse, a quote from Nisargadatta, on my rakusu: "When I look inside and see that I am nothing, that's wisdom. When I look outside and see that I am everything, that's love. Between the two is where my life turns.''
Play of the Day, with Jo-Ha-Kyu
I awoke to dark morning today. Although I see that it has now lightened to a watery gray, I do not see how or when. The advancing thick of day feels spindly, like bare trees, and yet it is full with a thousand branches. Makes me think of the structure of a Noh play, which [...]
Waiting for Picasso
They are all lining up, well-heeled, under umbrellas in the rain for Picasso and "the masters" here. Tickets reserved, coats checked, headsets ready. Everyone is as they should be. And the genius of 20th-century art is, too, and all the masters are, too. A parentheses of erotic drawings makes sparks, and Yo, Picasso from 1901 [...]
50 in Paris
There was a little celebration in Paris on Monday night. Check it out at the Zen blog created by my dharma brother Man of No Rank: http://pariszen.wordpress.com/
Ungovernable in Venice
In Venice, everywhere is land's end. Around each corner, water provides direct evidence of the absence of solid ground. Every step is bottomless. But on Monday, we awoke to a deluge in this marvel of a city. Swelled by rain and the tide, the canals and the sea had flowed into the labyrinth of narrow [...]
novembre 2008
How things real-ly are not
Nearly lunch time. Another bus passes outside the window, and a green VW Polo parks beside the linden tree. Fewer and fewer leaves are clinging to its tangle of limbs. The cat snores curled by the radiator. A colleague asks at work yesterday whether there is anything that is not conditioned. I wait, let him [...]
Alexis says:
Alexis says:
Alexis says: