Portugal – 26 novembre 2009 – Twirling a Flower

Heading to Portugal for several days of retreat. Which means there will be no sitting in Paris on Friday night at the Red Earth Centre (Nov. 27). Back to usual the following Friday (Dec. 4). Bon weekend.

Difficult to imagine a more perfect depiction of what in Zen jargon is called "shikantaza" (bearing witness to the whole of life) than the final scene of a film just seen at the Cinémathèque, Fellini's marvelous "8 1/2": Everything and everyone, hand in hand, joins a circus circle dance of life, all is/are included in [...]

What if we think of sitting, what is known as "meditation," as a kind of travel, a trip to an endlessly wondrous here and now? The French poet Yves Bonnefoy writes that because what the traveler sees is new to him, his "usual ways of perceiving, of understanding'' are upset, allowing for a free-flow in [...]

Soccer is known as "the beautiful game." Yet violent behavior is often displayed by opposing players and fans, like in Cairo recently before an Egypt-Algeria match. What is that all about? "Be a lamp unto yourself," the Buddha is said to have responded when asked what people should do after he died. This is not [...]

A weekend of studying the Heart Sutra went something like this: Boundless, we go around and around, and back and forth, with words and silence, speaking and not, we move from cushions to chairs and from chairs to cushions, we start in one place (a house) on Saturday and move to another (an office) on [...]

So it's Thursday, and I had a sandwich for lunch. At a desk in front of the daily news: secret prisons in Beijing, oil profiteering in Iraq, U.S. Marines on Okinawa, Obama, Bush, John Kenneth Galbraith, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Shiites in Iran, Maoists in Nepal, heavy snow in northern China... Not bound by a notion of [...]

Today is the day that everyone has been discussing for days, the 20th-anniversary day of the night when that strange wall "fell." Little has been said of how that wall came to be. Or how any wall comes to be. Or what constitutes a wall, or what constitutes a fall. Much has been said of [...]

I would like to post something here, but what? We all seem so involved with getting and spending, pursuing distraction. I see it, I see me do it as I enter into a discussion about office intrigues or a football match or read about politics in the paper or shine my shoes. And so what? [...]

Upon seeing the Pierre Soulages exhibition in Paris, I am struck by the continuous reverberations that I am still feeling from what was essentially a painterly presentation of black substances (not only paint). "Le noir a des possibilités insoupçonnées et, attentif à ce que j'ignore, je vais à leur rencontre," Soulages says. ("Black has unsuspected [...]