It's a brilliant afternoon, spring oozing in every direction as the cat pursues a fat fly buzzing around and around the room. When the insect stops, the cat stops. She waits. The fly crawls along the wall, then zips away, with the cat in fast pursuit. When the fly dips, the cat leaps, nearly catching [...]
In the morning paper, a headline on an article about the tenor Plácido Domingo: Singing every day as if it were the last Every day IS the last, every song the last and best. Domingo said he would end his fabulous career by simply one evening after a performance saying, That's it! And so it [...]
All these days without words now end. Having been sick, there were other things to do. Of course, there is always someone who is sick and always someone who is not. There is always something to do and always nothing to do. And from a friend comes a link to this brief encounter with Robert [...]
Tonight, with words, I construct a diagram of what I experience: the quiet of night deepening, a full stomach, voices in sharp discussion in the street. Language is the form, words the shape, the signs and symbols we have all agreed indicate one thing. In fact, I am only an image, a drawing, as Yves [...]
I read today that Hemingway said writing is not difficult; you just have to sit down at the typewriter and bleed. Like the Third Patriarch of Zen said of the "perfect" way: It, too, is not difficult; it just dislikes picking and choosing. Looking around all day and into night, imperfection abounds, limitless: Sunlight fades, [...]
After 24 hours without my regular Web connection, a pre-Internet Age experience seems now to have ended. I have no understanding of why it was off then or why it is on now. And I have nothing theological to say about it. Gave it little thought except for fretting a bit about a missed online [...]
Une journée de méditation Zen à Paris/A day of Zen meditation in Paris 14 mars (samedi) 9h30-17h30 30 euros infos et inscriptions: zenscribe@free.fr
This morning, early, as I emerge from underground onto the tony avenue where I spend my office days, the light is clearly growing brighter and stronger with the season. Behind the Arc de Triomphe stretches a bold swath of pink sky. It's gone when I pass again hours later. But spring is irrefutably near. Crossing [...]
So much to do all week left me without words here. I was plunged, however, into Walt Whitman's joyous word cosmos: All truths wait in all things, he wrote. Like Shunryu Suzuki, who said: Wherever you are, enlightenment is there. If you stand up right where you are, that is enlightenment. And now I stand [...]
A friend tells me of an expression in German that translates as, Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere. Reminds me of a line from a Talking Heads song, Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens. And now what's happening? Here? What place is this? And who is here? I smell garlic [...]