As we near what we call year's end and then enter what we call new year, an old Zen poem comes to mind: A water bird comes and goes, Leaving no traces at all. Yet it knows How to go its own way. May you go yours and I go mine, together on this way [...]
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?
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, [...]
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 [...]
Two birds hold a ledge black under bloated clouds then four perch two by two until flight flushes each one equally nowhere.
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/
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.''
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 [...]
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 [...]
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/