Monkey Mind

How lovely!Through the torn paper screen,the Milky Way.Issa(translated by Michael Sierchio & John Tarrant) … [Read more...]

The Zazengi: Rules for ZazenBy Eihei DogenTranslated by Dan Welch and Kazuaki Tanahashi (reprinted from The Art of Just Sitting: Essential Writings on the Zen Practice of Shikantaza edited by John Daido Loori)Practicing Zen is zazen. For zazen a quiet place is suitable. Lay out a thick mat. Do not let in drafts or smoke, rain or dew. Protect and maintain the place where you settle your body. There are examples from the past of sitting on a diamond seat and sitting on a flat stone covered with a … [Read more...]

In two devastating and frightening sentences, Hendrik Hertzberg's most recent contribution to the New Yorker's "Talk of the Town," reflects on a Washington Post series by Barton Gellman and Jo Becker as well as the work of the New Yorker's Jane Mayer, and summarizes what we are stuck with, its irony, and its horror."...(F)or the past six years, Dick Cheney, the occupant of what John Adams called 'the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived,' has been the most … [Read more...]

...As in dreamsbehind high doors there is nothing,not even emptiness.As in dreams,behind the face that looks at us there is no one.Obverse without a reverse,one-sided coin, the side of things.That pittance is the boontossed to us by hastening time.We are our memory,we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes,that pile of broken mirrors.(Jorge Luis Borges in Cambridge, found in the prefatory material to Robert Langan's Minding What Matters: Psychotherapy and the Buddha Within) … [Read more...]

I find Bastille Day well worth marking. Together with the Fourth of July it is one of the great markers of the beginning of a more or less genuine republicanism within human affairs. Prior to this the idea was limited to very small states, I think immediately of Athens & such mercantile oligarchic experiments like Venice. And even the big one, Rome, was never anything more than an oligarchy where the people's "vote" were by blocks and had little direct consequence, and even that very limited … [Read more...]

I was reading Hafidha Sofia’s blog Never Say Never to Your Traveling Self, where she asked for definitions of a list of terms like spirit, soul & psyche. It fired me up & I responded. Now I’ve thought perhaps it worth while to massage that reflection a bit and post the result here.I limited myself to reflecting on soul and spirit rather than her whole list of terms. Now, I’m not particularly interested in spirit or soul seen as somehow separate from who we are in and of our bodies. And sp … [Read more...]

Thanks to Beer Therapy for this breaking news from our former home town. I'm glad to find a connection between Boston & Milwaukee, although I have to admit this isn't where I thought it would happen...Wisconsin brewers stage old-fashioned protestJuly 11th, 2007A group of Wisconsin brewers blasted open barrels of beer on the docks of the Milwaukee River in their own version of the Boston Tea Party. They did this to protest a proposed bill they said would create complications for startup … [Read more...]

Considering the pope's statement, and how frequently any person is told people have not been kind about you, perhaps it would be good to turn to old Epictetus for counsel:If someone has just told you that so-and-so is saying something bad about you, do not try to justify yourself in the least with regard to what has been reported to you; only answer: "He must not be fully informed about all the other things that could be said about me; otherwise he would not have limited himself to that." (from … [Read more...]

Today Pope Benedict XVI has announced Jesus established one church, and hey, Orthodox Christians, Mormons, Baptists, Quakers, Presbyterians, Episcopalians and (Christian) Unitarians, it isn't yours... … [Read more...]

As prols for many years, Jan working as a typesetter & me as a glorified clerk (I had the title buyer much of the time) in used and antiquarian bookshops, we never had a proper vacation. Just didn't earn enough money to do such a thing. It wasn't until we moved into the professional ranks, more or less, with Jan earning her librarian degree & me the MDiv, did we ever take actual real vacations.Let me tell you, we didn't know what we were missing.Not only does it really allow people to … [Read more...]