But I can never be sure. This routine bit of business becomes a topic of doubt. It reminds me of how contingent and fragile our picture of the world -- and of our selves -- is. It reminds me of how many fundamental assumptions we make to get through the day. Read more
That phrase lodged in my brain, and made me think about how it may be time to "turn pro" in my projects outside the "day"job" -- the writing, my shiatsu practice, the martial arts, and music and art. Read more
it doesn't reflect what you saw the man in the orange coat waiting at the crosswalk the reflections of books in the window who could believe these were tightly knit together with the electrochemistry of nerve cells? Read more
Over the past few years my sensei has instituted a tradition of starting our kagami biraki class off with us all doing one thousand punches together. With each person counting off ten at a time, and novice students not being used to keeping the cadence for such drills, just going around and counting off 1,000 can be a challenge. At about one per second, it's almost seventeen minutes. Your arms get tired punching that long. If you're using proper form, your core musculature, your koshi, gets tired. Your throat gets sore from 1,000 kiais. Your brain wants to wander. It's a heck of a meditation. Read more
I never knew David Bowie, was not even a devoted fan, and didn't really have a deep lifestyle connection with him. And yet his life touched mine deeply in two different ways. He transformed my relationships with music and with dance. I would be a quite different person if he had never been. Read more
So to twist Pirsig: You want to know how to create worthwhile art? Understand that you are a worthwhile part of the universe and then just create naturally. Read more
So which self are you going to defend? This is our koan as martial artists, the unsolvable puzzle that is the object of our mediation: defending the non-self. To twist the words of Dogen: "To learn to defend the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by the myriad things." Read more
Some days I feel like I'm in a Woodie Guthrie song Some men'll rob you with a ball point pen Little crooks they go to jail, big ones just get more rich Same as it was way back when Read more
sometime well after midnight but well before the sun comes up I'm not quite sure of the numbers but there's a magic moment Read more
Consciousness is story-telling. And the stories it tells are not just about the past, but about the present leading into future. Indeed, that's the evolutionary advantage, telling stories to ourselves to predict the future. Read more
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