Pandemic Year
It stopped moving, the seconds pendulum in my parents ’ grandfather clock. When was that? …. I am confused as ?)aren’t you(? I sit here looking facing the glass bay doors to the clock of my world Home more than not (…except when…) I have watched the sun pendulum from one side of the world and back and I just don’t know their clock has not worked since…what?…the 80s? and this now, then, is……
Philosophy as/and/or Religion
1. In laying out the idea that there may be some value in thinking of philosophy as good for nothing, I drew comparisons between a certain way of conceiving of philosophy and what I take to be the best way to conceptualize Dōgen’s understanding of the practice of seated meditation or zazen. For Dōgen, you sit just to sit, not for some other end (wink wink). If we take seriously Socrates’ claim in the Apology that practicing philosophy is the…
Daily Song
I don’t do it often enough, but I intend to start the day with the following, “song.” It is original in a sense, or parts are, but much/most of it is taken from others, some more, some less obvious. Let it be like a scavenger hunt! And what happens when we take such a song into our heart and return to it daily? Thus begins another day for which I am overflowing with gratitude. Great is my fortune and…
If We See Things Clearly, Do We See That Suffering is Neither Good Nor Bad?—Exploring Issues with Zen and the Fact/Value Dichotomy
Quite representatively of popular Zen writings and teachings, Sobun Katherine Thanas is recorded, in her The Truth of This Life: Zen Teaching on Loving the World as It Is, as saying: I’ve been thinking with renewed interest how difficult it is to see or hear clearly. Settling the mind allows us to see things as they really are, relatively free of emotional or intellectual biases. Clear seeing may not happen the first time we sit, but maybe it will. Our…
Thoughts on Time, Grief, and the Self
I would like to begin by considering two radically different pictures. First, consider the original notion of an atom: a kind of indestructible, unchanging, simple. That is, because it had no smaller parts, i.e., it was simple, and it was further then taken to be indestructible and unchangeable, since to be destroyed or changed, it would require smaller parts that could be taken away or replaced. Now imagine such an atom moving through the world, interacting with various things, but…
Intimate (with) Life–for Kobayashi Issa
iMessage Poetry—2
iMessage Poetry—
Child to Adult: Thoughts on the Perceived Rate of Time’s Passage
Yesterday evening Sam and I were on the back porch when we heard a lawnmower from the front of the house. She figured it was her dad, who she’d asked to come by and mow our front yard when he had the chance, as my feet and hands are still healing. We went to the front of the house and sat on the front stoop, talking and being out there, in some sense, with him. It is terribly kind of…