The storm chez moi: One tree was lost on our street, and a downed branch in the Hall’s Pond Sanctuary _______ Years of solitude had taught him that, in one’s memory, all days tend to be the same, but that there is not a day, not even in jail or in the hospital, which does […]
Whiskey River
A Worldwide Eschatological Whoopjamboreehoo…or Not
I have a restlessness that constantly moves between two extreme nodes—from the “language is useful” end of the spectrum to the “language is not useful” at the other. When you find yourself hovering closer to the latter, the chatty wisdom of someone like Tom Robbins can feel comforting. Here’s one from my ever-reliable wisdom source, […]
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Discreteness
A watercolor by Renee Collins, from my collection. I don’t know the name that Renee originally gave it, but I’ve always referred to it as “Leaky Margins.” If you spend a fair amount of time online, you have probably come up against The Membrane. It functions a bit like a cell wall, as the boundary […]
Willing
Simplicity and complexity: A piece hanging on the wall at sculptor Paula Castillo’s studio in Santa Fe. The two entries below, a poem by Moramarco and a quote by Tom Robbins, were included in two separate posts on my favorite random access wisdom source, Whiskey River. But when I landed on the site this morning […]
Life That Doesn’t Lie Flat
Galactic beach wood, from Half Moon Bay We fall into a story about enlightenment—about life, in fact—and we can get trapped in it for many lifetimes. I wonder more and more how well any life really fits a story. What if our life is not this, then that, in a flat and sensible way, but […]
Leaky Margins
What Kafka had to be so clear and simple about was that nothing is clear and simple. On his death bed he said of a vase of flowers that they were like him: simultaneously alive and dead. All demarcations are shimmeringly blurred. Some powerful sets of opposites absolutely do not, as Heraclitus said, cooperate. They […]
Real + Imagined
And then the kicker is this: in passing from the real to the imagined, in following that trail, you learn that both sides have a little of the other in each, that there are elements of the imagined inside your experience of the “real” world – rock, bone, wood, ice – and elements of the […]
Saints and Ordinary Folks
This is an exquisite truth: Saints and ordinary folks are the same from the start. Inquiring about a difference is like asking to borrow string when you’ve got a good strong rope. Every Dharma is known in the heart. After a rain, the mountain colors intensify. Once you become familiar with the design of fate’s […]
Travelling, Or Being Travelled?
Whatever you may be, you are being ‘lived’. You are not travelling, as you think: you are being ‘travelled’. Remember: you are in a train. Stop trying to carry your baggage yourself! It will come along with you anyhow. – Wei Wu Wei, from Open Secret One of the best things about being online IMHO […]
Humility, with Humor
Something happens when we face the truth about ourselves. For one thing, there is no room for pomposity, arrogance, or self-absorption. More than one person has pointed out how closely conjoined “humility” is with “humor.” A sense of humor, like a true sense of humility, involves ruthless honesty about who we are, without disguise or […]