"Something overheard from the dissonant street - a screech, a bang - taken in and arranged. A subjective correlative. Sequences, resolutions, deliberate unfulfillments. The sublimity of large and small moments surrendering to the whole. What feeling feels like over time. An attempt to screw up what feeling feels like over time. Heartbreak and a high C. The twang the nervous system wants when it's in revolt. The often welcome melodic lie. Ululation and a stomp of heels, scat-sense, voice and ear living together in brilliant sin. The soul's undersong. The orchestration of randomness, a flirtation with the boundaries of silence and space. When Bun-Ching played last night - a reminder that the self wants to disappear, be taken away from itself and returned."
- Stephen Dunn
Music
Riffs & Reciprocities
Summer grasses:
all that remains of great soldiers'
imperial dreams
- Basho
Generations
Our stories lie down in the orchard,
their time is not now, but something is
coming, something is going away. They
rise to the stars, and wait to be told.
There are listeners who know how little
we know, how much we are feeling.
We had to go our own way, a little off course,
always, no matter how specific the directions
seemed at the time. In this universe if we're lucky,
we will live in our children's stories,
their tales that will turn us to legend,
some absurd truth that has nothing to do
with our plans, our meticulous records.
No matter what stories we discard or keep,
they will give us a life we cannot imagine.
- Jeanne Lohmann
The Light of Invisible Bodies
Beyond the Fields We Know
"Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world; he then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and thus to overcome it. This is what the painter, the poet, the speculative philosopher, and the natural scientists do, each in his own fashion. Each makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life, in order to find in this way peace and security which he can not find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience."
- Albert Einstein
"My teacher, Kishizawa Roshi, was a great scholar, and his study started after he gave up everything. He continued his study and practice just to meet ancient teachers who had devoted themselves to the teaching.
Whenever he met a student or scholar, he would ask for any written teachings they might have. Whatever it was, he was very much interested in reading it. He was always seeking for his friend, seeking for his teacher. Only when you give up everything can you see the true teacher."
- Shunryu Suzuki
"We have to be on our guard for these silent questions, asked outside the usual contexts of meaning. We are alone with them, wrestling with them in our nakedness, the way the ancient Greeks practiced the sport. No wonder we feel so uneasy when they arise.
No wonder we seek an array of distractions to keep them at bay most of the time. No wonder that for some people they are simply too big to admit of meaningful answers."
- Mark Kingwell
In the morning I mused
It won't return, the magic of life
it won't return
Suddenly in my house the sun
became alive for me
and the table with bread on it
gold
and the flower on the table
and the glasses
gold
And what happened to the sadness
In the sadness too, radiance.
- Zelda Schneurson Mishkovsky
The Spectacular Difference
Kris Lindbeck
"You think your mind is in your head, but where is it? No one knows. So our practice is to be with everything. When you include everything, that is the real self."
- Shunryu Suzuki
"Stuff your eyes with wonder . . . Live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories."
- Ray Bradbury
Gazing at the Cascade on Lu Mountain
Where crowns a purple haze
A shimmer in sunlight rays
The hill called Incense-Burner Peak,
from far
To see, hung over the torrent's wall,
That waterfall
Vault sheer three thousand feet, you'd say
The Milky Way
was tumbling from the heavens, star on star.
- Li Po
a not unfamiliar phenomenon on the horizon of shimmering deserts."
- Vladimir Nabokov
