The paragraph is quoted from a Buddhist text, Sansui kyō (Japanese: 山水經), rendered in English as Mountains and Waters Sutra. The poetic phrasing was composed by the 13th century Sōtō Zen monk Eihei Dōgen. Priest Daokai of Mount Furong said to the assembly, “The green mountains are always moving. A stone woman gives birth to…
Ok, ok, ok! Would you get to your point? Fair enough. As a reader you’ve been patient to accommodate. I’ll bring my best effort to say it plain. This is the point of drag racing. It is an entire package: the years of absorption, a type of apprenticeship, the nuances of basic high-performance engine…
We may speak of “public land” or “private land,”but the truth is we are in the presence of an ancient mystery–life itself—and the great life communitieswithin which all beings thrive and die. The pines were contemporaries with the dinosaurs;the sequoias were a dominant forestthat swept across the north Pacific rimand into much of Asia,…
“The Ainu say that the deer, salmon, and bear like our music and are fascinated by our languages. So we sing to the fish or the game, speak words to them, say grace. We do ceremonies and rituals. Performance is currency in the deep world’s gift economy.” Performance is art in motion,…
The line between the life of the fields and that of the village is not hard and fast. In any case wilderness, in the sense of being the most inaccessible part of a given territory, is seen as a shared space that is both dangerous and magical, a place to visit for spiritual and…
…we have entered a period in which global relations are defined by new nationalisms, religious fundamentalism, developed world hubris, stepped-up environmental damage, and everywhere expanding problems of health and poverty. What was to have been a “New World Order” is revealed as a greater disorder, much of it flowing from the top down. Disorder…
At this moment it is raining outside, a gentle, soaking rain. I am pleased. Destructive weather notwithstanding, our planet is warming after all; at times a day or two of steady rain still comes. A gentle rain gradually lends moisture to vegetation and to all that lives. To all things really. Water is life….
I accompanied my grand daughter in a walk through the neighborhood to her school. It was a fifteen minute walk. She traveled the distance on her bicycle, still outfitted with training wheels. She will be ready to have the training wheels removed soon. I double-timed my pace behind her as the bicycle enabled a…
Sunday morning I find myself “deep in the weeds” reading chapter X of What Is Called Thinking? by Martin Heidegger. I have one more chapter to go. I am determined to finish the book because the partial reading (half way) that was recommended is a certain finish short of the view which Heidegger has…
Telling is the business of language. What does language tell? What language tells, what it speaks and what it keeps silent, is and remains always everywhere what is, what can be, what has been, and what is about to come — …For whatever is put into language in any real sense is essentially richer…
