Laura and I arrived at the Venice airport. Yes, the flight was six and a half hours of discomfort. We could not have been better treated by the KLM flight attendants but, a constriction of space is the price that one pays for the affordable ticket price. Unless you pay for an upgrade to…
It is well understood that each of us lives in a constructed world, …made up of unacknowledged social narratives so deeply embedded in our psyches that we rarely recognize them, let alone doubt their truth. To a degree they must conform to the actual case of “what is” since if they are too…
…danger and unpredictability [are not] in themselves evil. Human cultures that demonize death or pain or sickness are thus less able to deal with the bitter side of nature, with intoxications; and they make themselves doubly sick. The Buddha taught that all life is suffering. We might also say that life, both attractive and…
I am reading Neil Postman’s book, Technopoly, The Surrender of Culture to Technology, copyright in 1992, though it could have been written this morning. Postman is a good writer, and he covers the sweep of hundreds of years of change in some detail, with language that is a delight to read. He quotes Alexis…
The mystery of language, the poetic imagination, and the mind of compassion are roughly one and the same,… Back On The Fire by Gary Snyder, The Path to Matsuyama, p. 60 Saturday morning, sun light filters through a high film of clouds. A light breeze brushes the surface of the retention pond just outside…
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…
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…
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…
A wide range of meaningbelongs generally to the nature of every word.This fact, again, arises from the mystery of language.Language admits of two things: One, that it be reduced to a mere system of signs,uniformly available to everybody,and in this form be enforced as binding; And two, that language at one great momentsays one…
