avril 2009
The End of the World as I Know It
It's the end of the world as I know it at The front door in white pellets on the walk The constant disappearance of everything I know Stones the size of a clamor melt the [...]
Night rain
The rain is coming down steady tonight. Sometimes there is so much to say that I find myself unable to begin.
No one on the edge of night
A newcomer fidgets during sitting practice. I remind myself to give her some instruction: It's essential to have a base on which to deconstruct. Message from an editor who declines to publish one of my [...]
So generous an experience
Last night's sitting was filled with quiet birdsong and the shimmy of a thread of incense smoke. It rose and swerved and spilled into the air all around. I could have stayed for hours. Then [...]
Shine a (discreet) light
All weekend, as I go about home activities (waking, sleeping, dressing, cooking, cleaning, talking, shopping) and then take up the day-job of cutting, fitting, packaging reports of what a select few have sorted and catergorized [...]
journée de méditation/day of sitting 25 avril
Une journée de meditation Zen avec Amy (Tu es cela) Hollowell Sensei et le Wild Flower Sangha Montreuil le samedi 25 avril 9h30-17h30 30 euros infos et inscriptions: zenscribe@free.fr
I still am
Having never left, I am back again. This, although I traveled to Portugal, where we sat together deepening the minutes, hours, days, surrounded by green hills and the brassy music of a fireman's band rehearsing [...]
Eve of retreat, early spring
It's the eve of departure for seven days of retreat in Portugal. What is there to say? The day was brilliant with sun. Had lunch with a 91-year-old friend, who is leaving Paris in a [...]
mars 2009
Fritz, may he go in peace
The partner of a longtime sangha friend died today in Amsterdam after a year of illness with cancer. A ceremony for him tonight joins all of us, each individual participant, as one. We chant, bow, [...]
Closer and closer
This morning I cleaned the bathroom. The mirror had become smudged. I also fed the cat. In a letter written to a friend in the 1930s, Samuel Beckett expressed dismay that a poem he had [...]
Nothing special
The Métro is packed with returning. The babies and small children seem particularly weary and agitated. Everyone, though, looks like they want and need something. I wonder what that might be. I wonder where they [...]
Whatever is best
Go to work early this morning, and deal with the daily news, meeting each task as it comes to me. Hours later, return home to care for my sick child, do laundry, answer mail, cook [...]
Simplicity is dazzling
I put aside the newspaper and its endless accounts of economic failure and accusations of fraud and deception, of war and oppression, of hunger and despair, kidnapping, trafficking, loss and gain, plans to save and [...]
Racing the sky
It's a brilliant afternoon, spring oozing in every direction as the cat pursues a fat fly buzzing around and around the room. When the insect stops, the cat stops. She waits. The fly crawls along [...]
One breath
In the morning paper, a headline on an article about the tenor Plácido Domingo: Singing every day as if it were the last Every day IS the last, every song the last and best. Domingo [...]
Always something and nothing
All these days without words now end. Having been sick, there were other things to do. Of course, there is always someone who is sick and always someone who is not. There is always something [...]
Unraveling in the Meanwhile
Tonight, with words, I construct a diagram of what I experience: the quiet of night deepening, a full stomach, voices in sharp discussion in the street. Language is the form, words the shape, the signs [...]
Reality bleeds
I read today that Hemingway said writing is not difficult; you just have to sit down at the typewriter and bleed. Like the Third Patriarch of Zen said of the "perfect" way: It, too, is [...]
février 2009
Connected
After 24 hours without my regular Web connection, a pre-Internet Age experience seems now to have ended. I have no understanding of why it was off then or why it is on now. And I [...]
journée de méditation/day of sitting
Une journée de méditation Zen à Paris/A day of Zen meditation in Paris 14 mars (samedi) 9h30-17h30 30 euros infos et inscriptions: zenscribe@free.fr
