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A Visit with Korean Nuns
Here is a little sentence or two about the visit with the wonderful Korean nuns.
View ArticleYear End Letter 2013
Dear Everyday Zen friends,As you know, I like to read. I am always reading. I don’t remember most of what I read, but I keep on. And everything I read sounds like Dharma.Lately I have been reading...
View ArticleDisturbance is a Necessity
Flying home from Mexico after sesshin. On the plane I am working on ms of my big book of essays on “reading, writing, language, and religion.” I keep cutting, polishing. There is no finished text, but...
View ArticleNo halfway measures will do
Finished Dharma seminar on King Lear last week— this week Chris begins her month on the Lion’s Roar of Queen Shrimala, an important sutra related to both the Lanka and Awakening of Faith in the...
View ArticleMcHale's Navy
Seatac airportThe other day while I was exercising I found a TV channel that was showing 1960's sitcoms. McHales's Navy was on, a show I remember well from the early sixties. Starring Earnest Borgnine,...
View ArticleMy Promised Land
Read Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land, the book about Israel that has been all over the American press in recent months. It’s the first book I know of in English — and widely available here (outside of...
View ArticlePaul de Man, Heidegger, and our fascination with the past
Read the recent New Yorker article on Paul de Man. Also reading Phillip Whalen’s 1967 novel You Didn’t Even Try in preparation for writing about it for an anthology on poet’s novels that Laynie Brown...
View ArticleOn the Death of Peter Muryo Matthiessen
I was at sesshin at Mar de Jade in Mexico when I learned of the death of Peter Matthiessen. I knew him as Muryo, Zen priest. Sad. I am sorry I won’t see him again. As always you think "why didn’t I...
View ArticleOn Stories
I’ve been thinking about stories in the light of koans, zen stories. Come to think of it, in zen the main literature is stories, certain kinds of stories. Koan stories are supposed to be exemplary...
View ArticleYear End Letter 2014
December 3, 2014Dear friends,I am writing to you as the year draws to a close, the days grow shorter, the light deeper and darker. Rain is falling today.Lately I have been brooding about time’s...
View ArticleOn first reading Adorno
I began by reading a tremendous book by our new local rabbi Aubrey Glazer, who, it turns out, writes critical theory! His book is “A New Physiognomy of Jewish Thinking: Critical Thinking After Adorno...
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