The Dog Walk Sutra of a couple of weeks ago came out of my little project to finally memorize the Heart Sutra, and to dedicate at least a part of my morning dog walks to reciting it. Because that was such a success, I decided that maybe the morning dog walks might also be a good opportunity to memorize some poems. I’m not getting any younger, and my graduate work is fading farther and farther into the past, and although I am grateful for my day job at the Big Corporation, it’s not creative work at all. I had this…
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Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva, doing deep prajna paramita, Clearly saw emptiness of all five skandhas, Ray! What are you doing? Get over here! Thus completely relieving misfortune and pain. O Shariputra, form is no other than emptiness, Emptiness no other than form; Form is exactly emptiness, emptiness exactly form. Sensation, conception, discrimination, awareness, Are likewise like this. Whoa! What are you doing? You’re not allowed in the street. O Shariputra, all dharmas are forms of emptiness, Not born, not destroyed, Not stained, not pure, Without loss, without gain. So, in emptiness there is no form, No sensation, conception, discrimination, awareness, No eye,…
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So, it’s snowing again this morning — and although I’m quite tired of snow, it’s a lovely soft morning — bit fat snowflakes, no wind, not too cold. So off for our morning dog walk I went — I’m babysitting the MH’s dog while he’s gone to Arizona for a couple of days and it was good to have 2 dogs with me again. So we get to the dog park and we’re coming around the edge of the bluff and there’s another couple coming toward us. She’s on the phone, and he barely nods hello. I don’t recognize them,…
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I have a lot of gardening books — I’m one of those people who learns how to do things from books, so the first couple of years I had this garden, I bought a lot of different things (especially if they were in the bargain bin at Borders). But there’s a very short list of books I go back to again and again: Second Nature by Michael Pollan and This Organic Life by Joan Dye Grussow. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstal’s River Cottage Cookbook is also probably in this category (except that every time I look at it I have such livestock-envy that…
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Bookslut picked up on the indelible image of Wendell Berry mucking out his composting privvy by pointing out this really interesting interview over at Mother Earth News. Some of his points seem a teeny bit dated (Green Acres? Who has watched Green Acres in 25 years?) but as always, it’s the way Wendell Berry champions those old, unsexy values of work and fidelity and discipline and the hard work of learning a craft. Which sounds very grim, but like the monastic rules, it’s the idea that through discipline comes joy. For instance: BERRY: It’s like having a milk cow. Having…
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You’ve probably seen by now that Madeleine L’Engle has died. Despite having been the kind of kid who could walk between classes with my nose in a book and never bump into anyone (I also became very quick at taking tests because we were free to read after we were done), I was never a big fan of A Wrinkle in Time. As a kid, I had a horror of stories where things turned into other things — Alice in Wonderland, for example. Perhaps it’s because I had the kind of life where 180s were all too common, where people…
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Let’s all try to go out and affect some kind of change today — no matter how small. (Me, I’m still trying to figure out how to recycle that plastic — can’t do it in Livingston, so I’ll have to check next time I drive to Bozeman. Otherwise, I’m mailing it to one of you who has plastic recycling in your town …) From “All My Habits are Bad” the Salon interview with A.M. Homes (via Bookslut) Do writers have a moral obligation? Oh, I think all human beings do. So if all human beings have it, then writers have…
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All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking. The idea, for example, that each particular erases the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown- faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk of that black birch is, by his presence, some tragic falling off from a first world of undivided light. Or the other notion that, because there is in this world no one thing to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds, a word is elegy to what it signifies. We talked about it late last night and in the voice of…
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This is my gorgeous new bathroom. Everything is new — the tile, the door (was on a different wall altogether) the sink, the curtains, new hot water heater installation — the tub is original, but the paint is new. Oh, and all of the plumbing installation below the bathroom is also new — the grubby old cast-iron pipe has all been replaced with very high-tech water lines after the plumbing repair services and emergency plumber that does plumbing repair in Greenville, SC saw the need to do some water leak detection. I have clean water running through new pipes with…
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One byproduct of revamping the blog is that due to various formating issues, I’ve had to touch just about every entry again. It gives a girl a chance to rethink the blog — why I started it, what I want to do with it. Among the many things I noticed was that although I started out with faith as a real topic on this blog (see the Fourteen Precepts in Fourteen Days series from 2003), it’s not something I’ve written about much in the last couple of years. There are a number of reasons for that, of course, and cruising…