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Issue #1341 - Wednesday, February 5, 2003 - Editor: Jerry
Seren's Horse
by Joseph Wu
My friends Michael & Amanda Ho were blessed with a baby girl on September 8, 2002. It just happened that she was born on my birthday in the Year of the horse, and that I had just finished designing a new horse model. Thus, this design is dedicated to little Seren Ho. It is folded out of three equal-sized squares of elephant hide paper.
http://www.origami.as/home.html
cee
http://www.livejournal.com/users/presentnonexist/
flicker
*
so long since .... words here
no more or less potent than
cells devouring
sometimes a flicker of a dream
speaking about Existence (HA HA!)
flowers, incense, white clothes on and no one in
the room cept i-n-i
deeply keenly aware
christ! the mouth opens and light vomits forth
nightmares equal to celestial orgasms
no differentiation possible
nothing occuring
sleeping deeply with eyes wide open
iamom
http://www.livejournal.com/users/iamom
Such a good DailyDharma
This poem reminds me of a great
conversation I had with J. late one night several years ago over
a slice of pizza downtown. We were talking about food, and I was
telling him this story about when I was in high school, and how I
used to go to the 7-Eleven by my girlfriend's house after I
dropped her off at night and buy a hoagie and an orange juice to
have during my long drive home. He laughed out loud when I told
him how much I used to look forward to that hoagie as I neared
the end of each date with my girlfriend. He said, "And
didn't you find that you almost enjoyed that hoagie more than the
date after awhile?"
I've also heard him say something like enlightenment is all that
and a bag of chips, or that it doesn't matter what you do when
you're enlightened -- the enlightenment experience can be
accessed through deep meditation or through eating a hamburger at
McDonald's. This poem made me think of all that. It also made me
think about how I thought I lost my mala beads on my Christmas
vacation, but my mother-in-law found them last week in the pocket
of a housecoat I'd borrowed while I was there. It's okay though,
because I really don't miss them. They're not necessary for
meditation, but they are quite nice to play with.
I woke up about 2:30 this morning
and
thought about Philip's Hat.
It is bright lemon yellow,
with a little brim
all the way around, and a lime
green hat band, printed
with tropical plants.
It sits on top
of his shaved head. It upstages
every thing & every body.
He bought it at Walgreen's himself.
I mean it fortunately wasn't a gift
from an admirer.
Otherwise he is dressed in soft blues.
And in his hands
a long wooden string of Buddhist
Rosary beads, which he keeps
moving. I ask him which mantra
he is doing - but he tells me
In Zen, you don't have to bother
with any of that.
You can just play with the beads.
Joanne Kyger
From the book, Poems 1979-1989, published by Black Sparrow Press,
1991.
Wolfgang Laib and the art of
immanence
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/newse/20030206woac.htm
Annabel Wright
Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer
In his reclusive life in Germany's Black Forest region, Wolfgang Laib has often been compared to the medieval mystics and monks who divorced themselves from social interaction in pursuit of purity. However, more than just the artist's affinities with St. Francis of Assisi and Sufi poet Jalaluddin Rumi inform the monastic element of the works in a current retrospective at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.
... The first of his works to
garner international attention,
Laib's milkstones
were long considered the key
to
under
standing
his body of work as a whole.
Deceptively simple in concept and design,
Milkstone is a flat slab of white marble, the surface of
which has been ground down to a slight depression that is filled
with milk. The sculpture glows white against the
gray gallery floor, merging the two substances into an apparently
seamless whole in which it is impossible to distinguish a
distinct surface or even a single state.
An important aspect of Milkstone is
the element of transience--
each day the milk congeals
and must be replaced in what amounts to an artistic ritual.
Matsumoto, one of six gallery staff members responsible for refilling the stone, says that after performing the task,
"I feel fresh, every time."
Chuck Hillig
from Seeds of the Soul
http://www.blackdotpubs.com/html/seeds_for_the_soul.html Y
our life’s journey is a
pilgrimage that’s
going from one sacred place to another sacred
place. And the very road that you’re traveling on
be-tween these sacred places is also sacred,
too. No matter what your life looks like, you have
never left the Temple of Divinity.
Everything is always sacred.
You’re always in the holiest
Center-of-the-Heart.
"...conditional existence has nothing to do with you at all. But human beings seem to presume that it must have something to do with them! -- as they presume themselves to be. But it's always running counter to the way things are. And if you examine your presumptions about the way things are, you find it's not at all the way you presume (as a matter of conversation) things are. When people presume things are whatever, as a way of convention, what does it mean, anyway? What have they thought about? What have they 'considered' about anything at all?
"Well, why should so-called ordinary people be required, for the sake of their association with Truth, to go through the process and everything required for its Realization, on the part of a great Realizer or a Saint-Realizer, of one degree or another? If that were so, then Truth would have no practical significance whatsoever. It would be, in other words, basically, not applicable to humanity, generally speaking. But, of course, you all presume that Truth has to do with you -- as humanity, generally speaking -- and that could be totally wrong!
"Did you see any concern in the realm of conditional experience (life and death and so on), for the perpetuation of any pattern, form, person, 'you', at all?
"Well, don't you think it's important to notice this? -- so that you don't go about 'living', so to speak, based on a wrong presumption about it.
"I mean, one way you could do it is get up out of your birthhouse, you know, open the door, and... .You know what I mean? Wooo-woohee! Flyin' out the door and out into the great world, to abide there, enjoy yourself there for eternity -- which is a huge, immense, lot of endless time. It never stops. It's just great, though, for-ever -- you know what I'm talkin' baby? You know? That's it. Zippity-doo-dah! You know, for-EVER!
"That's one way to go out the door from your birthhouse. Totally right-on, in a certain kind of a world. Is this one of those kind?
"No. And it seems like the proper time to find this out is when you're in your birthhouse -- given this, found this out, however, with all the Wisdom, rightness, and so forth, required.
"But it should be observed that everything that arises disappears, including every lifetime, every person, every body, every thing, every process, every event, every acquisition, every accomplishment -- everything. And there's no absolute predicting, it's just that, on the average, things will go on for such and such period of time, whatever that measure means, but it's not even guaranteed."
from Drifted in the
Deeper Land, by Adi Da Samraj
(typed-out for the Highlights)