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twenty twenty two

i have been waiting for this year for a long time, since 1998, when i started entertaining a model that said, what if the period 1970-2022 is structurally analogous to the period from 1470-1522, which contained the renaissance, the reformation, and the circumnavigation of the globe. what had started me looking at this model was…

w/o a measuring stick, tell me, right now, what time is this?

what we talk about when we talk about the china bucket list

gear doobie, what do i can?

how about explaining forgetting feelings? you could let that one go. how about, continuity is indeed very difficult, where’s the relevance? how about, in daytime seeing the sun, at night seeing stars? i’ve always liked, we don’t keep old calendar dates here. maybe keep, stretch out on the bench and lie down. calling it hidden…

the whole world is dying, how can you attain the realm of absorption in living?

hakuin said, if you sit there where the path of words ends and the course of mind dies out, this is called the hell of mired perception. when i was 12 i went to a birthday party at the local vfw, late in september, and met my high school girlfriend for the first time, i…

dogen, picking his nose, said, enlightenment is actually realized through the body

lazy ts’an, turning over his baked potato, said to the emperor’s poodle, what leisure time do i have to wipe snot for a worldly man? fa yen wrote, the mountains go on so long, it seems i have lost my way. a friend from the mountains gets in touch after 50 years. he says, you’re…

why not rain for sambodhi?

a young woman, world-weary, walks past on her way to the bart station. she says to me, i am grateful for this garden every day.

the dharma is not a secure refuge

i studied the householder sutra for a long time before i realized, in what the alcoholics call a moment of clarity, that the householder, as constructed, was a piss ant, and that’s not real, he wouldn’t have been that way. the set-up for the sutra is that the householder is under the weather, manifesting illness,…

everything that appears before you is the foremost paramita

pai-chang said, let go of body and mind, setting them free. he said, having a mind neither stilled nor disturbed in the presence of all things in the environment, neither concentrated nor distracted, passing through all sound and form without lingering or obstruction, is called being a wayfarer. nan-ch’uan was asked about practice, he said,…

spiritual light always lamented, the analyses of confucius and lao-tzu only transmit customary norms

the times went over to the dark side around the turn of the century, but they were always a willing tool of the power elite. occasionally i still brush up against their paywall, and laugh to myself, you actually charge people for this shit? at 15 i wandered out of the art and architecture room…