Sunday, December 3, 2023
Saturday, December 2, 2023
The Billy Collins poem “Aristotle”
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46706/aristotle
Aristotle
This is the beginning.
Almost anything can happen.
This is where you find
the creation of light, a fish wriggling onto land,
the first word of Paradise Lost on an empty page.
Think of an egg, the letter A,
a woman ironing on a bare stage
as the heavy curtain rises.
This is the very beginning.
The first-person narrator introduces himself,
tells us about his lineage.
The mezzo-soprano stands in the wings.
Here the climbers are studying a map
or pulling on their long woolen socks.
This is early on, years before the Ark, dawn.
The profile of an animal is being smeared
on the wall of a cave,
and you have not yet learned to crawl.
This is the opening, the gambit,
a pawn moving forward an inch.
This is your first night with her,
your first night without her.
This is the first part
where the wheels begin to turn,
where the elevator begins its ascent,
before the doors lurch apart.
This is the middle.
Things have had time to get complicated,
messy, really. Nothing is simple anymore.
Cities have sprouted up along the rivers
teeming with people at cross-purposes—
a million schemes, a million wild looks.
Disappointment unshoulders his knapsack
here and pitches his ragged tent.
This is the sticky part where the plot congeals,
where the action suddenly reverses
or swerves off in an outrageous direction.
Here the narrator devotes a long paragraph
to why Miriam does not want Edward's child.
Someone hides a letter under a pillow.
Here the aria rises to a pitch,
a song of betrayal, salted with revenge.
And the climbing party is stuck on a ledge
halfway up the mountain.
This is the bridge, the painful modulation.
This is the thick of things.
So much is crowded into the middle—
the guitars of Spain, piles of ripe avocados,
Russian uniforms, noisy parties,
lakeside kisses, arguments heard through a wall—
too much to name, too much to think about.
And this is the end,
the car running out of road,
the river losing its name in an ocean,
the long nose of the photographed horse
touching the white electronic line.
This is the colophon, the last elephant in the parade,
the empty wheelchair,
and pigeons floating down in the evening.
Here the stage is littered with bodies,
the narrator leads the characters to their cells,
and the climbers are in their graves.
It is me hitting the period
and you closing the book.
It is Sylvia Plath in the kitchen
and St. Clement with an anchor around his neck.
This is the final bit
thinning away to nothing.
This is the end, according to Aristotle,
what we have all been waiting for,
what everything comes down to,
the destination we cannot help imagining,
a streak of light in the sky,
a hat on a peg, and outside the cabin, falling leaves.
Billy Collins, “Aristotle” from Picnic, Lightning. Copyright © 1998 by Billy Collins. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Reprinted with the permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press, www.pitt.edu/~press/.
Source: Picnic Lightning (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998)
Tuesday, November 28, 2023
Sunday, November 26, 2023
Where did that bounty hunter idea come from
I was surprised when I read this article. I didn’t know about the deep philosophical roots behind Texas’s anti-abortion law. Now that I know the background and philosophy of both Clarence Thomas and his former law clerk, I can see what they are doing. Obviously they both threaten the legal basis for legal structures that are very important to me. Also, I doubt that most people have any idea what they are up to. Heads up!
A Panacea for the Heart An Incitement to Virtue Through Reflection on Impermanence
On the death of Christina Monson, an important lesson.
Sogan Rinpoche (Sogan Tulku Pema Lodoe) composed "A Panacea for the Heart: An Incitement to Virtue Through Reflection on Impermanence" upon learning of Christina's passing. It includes the following verse:
And when my Dharma siblings who I wished to remain here with me inseparably
Are led away without hope of intervening, by the Lord of Death himself, I feel sad
But sadness and grief don’t help; let us rouse strength of heart
And spurn ourselves to practice virtue and dedicate it with aspirations.
The full poem is at the link below. (note: I suspect a translation error substituted “spurn” for “spur” at the end.
https://www.shambhala.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/A-Panacea-for-the-Heart.pdf
Thursday, November 9, 2023
My favorite Improv West Coast Swing
I dance West Coast Swing as a hobby and have for almost 50 years. This dance has evolved over the years but at an especially rapid rate in the past five years - in my opinion it's at it's best now. On top of that, these two dancers, Ben and Victoria, are among the best in the world of contemporary WCS. I have watched them since they began to dance as teenagers and I just marvel at what they do. Please watch this video - it is my favorite WCS dance ever!
Sunday, November 5, 2023
Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche quotes on change
Loss of friends and relatives is much more common at my age. It is not any easier now just because it is well known. With that fact at the forefront, the imminence of death is clearly something to keep in mind. So is the recombination of our circle of friends, family, and colleagues. I now face the near term death of several people who are really key in my life. Pontificating in the face of this development is questionable, so I will keep this short and turn this post over to someone more qualified, Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche:
Change is continuous. Day by day, one season slips into the next. Day turns into night and night to day. Buildings don’t suddenly grow old; rather, second by second, from the moment they’re constructed, they begin to deteriorate… Think of beings inhabiting this universe. How many people born a hundred years ago are still alive?… We see the play of impermanence in our relationships as well. How many of our family members, friends, people in our hometown, have died? How many have moved away, disappearing from our lives forever?… At one time we felt happy just being near a person we loved. Just to hold that person’s hand made us feel wonderful. Now maybe we can’t stand him, don’t want to know anything about him. Whatever comes together must fall apart, whatever once fathered must separate, whatever was born must die. Continual change, relentless change, is constant in our world.
Don’t burden others with your expectations. Understanding their limitations can inspire compassion instead of disappointment, ensuring beneficial and workable relationships. Remember that you have only a short time together. Be grateful for each day you share.
Friday, November 3, 2023
Jane Marie Law post about the humanity of her class
My heart is so moved by this post, in our time of great sorrow for those who suffer, that I shed tears. It moves me to hear of genuine humanity showing up in response to what we are seeing. Many kudos to the professor who wrote this and many thanks… 🙏
Jane Marie Law’s post on Facebook:
An Everyday Miracle at Cornell University
It is unusual to have the university where I teach, Cornell in Ithaca, NY be in the national news for the same reason for an extended period of time. Usually, national news celebrates the accomplishments of some scholar, or some unusual student, and it’s a flash in the pan. Someone wins a Nobel prize or a national or international award. A new bird or bug is discovered. That’s sad, because that’s what should be in the news every day about my institution. Amazing things happen at Cornell every single day. So it has been very unsettling to be on the front page of the major media day in and day out for weeks on end. I have many thoughts and opinions about the events that have transpired at Cornell and they probably don’t align with the main stream coverage. But I don’t want to talk about that.
What will never make the news is what happens every day in classrooms across our beautiful campus. It should be what makes the news. Every day in seminars, lecture halls, labs, and field projects, students from the most diverse places on the planet get together and learn together, and make friendships that will last a lifetime and change the way they think because they’ve met someone different from themselves. Every day in seminar, lecture hall, labs and field projects, students fall in love with ideas, biology, poetry, film, languages, physics, and sometimes even each other. I know from having taught at this university for almost 35 years that the love affairs with ideas my students develop are intimately tied up with the people with whom they learn those things – – professors, teaching assistants, instructors, lecturers and other students. Ideas and knowledge don’t change people. People change people and at universities like this it’s often very beautiful to see. But you won’t read that in the news. It’s not even newsworthy here.
Let me tell you about a class I’m teaching right now. This class is held in the crappiest classroom I’ve ever had at Cornell, a basement room, devoid of any decoration, save a chalkboard and tiny windows high up, overgrown with not ivy but weeds (some inside the room) because it’s in a basement and walls are painted an off-white, with desks that are not fixed and with utterly no charm. The room barely fits the 24 of us. Among those 23 students are just about every form of diversity one can imagine: racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, nationality, gender, religious, dietary, able bodied and not, and political. In this small class I have eight different major religions represented. I have six different countries represented. I have all hues of political persuasion represented. I could give granular detail that would drive home this remarkable diversity, but this isn’t an essay on demographics. Perhaps it’s just what I teach, but this is how most of my classes are. And when I speak to my colleagues, this is what they say too. Incredible diversity is the norm here. People are lovable when they are learning enhancing things, and they learn to love the friendships that form when they do this. I know this. I have watched it happen for almost 35 years.
But let me tell you something really special about my students, particularly this group this semester. After the massacre on October 7 by Hamas against Jews in the kibbutzim and the subsequent invasion of Gaza by the Israeli Defense Forces and the unfolding and unrelenting horror of the high casualties among Palestinian civilians in Gaza, my students did not scramble to find a simple position to take. They opened up to one another in remarkable ways and, led by our discussions in class and the kind of atmosphere that is actually fairly common in these kinds of diverse settings, they listened to one another, and showed an enormous care for one another that was beyond avoiding uncomfortable conversations. They were filled with self-recriminations that they did not understand the situation with more nuance. And they also felt guilty to be continuing to go about their lives and their studies when the world was dealt so many horrible blows in such quick succession. Rather than hardening into ideological positions, the view you would have if you read the mainstream media, they got soft and open to one another. They may have had to be reminded by me that as a class they represent nothing short of a miracle of humanity, but I think the real miracle is the realization that when you put a diverse group of students in a small classroom to do productive work together, something happens.
Cornell University is closing tomorrow for one day of community reflection. But for my classes, we had class today, and I felt that that day of reconciliation and reflection could not come soon enough, so I declared today, “Zoomin’ in Your Jammies Day.” Students could come to class on ZOOM in their pajamas. They could stay in bed. They could have their stuffed animals. They could have a hot beverage. In fact, I think I might give extra credit to anyone who had a hot beverage. And everyone showed up on zoom and we read poetry together, poetry about putting your soul back together, poetry about the natural world and about bees, and about birds. There is a kind of special hush that comes over young people when they’re far from home and they’re learning the textures of their hearts and souls and minds without having it mediated by a standard curriculum. It takes my breath away sometimes, that hush. Today, even though we were on zoom, I could feel that special hush. I think we all felt very connected to one another.
This won’t make it on the front page of CNN or the New York Times, but let me say this: donors and political figures and harsh critics of American academia need to realize that the students and the professors and scholars working at these major research institutions are doing something very difficult and very rare. We are actually living diversity. We all deal with deep diversity every day and we know a lot about it. It isn’t all hatred and knives and people choosing sides. That makes the news. That makes for good stories. A tragically mentally ill young man who posts hateful and violent threats against Jews on the Internet makes the news. Students attacking one another at rallies, far from the norm here but happening elsewhere, makes the news. But that is not what we see most all of the time in the diverse communities that form at places like Cornell. On the contrary, we see people building relationships that will last a lifetime with people very different from themselves. People really do discover their shared humanity.
At the end of this semester, I’ll be inviting my students over to my home for dinner. I want to facilitate this moment in their lives, in every way I can because they will remember that when their alma mater made the news for something horrible, they had a tight little community, as diverse as the world will ever be, and people were gentle and kind and cared for one another, and it doesn’t ever have to be any different. Miracles happen every day at Cornell and other universities as diverse as ours. But it’s so common place we never think to report it.
Wendel Berry on poetry
This poem really strikes home for me and where I am these days. In fact, I was contemplating similar notions earlier today, in part because I have been noticing poetry lately, which is new for me, and partly because my line of thought is moving in this direction these days.
How to Be a Poet (to remind myself)
Wendell Berry
Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon affection, reading, knowledge, skill—more of each than you have—inspiration, work, growing older, patience, for patience joins time to eternity. Any readers who like your poems, doubt their judgment.
ii
Breathe with unconditional breath the unconditioned air. Shun electric wire. Communicate slowly. Live a three-dimensioned life; stay away from screens. Stay away from anything that obscures the place it is in. There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.
iii
Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came.
—The selected poems of Wendell berry
Key WW2 woman spy
While I face my personal challenges, I often realize how small they are in comparison to the trials of war and other major travails. Here's an example of both major challenges and major accomplishments via persistence and skill. I hope you find it interesting.
Thursday, November 2, 2023
Monday, October 16, 2023
Soundtrack for growing blonde dreadlocks
psilocybernetics and indigenous dream riddims take hold - soundtrack for growing blonde dreadlocks
Open Culture Whole Earth Catalog archive
I posted recently that I tossed my print collection of Whole Earth Catalogs and associated CoEvolution Quarterlies and Whole Earth Reviews, suffering from the expected withdrawal process. Here's the online methadone for this:
Open Culture on the online archive of The Whole Earth Catalog and magazines
Sunday, October 15, 2023
Only The Mountain Remains
Only The Mountain Remains is a film about a spiritual teacher who is dying. I saw it a few months ago in a class on Death and Dying and recommend it to everyone. Although it is about 30 minutes long, it shows a lot. The stream is available for free.
Tuesday, September 26, 2023
Wednesday, September 20, 2023
Jakub and Emeline are my favorite partner dancers
Many people now use the term “Modern Swing” for the current version of West Coast Swing. This new partner dance form merits a new name because it *is* truly different. Really! I have to say I now love it, after resisting this evolution for years. Others, like my wife, object that it is not swing. Incorporating contemporary and contact improvisation as well as Zouk, it is more expressive and more physically challenging than traditional WCS. I hope that I will be able to dance it myself someday but that would require rebuilding my entire body of dance skills. We’ll see…
My favorite partner team now is Jakub and Emeline. For WCS dancers they have unusual backgrounds. The About page on their website is well worth reading.
Thursday, September 14, 2023
location location location!
Yesterday I emailed friends and family about a report of someone smoking meth here in a downtown business’s bathroom and labeled it “life in the big city.” Well, here’s an example of a different kind of incident, in Santa Fe, NM…
https://ladailypost.com/bull-moose-captured-in-downtown-santa-fe/
Sunday, September 10, 2023
Billions of dollars for the Right Wing Agenda benefit Gini Thomas
It is no accident that the Supreme Court is now dominated by extremely conservative justices nor that the billions of dollars funding Right Wing propaganda benefit the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas. It is intentional. All of the money and political actors are also central to the Big Lie campaign to reverse the 2020 election.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/09/10/ginni-thomas-leonard-leo-citizens-united-00108082
Friday, September 1, 2023
Some observations on Death and Aldous Huxley
The events and authors mentioned here strongly influenced me in my teenage years. They introduced me to the path I have followed since then. Although I have meandered a bit, this path has a center which still holds. Now, as I begin elder hood, the losses that inevitably arise only lead deeper and increase my devotion. Thanks for sharing this journey.
Given that not everyone who would be interested in this subject uses Facebook, I lifted the entire post below from Samuel Long. He is well worth following if you use Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/IAmSamLongSamIAm?mibextid=9R9pXO
All my best,
David E. Anderson
********************
"It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig. Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me. When it comes to dying even. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic. No rhetoric, no tremolos, no self conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Little Nell. And of course, no theology, no metaphysics. Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear light. So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling, on tiptoes and no luggage, not even a sponge bag, completely unencumbered."
~from Aldous Huxley, Island.
https://amzn.to/47WawPU
"The “spiritual adepts” of Tibet’s modern period, writes Huston Smith in his comprehensive introduction to the Bardo Thodol, or “The Tibetan Book of the Dead”, “were inner-world adventurers of the highest daring, the Tibetan equivalent of our astronauts—I think it is worth coining the term ‘psychonaut’ to describe them. They personally voyaged to the furthest frontiers of that universe which their society deemed vital to explore: the inner frontiers of consciousness itself, in all its transformations in life and beyond death.” Western modernity—its energies focused entirely on shaping, subduing, and expropriating the material world—did not begin to take such complex inner journeys seriously until the 20th century. When it did, it did so largely through the popular influence of pioneers like Aldous Huxley and Timothy Leary, who introduced the inner journey through a syncretism of Eastern spirituality, Indigenous religious practices, and psychotropic drug use—something of an accelerated course to the frontiers of consciousness for those who had failed for so long to investigate its limits. Huxley’s first psychedelic experience, described in his 1953 The Doors of Perception, “was in no sense revolutionary,” he wrote, in that he did not, as he had expected, experience “a world of visions” like those in the Bardo or the writings of William Blake. On the other hand, he describes a shift in consciousness in exactly the terms spiritual practitioners use to talk about enlightenment. He references Meister Eckhart’s Istigkeit or “Is-ness”—“a perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure Being.” He uses words like “grace” and “transfiguration” and refers to D.T. Suzuki’s essay “’What is the Dharma-Body of the Buddha?’”—“another way of saying Mind, Suchness, the Void, the Godhead.” His faith in this experience persisted to the end of his life. It was, for him, an initiation, a “great change… in the realm of objective fact.” So profound were Huxley’s experiments with psychedelic drugs that on his deathbed ten years later, he requested that his wife Laura inject him with 100 micrograms of LSD. In the short video up top, Laura remembers the day, the same day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. And in the letter above, which you can read in full at Letters of Note, she describes Huxley’s last days in vivid detail to Huxley’s brother Julian and his wife Juliette. According to Laura, Huxley struggled in his last two months to accept the fact that he was dying of cancer. She read to him, she writes, “the entire manual of Dr. Leary extracted from The Book of the Dead.” Huxley reminded her that Leary used the manual to guide people through their acid trips, and that “he would bring people, who were not dead, back here to this life after the session.” After several painful days, however, he came to terms, “all of a sudden,” and made out his will. Laura had already consulted with Sidney Cohen, “a psychiatrist who had been one of the leaders in the use of LSD” and learned that Cohen had given the drug to two dying patients; “in one case it had brought up a sort of reconciliation with Death, and in the other case it did not make any difference.” After she had offered it to Huxley several times over those two months, he finally wrote out his instructions to her for the dosage. She injected it herself, then, a few hours later, gave him another 100 micrograms. As he died, under the effects of what she calls his “moksha medicine,” Laura coached him “towards the light” as the Bardo counsels. “Willing and consciously you are going, willingly and consciously, and you are doing this beautifully; you are doing this so beautifully.” After several hours, Huxley died. These five people all said that this was the most serene, the most beautiful death. Both doctors and nurse said they had never seen a person in similar physical condition going off so completely without pain and without struggle. We will never know if all this is only our wishful thinking, or if it is real, but certainly all outward signs and the inner feeling gave indication that it was beautiful and peaceful and easy. You can hear Laura discuss Huxley’s LSD-assisted death in much more detail in a conversation here with Alan Watts,
http://www.openculture.com/2015/06/zen-guru-alan-watts-helps-us-overcome-the-fear-of-dying.html
who calls it a “highly intelligent form of dying.” In her letter, she defies the judgment that Huxley’s use of psychedelic drugs, in life and death, was irresponsible or escapist. “It is true we will have some people saying that he was a drug addict all his life and that he ended as one,” she writes, “but it is history that Huxleys stop ignorance before ignorance can stop Huxleys.” Indeed, in the same year that Aldous died, his brother Julian—the renowned evolutionary biologist—published an article called “Psychometabilism” in the second issue of The Psychedelic Review, the research journal co-founded by Leary. “In psychedelic drugs,” wrote Julien, “we have a remarkable opportunity for interesting research.” Likewise, he argued, “mysticism is another psychometabolic activity which needs much further research… some mystics have certainly obtained results of great value and importance: they have been able to achieve an interior state of peace and strength which combines profound tranquility and high psychological energy.” In his informal, literary way, Aldous Huxley conducted such studies with himself as the subject, and wrote of the results and possibilities in books like The Doors of Perception and Island. A few years after Aldous Huxley’s death, the US and UK governments banned the kind of psychedelic research Julien recommended, but it has recently become a serious object of scientific study once again, and thanks to the reporting, and experimenting, of writers like Michael Pollan, Westerners may soon once again use psychedelics to take the inner journeys our culture does its best to discourage and denigrate." ♦️ ©2006-2022 Open Culture, LLC. All rights reserved.
"Huxley was diagnosed with laryngeal cancer in 1960; in the years that followed, with his health deteriorating, he wrote the utopian novel Island, and gave lectures on "Human Potentialities" both at the UCSF Medical Center and at the Esalen Institute. These lectures were fundamental to the beginning of the Human Potential Movement. Huxley died aged 69, at 5:20 p.m. PST on 22 November 1963. Media coverage of Huxley's death, along with that of fellow British author C. S. Lewis, was overshadowed by the assassination of John F. Kennedy on the same day, less than seven hours before Huxley's death. In a 2009 article for New York magazine titled "The Eclipsed Celebrity Death Club", Christopher Bonanos wrote: The championship trophy for badly timed death, though, goes to a pair of British writers. Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World, died the same day as C. S. Lewis, who wrote the Chronicles of Narnia series. Unfortunately for both of their legacies, that day was November 22, 1963, just as John Kennedy's motorcade passed the Texas School Book Depository. Huxley, at least, made it interesting: At his request, his wife shot him up with LSD a couple of hours before the end, and he tripped his way out of this world. This coincidence served as the basis for Peter Kreeft's book Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C. S. Lewis, & Aldous Huxley, which imagines a conversation among the three men taking place in Purgatory following their deaths. Huxley's memorial service took place in London in December 1963; it was led by his elder brother Julian. On 27 October 1971, his ashes were interred in the family grave at the Watts Cemetery, home of the Watts Mortuary Chapel in Compton, Guildford, Surrey, England. Huxley had been a long-time friend of Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, who dedicated his last orchestral composition to Huxley. What became Variations: Aldous Huxley in memoriam was begun in July 1963, completed in October 1964, and premiered by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on 17 April 1965. Huxley was a close friend of Jiddu Krishnamurti and Rosalind Rajagopal, and was involved in the creation of the Happy Valley School, now Besant Hill School, of Happy Valley, in Ojai, California. The most substantial collection of Huxley's few remaining papers, following the destruction of most in the 1961 Bel Air Fire, is at the Library of the University of California, Los Angeles. Some are also at the Stanford University Libraries."
https://archive.today/20130615214233/
http://digital2.library.ucla.edu/viewItem.do?ark=21198/zz00253vz2
http://www.anglistik.uni-muenster.de/Huxley/huxley_research.html
https://www.gutenberg.org/author/Aldous_Huxley
https://norman.hrc.utexas.edu/fasearch/findingAid.cfm?eadID=00378
https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt1489q14s/
Sunday, August 27, 2023
Li Po poem
The birds have vanished down the sky.
Now the last cloud drains away.
We sit together, the mountain and me,
until only the mountain remains.
Li Po, “Zazen on Ching-t’ing Mountain,” translated by Sam Hamill
Saturday, August 26, 2023
Laurie Anderson performing in SF
Wednesday night I will be at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco to see Laurie Anderson perform for the Zorn at 70 series!
From the program:
The Great American Music Hall is extremely proud to present ... "ZORN at 70", 15 extraordinary performances across 5 days at GAMH (and one at Grace Cathedral), curated by John Zorn, in celebration of the legendary composer, musician and iconoclast's 70th birthday.
Featuring John Zorn, Laurie Anderson, Bill Frisell, Julian Lage, Fred Frith, Mike Patton, John Medeski, Dave Lombardo, Trevor Dunn, Petra Haden, Trey Spruance, Kenny Wollesen, Brian Marsella, Gyan Riley, Cyro Baptista, Chris Otto, Sae Hashimoto, Steve Gosling, Jorge Roeder, WIlliam Winant, Ikue Mori, Ches Smith among many, many others ...
This series will feature two world premiere performances, several of Zorn's best loved and most celebrated ensembles as well as some of his latest projects, a unique solo organ recital at Grace Cathedral and a very special COBRA performance, curated especially for San Francisco.
One of the most ambitious and wide reaching concert series Zorn has ever curated, this incredible series will take place from August 30th - Sept 3rd and cannot be missed.
Show times, line-ups, ticket prices and details can be found at GAMH.COM along with options for day passes and full series passes.
Wednesday, August 23, 2023
Tuesday, August 22, 2023
Andrew Holecek on Death and Dying
Almost done with this class. It is deepening even further my lifelong involvement with Buddhism.
A reminder: Death is certain, the date is not.
https://www.andrewholecek.com/event/death-and-the-art-of-dying-deep-dive-into-the-luminous-bardo/
Monday, August 21, 2023
New Laurie Anderson interview
Laurie Anderson is important to me. She has been since her music first appeared. I have seen her perform many times over the decades. She also shares my particular Buddhist practices and studies. Here’s a little bit of recent conversation to read.
https://tuenight.substack.com/p/laurie-anderson-talks-tai-chi-aging
Sunday, August 13, 2023
RuPaul's Secret Celebrity Drag Race
As I said in my last post, we watched different TV shows last night for a change of pace. To top it off we stretched out and watched RuPaul's Secret Celebrity Drag Race. It was a fun distraction. I also realized that my drag name would be Davida Loca... <snap> 😀
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RuPaul%27s_Secret_Celebrity_Drag_Race_(season_2)
The HistoryMakers project
For an entertaining break we watched some different TV shows last night. One was 60 Minutes.
The HistoryMakers segment was moving and inspiring and highly recommended! This project creates oral histories of Black Americans and curricula for schools based on them. It is a strong antidote to DeSantis's fascist anti-history and is now part of the Library of Congress. The segment is available on the project site :
Dinosaur species revival project
Jeff Goldblum announced today that he is working with Stewart Brand to revive this species using the embryo as a starting point. Donald Trump immediately announced his full support for the project, saying “Since we too are dinosaurs and like to tear things apart with our teeth, we look forward to the company of a kindred soul.”
https://www.iflscience.com/perfectly-preserved-dinosaur-embryo-found-inside-fossilized-egg-70182
Heather Cox Richardson book release/talk Oct 14, 2023 Oakland, CA
$36 admission includes a signed copy of the hardcover version of her new book!
Thursday, August 10, 2023
Death and Dying class
I enrolled in this class after watching a one-hour talk by Lama Justin Bujdoss. He is a Caucasian American deeply trained in Tibetan Buddhism and a long time senior member of the NYC Department of Corrections chaplaincy program. He is very active in reaching out to POC and other minorities who are under represented in the US Buddhist community.
His profile appears at the bottom of the following page for this class:
https://www.sowarigpaonline.org/courses/Death-and-Dying-self-paced
Wednesday, August 2, 2023
Tuesday, August 1, 2023
Monday, July 31, 2023
How organized is the Right? Very...
Brainwashing must start young and continue through early adulthood. It should also be required by the government and funded with taxpayer dollars. So says the rich and powerful Right.
Saturday, July 29, 2023
Inspiring story of a friend in 2020
A high school friend was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2020 as COVID arrived. He was hospitalized at Kaiser for a few days, then told to go home, make himself comfortable, and prepare for death within two months. Stunned, he called his son, a medical physics PhD and AI researcher at a medical research startup. The son jumped on the internet to find the best oncologists for his father's ailment. One UCLA doctor stood out and was relatively close by. An email to him led to an immediate phone call. The son sent Kaiser's health records to this doctor, who quickly decided the diagnosis was wrong and told him to bring my friend to the ER at UCLA. My friend immediately checked out (over the protests of his doctor) and went directly to the other ER. There a new and different diagnosis led to chemotherapy and radiation treatment, a combination which cured him. A little more than two years later he is still free of cancer.
Keep hope alive.
Historic moment in US Fifties history that should inspire us now
Friday, July 14, 2023
Early life
When I was about six years old I had a conflict with my father over something trivial while we were outdoors. I tried to run away, but he grabbed me and began to spank me with his free hand. I began to cry. For this he spanked me more, ordering me to stop crying. I told him that he was making me cry, but this made him even more angry. I saw that he was irrational and that this would therefore continue. I realized then that I could ignore the spanking, quiet down, end the battle, and live for another time. So it was. In that moment he in fact lost a lot of his ability to control me in the future.
When I was 16 I had another conflict with my father. This time when he moved to grab me, I picked up a nearby pole and ordered him to stay away. He did. It was not long after this incident that I left home. I continued to attend high school, working on the side. I graduated early, earned scholarships, and moved to the college town where I began my studies. On my own, I worked, took out loans, lived cheaply, and eventually was able to declare myself financially independent.
Note that my father was not a brutal man, but he was of another era. And he had survived being chased by thugs with axe handles when he was a labor organizer.
Monday, July 3, 2023
Thursday, June 29, 2023
Our life together
When we are blessed to experience life as a sacred journey, our highs and our lows are all elements of something greater. To share this with someone, to really know and recognize it together over decades, is more profound than anything I have ever known. Our gratitude knows no bounds.
The theremin player, an interesting character
One of the most interesting stories I have read recently! BTW, I built a theremin from a kit in high school. I couldn’t play anything though because that requires the ability to accurately play a pitch...
Saturday, May 20, 2023
Thursday, January 12, 2023
RIP Jeff Beck
I had felt stressed for a few days about a couple things when came the shocking news of Jeff Beck’s death. I just sat and watched videos of his performances for a couple hours and cried. So sad. Fortunately I saw him live a few years ago here in the Bay Area. May he rest in peace.
Sunday, January 8, 2023
PBS Great Performances “Gloria: A Life”
Gloria is an exploration of Gloria Steinem’s life and its impact. It is a 90-minute recording of a play performed in 2019.
We found this very moving and evocative of many memories. Good to prompt insights. Highly recommended!
continuing focus
For the last few months I have been prioritizing. Making progress, I can say. Still much to do in 2023. Meditation is both a result and cause in this endeavor. Approaching 1000 hours of pandemic meditation practice, according to my timer app. Daily practice is key to everything.
Feeling gratitude for my close friends and relatives - thank you. May you flourish and grow.
Very excited by the combination of Tools for Thought work and AI. 2023 is going to see tremendous developments!
Happy New Year!
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