Achan Sumano of the Double-Eye Cave
Posted: June 13, 2017 Filed under: articles, buddhism, people, religion, writers Leave a comment
Achan Sumano in the Double-Eye Cave in Thailand, where he has lived for more than 20 years. He practices Buddhism in the tradition of the late Achan Mun and Achan Chaa of the Forest Meditation Center near Ubon, Thailand. Photograph by Roy Hamric
“Viewing TV, reading newspapers, and staying on top of the dramas happening in the world causes a lot of anxiety and frustration to short circuit our ability to respond appropriately to events in our personal lives. In our intimate relationships, more so than any other, there is a need to function with spontaneous penetrating wisdom, with humanity, with love and with compassion. Penetrating wisdom is a critical aspect because it can see through circumstances. Wisdom recognizes the need for compassion beginning with compassion for ourselves. I regard family and intimate relationships as the ground for training ourselves to act and live as whole, kind-hearted human beings. In the family, in marriages and partnerships, we soak up massive amounts of pain from disappointment, frustration, jealousy, misunderstanding, etc. As painful as this is, all of this is needed to cultivate wisdom…” For more, see here.
Dylan’s Nobel Prize Speech
Posted: June 5, 2017 Filed under: music, people, poetry, writers Leave a comment
Here’s Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize speech, which is a peek at his inspirations, entanglements and bondings and the power of stories to convey word pictures of the world. I was surprised he barely mentioned poetry.
Mornings In Mexico
Posted: April 9, 2017 Filed under: books, people, places, writers Leave a comment
“And many of the Serranos, the Indians from the hills, wearing their little conical black felt hats, seem capped with night, above the straight white shoulders. Some have come far, walking all yesterday in their black hats and black-sheathed sandals. Tomorrow they will walk back. And their eyes will be just the same, black and bright and wild, in the dark faces. They have no goal, any more than the hawks in the air, and no course to run, any more than the clouds.”
– D.H. Lawrence, in his nonfiction voice, heavy with mysticism and lyrical description on the otherness of the Indian culture he observed while staying near Oxaca in the mid-1920s.
Ralph Ellison’s Faux Haiku
Posted: November 20, 2016 Filed under: books, people, poetry, writers Leave a commentAlbert Murray, Ralph Ellison’s friend, remembers a short poem, which I will call a haiku, from their days as students together: Murray recalls the author of Invisible Man as the smartest-dressed upperclassman at Tuskegee. Murray was impressed that Ellison always seemed to check out the best books in the library, and he presented a “nascent elegance” in his two-tone shoes, bow tie, contrasting slacks, and whatever else the best haberdasher in Oklahoma had to offer.
“I even remember the poetry Ralph wrote,” Murray said:
“‘Death is nothing, / Life is nothing, / How beautiful these two nothings!’ “
Epictetus on the senses
Posted: October 29, 2016 Filed under: people, states of mind, time and space, writers Leave a comment
“For as the carpenter’s material is wood, and that of the statuary is copper, so the matter of the art of living is each man’s life…
“The question at stake,” said Epictetus, “is no common one; it is this:—Are we in our senses, or are we not?”
– Excerpt From: Epictetus. “A Selection from the Discourses of Epictetus with the Encheiridion.”
Emerson on books
Posted: September 25, 2016 Filed under: books, people, writers Leave a comment
“Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire.
“I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Jim Harrison writes about Red Pine
Posted: May 9, 2016 Filed under: books, Buddhism Zen, poetry, writers Leave a comment
Red Pine, Stonehouse and Gary Snyder are mentioned in Jim Harrison’s new trilogy of novellas that was just released, The Ancient Minstrel:
“After attending and giving at least a hundred poetry readings he could remember only one that struck him as a hundred percent genuine and honest. A poet named, simply enough, Red Pine read from an ancient Chinese poet he had translated, called Stonehouse. Red Pine read with quiet integrity just what he translated. Usually after a reading he was in a private snit and needed a drink, but now he walked down and looked at the harbor, his spine still tingling. The other true exception was Gary Snyder. He never wanted Snyder’s readings to end.”
Daylight
Posted: February 27, 2016 Filed under: people, photography, poetry, time and space, writers Leave a comment
Did you notice the daylight today?
The days are short in December.
It comes before dark. Sometimes it passes
in a hurry to get someplace else
More friendly perhaps. Fiji maybe.
We become forgetful and miss it some days.
In March there were six different warblers
in one willow bush. What else could
you possibly want from daylight?
– Jim Harrison, Dead Man’s Float
Finger Snapping Time
Posted: February 21, 2016 Filed under: buddhism, people, photography, poetry, writers Leave a comment
Photograph of Blue Heron by Jesse Sublett
People can’t explain why they’re so crazy
The two evil birds on their faces
The three poison snakes in their hearts
One or another blocks their way
Making it hard to get hold of things
Lift your hand high and snap your fingers
Homage to the Buddha
– Poem #223 from The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain, translated from Chinese by Red Pine
First You Must Last
Posted: August 17, 2015 Filed under: books, sight seeing, writers | Tags: ernest hemingway, writers Leave a comment
Ernest Hemingway’s boyhood home in Oak Park, Ill. “Il faut, d’abord, durer.” – (“First of all, one must endure.”) – A saying of Hemingway, from a letter.
the roy hamric journal 