“The gift of becoming aware of the simple, astonishing beauty of anything, even as we recognize that it, and we along with it, will one day be no more. This moment of awareness holds everything.” – Douglas Christie I want to muse about the line “this moment of awareness holds everything” and how it spun me round in relationship between my sitting practice and the fierce reality of the present moment. I think the present moment gets shortchanged by lazy quips and sophomoric slogans – YOLO and all the rest. And sitting practice can be misunderstood just as easily… it …
Tag: Gary Snyder
A Revelatory Elegy of Unknowing with Todd Davis (author of Coffin Honey)
Reading Todd Davis’s gorgeous poems, you can’t help but feel that the capacities of human vision, and also our appetite for exactly this way of seeing and naming have been mysteriously, precisely increased. – Jane Hirshfield The poems of Todd Davis sharpen a reader’s spirit and focus, on the bloodstained teeth breaking apart the day-to-day doldrums and on the mythic imagination necessary to bear witness to this daunting moment in our species, on our planet. Todd Davis and I spoke back in 2019 about his book Native Species and he has read his poems in the last two years on …
Bill Porter (Red Pine) on Zen and Taoist Masters, Mountain Hermits, & the Life of a Translator
“Bill Porter has been one of the most prolific translators of Chinese texts, while also developing into a travel writer with a cult following.” —New York Times (The audio is shaky between ~ 2m30s – 5m. Apologies for that. I owe you a high five) Bill Porter (Red Pine) on Zen and Taoist Masters, Mountain Hermits, & the Life of a Translator Bill Porter, aka Red Pine, calls the hermit life, “graduate school for the spiritually inclined.” Bill Porter is a translator of Buddhist and Taoist mountain poets that uncross your third eye and waft the scent of a fine …