Sunday, July 10, 2011
Moving to wordpress
I seem to be switching from blogger to wordpress. Look for the same old blog at http://toevening.wordpress.com/
Thursday, April 28, 2011
A tree in a heavy wind
A late night and a stormy morning. Aborted 5:30 alarm in favor of sleep. In retrospect its not clear how wise this was.
The weather inside mirrors the weather outside. As waves of rain sweep through the city crowding radar maps with bright colors, I find my own sensitive instruments periodically overwhelmed.
Blood filled with adrenaline has a battery acid feel to it. Skin and heart and lungs charged to the sparking point like a 9-volt on the tongue.
Acute sense of impending doom but no clear sense of direction. There is something here; something wants to be heard, but the message is unfocused. Where does this ill wind blow from? From what depths has this unnamed animal passion bubbled up from to break noxiously at the surface?
Don’t know.
Fear? Longing? Injury? What is this?
Don’t know.
Roots reach out looking for ground.
The weather inside mirrors the weather outside. As waves of rain sweep through the city crowding radar maps with bright colors, I find my own sensitive instruments periodically overwhelmed.
Blood filled with adrenaline has a battery acid feel to it. Skin and heart and lungs charged to the sparking point like a 9-volt on the tongue.
Acute sense of impending doom but no clear sense of direction. There is something here; something wants to be heard, but the message is unfocused. Where does this ill wind blow from? From what depths has this unnamed animal passion bubbled up from to break noxiously at the surface?
Don’t know.
Fear? Longing? Injury? What is this?
Don’t know.
Roots reach out looking for ground.
Saturday, April 23, 2011
Mind the Gap
“Where is my mind? Where is my mind? Way out in the water, see it swimming.” – The Pixies
“You ask. That’s your mind. I answer. That’s my mind. If I had no mind, how could I answer? If you had no mind, how could you ask? That which asks is your mind. Through endless kalpas without beginning, whatever you do, wherever you are, that’s your real mind, that’s your real buddha.... To search for enlightenment or nirvana beyond this mind is impossible.... Your mind is nirvana.” – Bodhidharma
“And remember, no matter where you go, there you are” – Confucius
“Come as you are / as you were / as I want you to be / as a friend / as a friend / as an old enemy” – Nirvana
“I was basically trying to rip off The Pixies” – Kurt Cobain
“You ask. That’s your mind. I answer. That’s my mind. If I had no mind, how could I answer? If you had no mind, how could you ask? That which asks is your mind. Through endless kalpas without beginning, whatever you do, wherever you are, that’s your real mind, that’s your real buddha.... To search for enlightenment or nirvana beyond this mind is impossible.... Your mind is nirvana.” – Bodhidharma
“And remember, no matter where you go, there you are” – Confucius
“Come as you are / as you were / as I want you to be / as a friend / as a friend / as an old enemy” – Nirvana
“I was basically trying to rip off The Pixies” – Kurt Cobain
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
My Dinner with Avalokitesvara
All day trying to climb the ridge of an iceberg but sliding into sleep instead. Finding some purchase by stepping into the weave and weft of the tapestry, the grid of Albert’s spacetime. Breathe in and step up into the moment. Breathe out and reflect. A clean bowl ready to receive.
But then again asleep.
An ancient message from an old master:
The swordsman uses skillful means to rescue the family, but they do not see the gravity of the situation. Bathed in awe and gratitude they invite disaster. Is this me? Faith, doubt, and determination. Two out of three can perhaps be accounted for, but the other is in question.
A teacher in another time asks the question: “why do you practice?” I don’t know. A beloved metaphor of old: an immovable tree in a heavy wind. But rooted to what?
A gift:
Why do I practice? What am I looking for? I have been here before and dropped it. Will this be different?
The first motive was curiosity. But then a skillful means sparked a taste and curiosity became desire. Practice was beautiful and I fell in love with the world like one falls in love with a pretty girl. But this was not enough to sustain when practice became inconvenient. Practice born of desire felt selfish and could not be tolerated. Bright spark faded, the tide came in, and the beach became just an echo of memory.
Now I’ve returned to the waters at this rocky shore and wade right in up to my neck. I do not think the same desire moves me. The time between brought storms both slow and sudden, and my roots could find no purchase. I could not bend enough to ride the wind and so I broke. And in that snap instinct or memory brought me back to this old practice. Perhaps it was to look for solace, but I suspect that even broken I knew that none was to be found on these shores. But arriving here and stepping back into the sea I find that I can hear the waves more clearly. I am a part of this world, and what I do has consequence. For good or ill there are many who are tied to me, and if I break and founder I may take them down with me. But now I can hear the message sent down through the millennia: This vehicle has a flawed design, but the recall notice has been sent and I can make repairs.
Silent tears in a darkened room. Speared through the chest by loving arms steeped in woe. In over my head off of unfamiliar shoreline I am moved by tides beyond my fathom. Sensitive instrument, open and unshielded, the faintest twinkle a blinding light. The sky is full of stars.
But then again asleep.
An ancient message from an old master:
"I beg to urge everyone:An ancient message from The Flaming Lips:
Great is the matter of birth and death.
Time waits for no one.
Wake up, Wake up
Don’t waste a moment."
“Do you realize that everyone you know someday will die?”
The swordsman uses skillful means to rescue the family, but they do not see the gravity of the situation. Bathed in awe and gratitude they invite disaster. Is this me? Faith, doubt, and determination. Two out of three can perhaps be accounted for, but the other is in question.
A teacher in another time asks the question: “why do you practice?” I don’t know. A beloved metaphor of old: an immovable tree in a heavy wind. But rooted to what?
A gift:
“The root
of all things
is not far
or close
Above, sky
Below, ground
Between, Chris”
Why do I practice? What am I looking for? I have been here before and dropped it. Will this be different?
The first motive was curiosity. But then a skillful means sparked a taste and curiosity became desire. Practice was beautiful and I fell in love with the world like one falls in love with a pretty girl. But this was not enough to sustain when practice became inconvenient. Practice born of desire felt selfish and could not be tolerated. Bright spark faded, the tide came in, and the beach became just an echo of memory.
Now I’ve returned to the waters at this rocky shore and wade right in up to my neck. I do not think the same desire moves me. The time between brought storms both slow and sudden, and my roots could find no purchase. I could not bend enough to ride the wind and so I broke. And in that snap instinct or memory brought me back to this old practice. Perhaps it was to look for solace, but I suspect that even broken I knew that none was to be found on these shores. But arriving here and stepping back into the sea I find that I can hear the waves more clearly. I am a part of this world, and what I do has consequence. For good or ill there are many who are tied to me, and if I break and founder I may take them down with me. But now I can hear the message sent down through the millennia: This vehicle has a flawed design, but the recall notice has been sent and I can make repairs.
Silent tears in a darkened room. Speared through the chest by loving arms steeped in woe. In over my head off of unfamiliar shoreline I am moved by tides beyond my fathom. Sensitive instrument, open and unshielded, the faintest twinkle a blinding light. The sky is full of stars.
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Desperately Seeking Oblique Strategies
I think i grok Brian Eno. Or actually, I grok what I imagine is Brian Eno, which I guess is probably a much less profound statement. Anyway, the Brian Eno of my mind’s eye looks to me a bit like the landscape in my I’s mind. Weeviling around in circles thinking too much about the process of thinking. Trying to manufacture intellectual devices to spur on creativity.
Bus error. Core Dumped. Sick scream of grinding gears and the smell of burning transmission fluid.
“What would you give for your kid fears?”
Not actually certain really. I don’t think I can extrapolate back to my youthful self anymore. Even the blooming kidult of 19-20 seems pretty alien to me at the moment. I’ve no idea what my 20-year old self would make of my life at the moment. Too many sea changes have come and gone in the meantime. Looking at the archeological evidence I think he was something of a romantic wrapped under the security blanket of cynicism. Not sure how much of that is left. If I think about it there is probably still at least an echo there somewhere. A ghost in the machine, perhaps more obvious as absent from the places it used to hang. Forced out by various waves of emergency pragmatism probably. Like a massive HVAC unit installed in the corner of a victorian drawing room. Mechanical pump playing tricks with thermodynamics where a tortured poet’s heart might once have bled.
Interesting to look at the works of that poet that have traversed the changes and strike home still, albeit perhaps in unexpected ways. Denouement, arguably my first wholly successful piece of songwriting, strikes me now as remarkably post-romantic. A meditation not on heroic feats and hearts aflame, but on consequence and carrying on. An ode to echos. The strangely prescient Dark Matter, written back when the metaphor left the outcome in question, but which took on new meaning in December of 1998 when high-redshift supernovae shed new light on very old questions. It’s companion piece, the still unfinished sketch Caroline and the New Cosmology, started as a potential album title and developed to a tiny snippet of music and the final couplet of a chorus before stalling for well over a decade now. The image though still stings true, arguably more apt now than then. Sleeping there is something that wants to be said, but having poked at it the other evening I can say that, for now at least, it is not ready to stand up and be heard. I have not the words to build on it’s haiku perfection as a broken fragment.
Besides, post-romantic me has begun to wonder about the wisdom and generosity of “truth”. Part of me suspects that Bono is right that good artists tend to be dickheads. (Bono, being one, said it better).
Hmm... Robyn Hitchcock is going to end me here. “A happy bird is a filthy bird”.
End of line.
Bus error. Core Dumped. Sick scream of grinding gears and the smell of burning transmission fluid.
“What would you give for your kid fears?”
Not actually certain really. I don’t think I can extrapolate back to my youthful self anymore. Even the blooming kidult of 19-20 seems pretty alien to me at the moment. I’ve no idea what my 20-year old self would make of my life at the moment. Too many sea changes have come and gone in the meantime. Looking at the archeological evidence I think he was something of a romantic wrapped under the security blanket of cynicism. Not sure how much of that is left. If I think about it there is probably still at least an echo there somewhere. A ghost in the machine, perhaps more obvious as absent from the places it used to hang. Forced out by various waves of emergency pragmatism probably. Like a massive HVAC unit installed in the corner of a victorian drawing room. Mechanical pump playing tricks with thermodynamics where a tortured poet’s heart might once have bled.
Interesting to look at the works of that poet that have traversed the changes and strike home still, albeit perhaps in unexpected ways. Denouement, arguably my first wholly successful piece of songwriting, strikes me now as remarkably post-romantic. A meditation not on heroic feats and hearts aflame, but on consequence and carrying on. An ode to echos. The strangely prescient Dark Matter, written back when the metaphor left the outcome in question, but which took on new meaning in December of 1998 when high-redshift supernovae shed new light on very old questions. It’s companion piece, the still unfinished sketch Caroline and the New Cosmology, started as a potential album title and developed to a tiny snippet of music and the final couplet of a chorus before stalling for well over a decade now. The image though still stings true, arguably more apt now than then. Sleeping there is something that wants to be said, but having poked at it the other evening I can say that, for now at least, it is not ready to stand up and be heard. I have not the words to build on it’s haiku perfection as a broken fragment.
Besides, post-romantic me has begun to wonder about the wisdom and generosity of “truth”. Part of me suspects that Bono is right that good artists tend to be dickheads. (Bono, being one, said it better).
Hmm... Robyn Hitchcock is going to end me here. “A happy bird is a filthy bird”.
End of line.
Friday, February 19, 2010
Flawed Bodhisattva Blues
Life happens. Does seem to be a life happens sort of day today. So yes, life happens, even when I’m not looking for it and maybe not even ready for it. Life still happens and so it goes. A circumstance arose and somewhere I found a transcendent me to respond with kindness and make a leap of faith.
Well, sort of. Actually I don’t think the word faith is really that appropriate in this situation. Manifesting as I was, there was no faith necessary. I was infinite and inexhaustable. However, I was not without my faculties and I knew that there was risk involved and I knowingly made the leap anyway. It wasn’t a leap of faith however, because I recall no sense, either then or now, that there was any sort of safety net at all. There was surely a leap, but it was, I think, a leap of lovingkindness (to borrow the buddhist phrase) and not really one of faith. I felt the need for the action, not the sense that my kindness would be repaid or the comforting sense that it would all somehow work out just fine.
Sunshine asked me if I believe in fate, and I responded with a philosophical discussion about the nature of physical causality and the skepticism slowly creeping into the back of my head about the naive treatment of causality and the arrow of time in modern physics. (Not to mention the weird creepy stuff coming out of entangled quantum states which really is beginning to make me wonder if Danny’s time machine might not really work).. But all this aside, I think the truth is that I don’t really draw any faith from the notion of fate. I don’t think I’ve ever really felt that there was someone or something pulling strings for me or anyone else. Life happens, and other stuff happens too, and I don’t see any global sense of meaning to it all. I see lots of patterns and influence, but no intelligence or hand of kindness conducting the dance. I can recognize what seems like fantastic synchronicity, but I also recognize that there is a survival bonus in recognizing patterns and that, as an offspring of millions of generations of survivors, there is a tremendous anthropic selection effect at work which makes it very likely for me to be susceptible to seeing such patterns in the turbulence of life. The reason Zen Buddhism works for me where other western spiritual paths do not is that it does not require any faith in faith or fate. Surprisingly, despite it’s image of being about nonsensical paradox, I find Zen eminently sensible and logical, and while it can be wonderful and a source of great strength, it is also sometimes cold comfort precisely because of this lack of faith. There are no safety nets, only life and the transcendent which are not two.
So here I am, mid-leap, off the map and suspended in white vacuum. Launched from the platform of Big Heart incarnate, I find myself without landmarks or anything to guide me but my own internal compass. Keenly aware that I’m off the map I consciously work to banish dragons by act of will. I am open and things are fine not through the guiding kind hand of fate but rather by virtue of my own consciously maintained internal balance. Through continued effort I try to maintain the bodhisattva dance and continue to try and channel lovingkindness through a heart at least intermittently in touch with the transcendent.
When manifesting, of course, this is effortless. But I have not the depth of training to manifest continually, and I don’t think it is wise to try anyway. The transcendent is only half the story and one has to live in the world as well as being divine. Yesterday, I was in-the-zone. The dance continued and all was fine. Today, I’m still mostly fine, but awoke just slightly off and that’s where the concern comes in. Cause I’m not Kanzeon. I’m not a saint, and there are flaws in the gemstone through which the laser-light of lovingkindness flows. Thus far my heart has been able to weather the flow but the status quo is an unstable equilibrium. This is the top of the mountain and I’m not sure of the surrounding territory. I have half-formed picture postcard ideas of what the stable equilibrium would look like, but I’ve no map from here to there and I’ve no idea if there’s a great big mountain in the way. Somehow I need keep dancing on the head of this pin until I find a path or quantum tunnel to the stable point. I have more strength than I would have thought, and I’m not completely alone, but this high-wire act is not being performed with the safety net of faith, but rather over a mine-field of buried fear and despair (and perhaps non-existant dragons).
Well, sort of. Actually I don’t think the word faith is really that appropriate in this situation. Manifesting as I was, there was no faith necessary. I was infinite and inexhaustable. However, I was not without my faculties and I knew that there was risk involved and I knowingly made the leap anyway. It wasn’t a leap of faith however, because I recall no sense, either then or now, that there was any sort of safety net at all. There was surely a leap, but it was, I think, a leap of lovingkindness (to borrow the buddhist phrase) and not really one of faith. I felt the need for the action, not the sense that my kindness would be repaid or the comforting sense that it would all somehow work out just fine.
Sunshine asked me if I believe in fate, and I responded with a philosophical discussion about the nature of physical causality and the skepticism slowly creeping into the back of my head about the naive treatment of causality and the arrow of time in modern physics. (Not to mention the weird creepy stuff coming out of entangled quantum states which really is beginning to make me wonder if Danny’s time machine might not really work).. But all this aside, I think the truth is that I don’t really draw any faith from the notion of fate. I don’t think I’ve ever really felt that there was someone or something pulling strings for me or anyone else. Life happens, and other stuff happens too, and I don’t see any global sense of meaning to it all. I see lots of patterns and influence, but no intelligence or hand of kindness conducting the dance. I can recognize what seems like fantastic synchronicity, but I also recognize that there is a survival bonus in recognizing patterns and that, as an offspring of millions of generations of survivors, there is a tremendous anthropic selection effect at work which makes it very likely for me to be susceptible to seeing such patterns in the turbulence of life. The reason Zen Buddhism works for me where other western spiritual paths do not is that it does not require any faith in faith or fate. Surprisingly, despite it’s image of being about nonsensical paradox, I find Zen eminently sensible and logical, and while it can be wonderful and a source of great strength, it is also sometimes cold comfort precisely because of this lack of faith. There are no safety nets, only life and the transcendent which are not two.
So here I am, mid-leap, off the map and suspended in white vacuum. Launched from the platform of Big Heart incarnate, I find myself without landmarks or anything to guide me but my own internal compass. Keenly aware that I’m off the map I consciously work to banish dragons by act of will. I am open and things are fine not through the guiding kind hand of fate but rather by virtue of my own consciously maintained internal balance. Through continued effort I try to maintain the bodhisattva dance and continue to try and channel lovingkindness through a heart at least intermittently in touch with the transcendent.
When manifesting, of course, this is effortless. But I have not the depth of training to manifest continually, and I don’t think it is wise to try anyway. The transcendent is only half the story and one has to live in the world as well as being divine. Yesterday, I was in-the-zone. The dance continued and all was fine. Today, I’m still mostly fine, but awoke just slightly off and that’s where the concern comes in. Cause I’m not Kanzeon. I’m not a saint, and there are flaws in the gemstone through which the laser-light of lovingkindness flows. Thus far my heart has been able to weather the flow but the status quo is an unstable equilibrium. This is the top of the mountain and I’m not sure of the surrounding territory. I have half-formed picture postcard ideas of what the stable equilibrium would look like, but I’ve no map from here to there and I’ve no idea if there’s a great big mountain in the way. Somehow I need keep dancing on the head of this pin until I find a path or quantum tunnel to the stable point. I have more strength than I would have thought, and I’m not completely alone, but this high-wire act is not being performed with the safety net of faith, but rather over a mine-field of buried fear and despair (and perhaps non-existant dragons).
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Ice-cube tray people
Where did we get this notion that ones “private” life should not overlap with ones “professional” life? I mean, I can certainly understand the reasoning motivating such a principle. Employers want predictable, reliable employees, and personal lives, fraught as they are with emotions and other messy complications tend to make people act unpredictably. But the notion that such a compartmentalized ideal is actually achievable seems to me to forget that professionals are, in fact, still human beings. The only way to reliably keep your personal life from affecting your professional one is not to have a personal life at all. The fact that we are reminded of this in scandal after scandal after scandal, and still look at them as scandals is a sobering reminder of how dehumanized our society has become. (Our unforgivably failed social norms about the proper care of children is another). I’m beginning to think that the true citizens in our society are not human beings any more, but corporations and other similar collective entities, and this is a thought that is beginning to scare me.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
