An American Zen Buddhist training center in the Mountains and Rivers Order, offering Sunday programs, weekend retreats and month-long residencies.
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Fuse Yajiro's Death Poems
A warrior named Fuse Yajiro grew ill in the spring, and by autumn he was dying. He wrote this poem: Before longI shall be a ghostbut just nowhow they bite my flesh!the winds of autumn. After Writing this poem so full of nostalgia for life, Fuse Yajiro recovered somewhat and lived on for another month. Something must have changed his mind about death, for in a mood of greater detachment, he wrote another death poem: Seen fromoutside creationearth and skyaren't wortha box of matches. —from Japanese Death Poems: Written by Zen Monks and Haiku Poets on the Verge of Death (Tuttle, 1998). Image: Triangle, Circle, Square, Walter De Maria, stainless steel, 1972. Photo courtesy of The Menil Collection. More » -
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In the Time of Waste
Joanna Macy, author, activist, and Buddhist teacher, looks at time from the perspective of our nuclear legacy. She co-founded the Nuclear Guardianship Project aimed at "monitored retrievable storage" of our radioactive wastes. For the ongoing protection of life, Guardian Sites could become centers of reflection where the containments of radioactivity are monitored and repaired and practices from wisdom traditions are applied. More » -
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Time from the Point of View of a Slime Mold
As we get older we wonder at our impatience, when, as children, we had to wait in the station for the train to arrive. It is one of the many signs that time has very different meanings for us, even over our own life span. Time and life are intertwined in so many different ways, something biologists are acutely aware of. Consider a few extremes: A single-cell bacterium may live its entire life cycle in half an hour, but a generation for an elephant takes twelve years, and a giant sequoia generation takes sixty years. One reason I work with slime molds in the laboratory is that their generations are short, so that if I start an experiment on Monday, I will know the result by Wednesday or Thursday. This kind of biological time—life-cycle time—is at the middle of the time scale of living phenomena. More » -
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Watching the Ancestral Prayers of Venerable Others
Lena Higgins, 92, breastless, blind, chewing her gums by the window, is old, but the Great Comet of 1843 is much older than that. Dry land tortoises with their elephantine feet are often very old, but giant sequoias of the western Sierras are generations older than that. The first prayer rattle, made on the savannah of seeds and bones strung together, is old, but the first winged cockroach to appear on earth is hundreds of millions of years older than that. A flowering plant fossil or a mollusk fossil in limy shale is old. Stony meteorites buried beneath polar ice are older than that, and death itself is very, very ancient, but life is certainly older than death. Shadows and silhouettes created by primordial sea storms More » -
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Deep Time: Beyond 2000
As we approach the millennium, some two thousand years after the birth of Christ, it is tempting to reflect on time in the widest scientific sense in order to attempt to break free of Judea-Christian cultural residue and its somewhat stultifying, apocalyptic tone. More » -
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Haibun
Rock is naturalist scripture. The deeper you go the older the story. Pikas & squirrels scamper over the top, then spiral descent from gone tooth & twig. Petrified bone sediment myth. Or psychic fossil? Horesetail & algae glow green again, come to life in car engines. Fantastic shapes, old as forests. And now the likelihood we have in the world as many diverse minds…"as there are organisms capable of perception." Evolution's basic job-turning rock to green growth. Andrew Schelling is an award winning poet, essayist, and translator on the faculty of the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. More »
