FEATURE 78 - Jill Bolte Taylor's Stroke of Insight

Fascinating talk by Jill Bolte Taylor recounting in vivid detail her experience of having a stroke. The conclusions she draws about the choices we have regarding our mind is revelatory.

QUOTATION MARKS 34 ~ Sangharakshita

You learn what it is

that you are trying to do

in the process

of trying to do it

SANGHARAKSHITA

DIARY 137 - The Rituals of Faith

The last couple of months I've been working on the text and form of the upcoming Wesak at Windhorse event -Unfolding Of The Lotus, to celebrate the Buddha's Enlightenment. It's still three weeks or so away on the 17th May. We are now in the finalising and preparation phase, of making what is planned come into being.

During the fortnight prior,I've organised a collective project to

install a stenciled Lotus border around the Stupa Area in the Warehouse. This has two discreet stages, first, over 200 lotus stencils need to be cut, and second, these are formed into stencil and sprayed onto the warehouse floor. Currently I'm working out how to set this collective action into a ritualised context.

The morning of Wesak is being conceived as a long processional sequence of storytelling. At various stages we'll stop to hear an aspect of the Buddha's journey towards Enlightenment, plus verse and chorus responses adapted from early suttas. I'm hoping it will be quite rowdy and cacophonous should people let their hair down, as we spiral from the Shrine Room to the Stupa Area, inside and outside the warehouse. Once completed, there will be a Meditation and Sevenfold Puja to conclude. It sounds simple, but the logistics of how to successfully move 40+ people around is proving difficult to imagine. Inevitably it will have its chaotic moments. I have my periods of anxiety about this, but mostly I'm excitedly looking forward to it.

Paradoxically, in amongst all this creativity devising Buddhist

rituals etc, I've found myself really struggling with where my spiritual life is currently at. The imperative to just keep going, and get on with all the various projects I'm involved in, overrides a level of spiritual ennui I've not experienced in quite this way before. I'm generally feeling tired - of meditation, or applying myself to Dharma Study, and dare I say it, Buddhism in general. Even Dogen, my usual source of refuge and inspiration in barren times of spiritual struggle, doesn't quite match or elevate my mood. I've definitely come to the end of something, but what, if anything will take its place I really cannot tell. If you don't know how, or what it is you've lost, its hard to know where to start looking to regain, or rebuild it. I guess its this aspect of not knowing, of what I could be doing to help myself, that makes it most disconcerting.

As a result, much of what I currently do is like a book without its binding, nothing is there to hold all its individual pages together, to prevent them blowing away. Though what I'm doing is no doubt spiritually beneficial to others, it feels empty of the personal Sraddha to give it a more transcendent purpose. Having let go of a long held view that I could find a creative vocation, I launched myself on a more selfless vocation last year, to put what talents I have entirely at the service of Buddhism, the business and others. Now, it may be that my vision for this has run out of steam, the process maybe incomplete, or flawed. It could be I'm undergoing some sort of reaction to this decision, or I currently lack the depth of practice to sustain it, or I'm not sufficiently grounded enough. Whatever it is I'm experiencing a feeling of alienation from what I'd previously 'set my heart upon.'

My confidence that all this will eventually work out, wavers from day to day. So I have my moments of quiet despair, after which I just pick myself up and carry on devising rituals as if something in the doing of this will provide the answer I'm seeking. I hope that I am right.

QUOTATION MARKS 33 - Buckminster Fuller

I am quite confident that I can say with authority

that Einstein, when he wanted to study,

didn't sit in the middle of a school room.

That is probably the poorest place he could have gone to study

When an individual is really thinking,

he is tremendously isolated.

He may manage to isolate himself in Grand Central Station,

but it is despite the environment rather than because of it.

The place to study is not in a school room

R BUCKMINSTER FULLER

Taken from Education Automation

FEATURE 77 - A Bukowski Poem

Read through some late poems this morning from The Last Night On Earth by Charles Bukowski, written two years before he died in 1994 at the age of 73. Unsurprisingly there's plenty of reflection on the growing immanence of his death, and rather sanguine summaries of a lifetime lived largely on the edge of poverty and success. He kept himself afloat on a stream of sex-drink-gambling-fights -and most of all writing.

Reading this poem - Air and light and time and space - somehow resonated with me, probably because I know I've done what he's describing -waiting for the right time or space to arrive for creativity - which rarely does of course.

Bukowski spent most of his life working long hours in deadbeat jobs, but wrote none the less, mostly by depriving himself of sleep to write through the night. To write he had to make it something he just had to do, in spite of, not because of the circumstances he found himself in. In the past I know I made the incompatibility of my circumstances an excuse for my lack of creative accomplishment - if only I didn't have to work! Impatiently waiting for that right moment of air, light, time or space, to arrive.

According to Bukowski these only arrive if you're prepared to make huge personal sacrifices to obtain them, and that this will greatly inconvenience you, and be discomforting. He'd say any work arrived at without that element of personal sacrifice, will inevitably become a contrived artifice and indulgent, and what's worse would be existentially untruthful.

AIR AND LIGHT AND TIME AND SPACE

"-you know,I've either had a family, a job, something

has always been in the

way

but now

I've sold my house, I've found this

place, a large studio, you should see the space and

the light

for the first time in my life I'm going to have a place and the time to

create"

no baby, if you're going to create

you're going to create

you're going to create whether you work

16 hours a day in a coal mine

or

you're going to create in a small room with 3 children

while you're on

welfare,

you're going to create with part of your mind and your

body blown

away,

you're going to create blind

crippled

demented,

you're going to create with a cat crawling up your

back while

the whole city trembles in earthquake, bombardment,

flood and fire.

baby, air and light and time and space

have nothing to do with it

and don't create anything

except maybe a longer life to find

new excuses

for.

CHARLES BUKOWSKI

from The Last Night on Earth.

published byECCO

POEM - Blurred Vision

BLURRED VISION

Not sure,

just not sure

whether I can

even settle

on vagueness

as a definition

for sure.

There maybe

a clear reason

an underlying

sediment to

everything

But

how sure

could anyone

be about that?

Could vagueness

be just

out of focus

doubt?

Doubt

beautifully

shot through crinkled water

or smears of Vaseline

Doubt

concealed

behind the

smokescreen

of other emotions

Doubt

with the headlights

switched off.

Doubt

whispered

rather than declaimed

spoken

sotto voce

to imaginary friends

after midnight

Doubt

smothered

under my pillow

whilst I was

half asleep.

VIDYAVAJRA

17th April 2011

FEATURE 76 - Yazumi Beauty Salon

This time with gorgeous subtitles

The Residents - Moisture

FEATURE 75 - Fever Ray - Stranger Than Kindness

Few bands can match or exceed the early Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds Song - Stranger Than Kindness. But here's Fever Ray giving it a creepy going over. Great Video too.

FEATURE 74 - Elbow - Neat Little Rows

FEATURE 73 - Yazima Beauty Salon

The campest thing I've seen in years

WORK IN PROGRESS - Show Of Hands Project Finished

After three months, 100+hours of work, including back strain and fatigue, the Show Of Hands project is finally finished. Here's a quick resume of the painting process as documented in photographs. If you miss the auto-play click on Show Of Hands in the bottom left corner and then click play.

Here it is installed in all its glory at the entrance to the warehouse. It's relief to have finally finished this project, one that has dragged on for considerably longer than I'd originally envisaged. But still, it is good to see it up there, loud and proud.

What ever next. Well, I'm already turning my mind to celebrations for Buddha Day/Wesak in May. I also have projects to develop our photo archive, improve the aesthetics of the Stupa Area, the end of the warehouse nearest the offices where the hanging is, plus ideas for future collective based projects, either in terms of subject matter or involvement. In other words, more ideas than I have either the time nor energy to carry out.

POEM - The Unbeknown

Who knows

are there jungle birds not yet documented?
are there mountains no boots have stepped upon?
are there caves and oceans left unexplored?
are there bulls that never rage?
are there shackled limbs yet to be liberated?
are there wars that achieve their stated aim?
are there hearts that will never break?
are there things still unseen by human eyes
thought by human minds
or felt by human hearts?

is there such a thing as

higher states of consciousness?

or are such things

just taunts

the cultivation of a hope

to jolly ourselves along with

are we simply lost

foundering

in the exploration

of our own mystery

whilst our persistent irritable bowels

punctuate with farts

a string of poorly drawn metaphors

that fist fight with death

we remain

unbeknown

to the point

that our pain weeps for itself

we capture our emptiness

hold it high

and vaingloriously cheer

at a dark green beer bottle

it's such a languid hold

we have on life

as if we already know

we're done for

what our real legacy will be

that most of us

heroically or stoically

will live below our potential.

Written 12/2/2011 by

VIDYAVAJRA

BOOK REVIEW - Patti Smith - Just KIds

You could call this a combined autobiography and a biography. Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe seem, at least from her re-telling, to have become joined at the hip from almost from the first moment they met. Both in New York, both trying to become the artists they feel themselves to be, each inspired and encouraged the other to be bold, to go further. Their early love and relationship, found them living in and out of each others rather thinly financed pockets. This life together began shaping their own unique talents.

Patti Smith appears to have been very muse like, willingly devoting herself to Mapplethorpe's talent, sometimes at a great cost to her own. She seemed to lack confidence, not quite knowing where to focus her effort, in comparison to Mapplethorpe who's impulsive instinctive temperament was somehow sure he was on the right track. Ironically it was Smith who achieved her fame first, melding her poetry with rock music, in one of the most distinctive debut albums in popular music history - Horses. With Mapplethorpe providing the iconic photo of Smith on the cover.

Mapplethorpe becomes more on the outer fringes of Smith's life as the book progresses as her fame arrives, he gradually discovers his real sexual predilections, and simultaneously the subject matter for much of his classic photography. Here Smith cannot follow him, she can seem touchingly naive and unsullied for a rock n roller. The subject matter of his photography -often sexually graphic was and still is controversial, combining classical beauty with explicitness.

Smith's writing can sometimes be sparse, sometimes richly detailed, or poetically refined,but always evocative. She captures the feeling of the times, whether its the late sixties or early seventies New York. The days of Woodstock, of Max's Kansas City, and CBGB's jump off the pages, the eccentrics. the trannies, the druggies, and the bands. Its pages are colourfully peopled with the late, and often great, Smith and Mapplethorpe seemingly colliding with many stars on either their ascendancy or decline. Whilst they lived in the Chelsea Hotel, people, now of note, but struggling then to make their name, lived literally on the same floor as them.

At times it can sound like Smith is name dropping constantly, or leaves the impression that she was some sort of guide or seminal influence on the people she met. There is a token amount of self-mythologising and reshaping of the past to more accurately predict or prefigure the present. I lost count of the number of times in the early chapters, she tells Mapplethorpe he should try photography. But, that's often the case, one refines what ones life, and the lives of others, are about through the process of retelling them. I can see why this book has garnered critical awards. She has a flair for conjuring up the zeitgeist of a period, its visual motifs , its times and places. Her verbal fluency is subtle and well crafted, avoiding the overwrought. The result has a unique beauty, a truthfulness that, though often quirky, is very grounded. A bit like Patti Smith.