February 8, 2014 When I was a boy, I loved recess. It was a break in the school day from the drudgery and oppressive silence of the classroom, a brief opening into noise and laughter and play. I suspect I did more real growing during recess than in any amount of time I spent in…
Author: brian
What is Ego?
August 15, 2012 I can recall sitting in a project meeting one day a few years ago. I was the Business Analyst, the fellow responsible for creating documentation that would become the “project book” — the functional, business-oriented, technical, and performance specifications or requirements for the application that was being developed for this project….
Seeking the Edge of Body
April 1, 2014 Where, I wonder, does your body end? This is what the old Zen masters called a koan, one of those puzzles that can’t be held in the hand of Reason, any more than air or smoke can be gripped by the fist. The general, common sense answer would of course be: at…
Drunks in the Church, Saints in the Tavern
May 12, 2014 This is the kind of thing that can change your day and maybe — if you’re not careful, that is — even transform your life. Like all true art, it challenges, penetrates appearances, and calls upon what is true and universal within and among us all. Rumi was a great Persian poet and…
A Dress Falls; The Lover Rises
April 18, 2015 The secret of the mountains is that the mountains simply exist, as I do myself: the mountains exist simply, which I do not. The mountains have no ‘meaning,’ they are meaning; the mountains are. The sun is round. I ring with life, and the mountains ring, and when I can hear it, there is a…
Night Life of the Troubled Mind
February 3, 2012 I’m sitting on a horse, the wrong way (tail-facing). I am facing a woman who I don’t know well but have long loved, reaching to embrace her. As I hold her in my arms and feel her energy entering me, I feel the horse starting to move. The question arises: “can I…
Of the Journey Downward
March 11, 2013 I write, in part, because it distracts me, diverts me. This is more than about “keeping me off the streets at night.” The diversion is not away from external reality, but towards my own. It is about seeking — and occasionally finding — meaning within where there is none around me. If…
3 Foxes, a Hawk, and a Toe: The Way of Deliverance
May 18, 2014 The older I get, the more I find that my only enemies are inside me; that when I can defeat and kill these adversaries, what I once saw as threats and strangers around me are just illusions, the misperceptions of derived and superficial belief. Opposition — the belief in me versus the…
Crow Calling, Winter Dream
March 15, 2015 A bank of storm clouds, dark with their burden, came into view at the bay windows of my apartment. Even as I watched them, their black deepened, until they resembled more a cosmic nebula than a bank of clouds in our local atmosphere. Then, in the midst of this dark, a crack of…
A Lesson of Night: The Cosmic Brain
June 9, 2014 I still talk to her. I imagine that will be so for a long time. Over the space of the years she learned my language. Not the words, of course — she learned the real meaning, the “deep structure,” as Chomsky would call it, of my sounds, intonations, and breath. Animals can do that,…