 "The weeks stood still in summer.
The trees' blood rose. Now you feel it wants to sink back into the source of everything . . . Now the immense loneliness begins." Rilke  The dry season has begun
fewer clouds, no rain I feel bored and adrift, at sea . . .  "I love the sound of birds, the sight of wind
passing through the trees . . . . . . a bowl of vegetables and noodles, a cup of wine, the sweet aroma of some tea. How could heaven be anywhere but here? This place, now, today . . . is eternity . . . " David Budbill Impressions of Gulfport
I've begun reading Jean-Luc Marion's Being Given. That lead me to look at my Ph. D. dissertation (written over 40 years ago, can you believe it?!). Rereading it again, I realized that even then I was becoming drawn more and more toward contemplation--especially as Zen practices it. I also was reminded of what I wrote in one of my earliest posts on this blog about impatience with philosophical discourse. Here is Marion: "To see a painting it is not enough to see it--to gather with the sense of sight the information found on a colored being. To this view must be added . . . the event of its apparition in person . . . To the ontic visibility of the painting must be added a super-visibility . . .its upsurge. This exceptional visibility . . . imposes . . . (itself on) me, in the flesh, in person, without screen." Marion's convoluted prose weaving through his convoluted arguments somehow make me think of Wittgenstein's simpler: "Don't think, just look." Or maybe even more simply, what Basho wrote: A crow has settled on a bare branch-- autumn evening.  Autumn in New Mexico
"In creative work--creative work of all kinds . . . artists are not trying to help the world go around, but forward. Which is something altogether different from the ordinary . . . Its labor requires a different outlook . . .The extraordinary is what art is about." (And that might mean recognizing the extraordinary in the ordinary, I would say.) "No one yet has made a list of places where the extraordinary may happen and where it may not. Still, there are indications. Among crowds, in drawing rooms, among easements and comforts and pleasures, it is seldom seen. It likes the out-of-doors. It likes the concentrating mind. It likes solitude . . .Its concern is the edge, and the making of a form out of the formlessness that is beyond the edge." Mary Oliver  San Ildefonso pueblo church, New Mexico
"I have a fondness for this place, an attachment to the climate, the hardship, the difficulty, and there is solitude here and quiet, a kind of modesty in the landscape, an unassuming grandeur." David Budbill  The image above and the lyrics below express my feelings about this season pretty well:
"Winter's coming on, I feel it all around The leaves are moving faster along the ground . . . Another autumn, I've know the chill before, But every autumn, I feel it more and more . . ." Alan Jay Lerner  "Out of the undifferentiated Tao
come the ten thousand things the bug in the bird's mouth, the bird in the tree, the tree outside the window, the window beyond the chair, the chair in the room, the man in the chair who has just risen from the chair and walked across the room to look out the window at the bird in the tree with the bug in its mouth. See how all of us, at our own and different speeds, return to the Tao." David Budbill  On Monday, Tampa--yang; yesterday, Fort Desoto Beach--yin. Monday, sunny, noisy, much moving around; yesterday, overcast, quiet, little movement . . . Life as changing and intertwining of opposites or maybe better contrary complementaries
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