March 2011
excerpted from
Sonny’s Blues
Then Creole stepped forward to remind them that what they were playing was the blues. He hit something in all of them, he hit something in me, myself, and the music tightened and deepened, apprehension began to beat the air. Creole began to tell us what the blues were all about.
March 2011
What if we extended as much kindness and generosity to everyone as we do to our own children and grandchildren? It’s shameful that I still make a distinction between the small number of people who matter the most to me and the nearly 7 billion other humans on the planet.
Sunbeams
Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back, and, instead of bleeding, he sings.
March 2011
A Joyful Noise
Krishna Das On Chanting The Names Of God
Real gurus don’t intend to teach; they teach just by being. The word guru means “one who dispels the darkness,” which is different from giving light. Giving light means giving someone something that they don’t already have. Gurus remove the layers of darkness and show you what’s already there. They peel away the self-hatred, the guilt, the shame, the fear. A guru is someone who has truly conquered all of that and lives only to help people. There’s no edge, no harshness, only complete love and acceptance — and a kind of cosmic chuckle because you don’t fully understand; not laughing at you, but saying, “Come on! Get with it!”
The Great Bewilderment
Reading “Captin JJC The Feirce”
Wars where feirce at hand. In crimenal v.s. soldier a young boy that hade a dream lived in these pereyod. hes dream that filed his heart is to work with a famous crimenal. He could do well and impress the bandit. The Bandits name was captin JJC the fieirce. The young boy was an orfen. he hade a plan.
Six Lost Books
A writer is in a perpetual struggle with emptiness. He or she awakens each day to the Blank Page and somehow finds words to fill it. But the next day the page returns, just as blank as before. Even a finished book carries traces of emptiness, behind the words and in the corners of the pages. Normally this emptiness is white, but I am confronted with the rarer black variety.
World Enough And Time
I’m back in my hometown, staying with my sister Nancy, the hands-down favorite to replace me. For this first week my daughter, Rachel, is away at camp. A trial separation. Then she will come here, and we will both get used to the idea that she will go on living with Nancy after I am gone.
The Way She Walks
There are those who like to look for girls in the subways. Once I knew a girl, a Barcelonian, who was good at it. Prodigiously good. Oh, that Spanish swagger. She liked very much the challenge, she said. It is so like being on the stage, she said.
Love Shack
The only room in the house we can heat properly becomes the only room where I’ll let you undress me.
Selected Poems
— from “A Prayer” | If it weren’t for Mary, who knows all too well my oblivious nature, / I’d never have noticed those tiny, crepuscular creatures / floating around in the dogs’ water bowls.
Beneath The Sky, The Longing
Bhutan, 2010 | At the top of the Thimphu hills the sun leaves its afterbirth everywhere, / prayer flags drench the pines, / a monk scampers away like a red fox
Marginalia
This book I’m reading now my mother read / and loved. You can get this close to the dead / and no closer.
