New Empty Bowl books by Red Pine

Three new chapbooks by Red Pine’s Empty Bowl Press. Order at Amazon.


Emerson on the books we read

“I cannot remember the books I read any more than the meals I have eaten, even so, they have made me.”


A New Edition of David Loy’s Non-Duality, A Classic

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Loy’s book is essential for anyone practicing some level of Zen, Buddhism, Taoism, or a student of the writings of Heidegger or the Japanese philosophers related to the writings of Suzuki, Abe, et al. Loy was a student in Yamada Roshi’s Sanbo Kyodan lineage. The new edition has a revised introduction and notes; it is published by Yale University Press.


Richard Poirier and Stanley Cavell: two inspired guides into deepest Emerson

“Emerson says now and then that language might lead us back to human origins, that ‘language,’ as he says in ‘The Poet,’ is ‘fossil poetry.’ This implies that there are discoverable traces in language of that aboriginal power by which we invent ourselves as a unique form of nature. Frost in an Emersonian mood ends the poem ‘All Revelation’ with a tribute to this human inventiveness:

‘Eyes seeking the response of eyes

Bring out the stars, bring out the flowers,

Thus concentrating earth and skies

So none need be afraid of size.

All revelation has been ours. ‘”


D.T. Suzuki jottings

This is part of several fragments and notes jotted down on the back of an envelope by D.T. Suzuki and published in The Eastern Buddhist in Vol XXXIII No. 2 in 2001. They were immediate flashes of his inner experience and understanding as contrasted with the careful prose found in his essays and books.


A second coming?

The Second Coming
By William Butler Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Long ago & far away

I think this is pre-Dallas Morning News days, probably around 1969 in Denton, a carefree time when the world began to send me off to places unknown, unimaginable, rewarding and still mysterious.


Election Day, Vote!

1954/08/14

A photograph by Russell Lee capturing a campaign speech by the great Texas senator Ralph Yarborough. He represented the best of Texas in his time. 


Ibsen’s ‘life-lie’

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“If you take the life-lie away from the average person, you take away his happiness as well.” –– Dr. Relling in Ibsen’s  “The Wild Duck,” Act 4.


Russell Lee

LEE

Russell Lee,  San Marcos, Texas.  March, 1940