 |
|
|
|
|
 |
|
About a Poem: Gary Geddes on Don McKay’s “Waking at the Mouth of the Willow River” (May 2013) |
|
|
|
|
Shambhala Sun | May 2013
About a Poem: Gary Geddes on Don McKay’s “Waking at
the Mouth of the Willow River”
WAKING AT THE MOUTH OF THE WILLOW RIVER
Sleep, my favourite flannel shirt, wears thin,
and
shreds, and birdsong happens in the holes.
In thirty seconds the naming of
species will
begin. As it folds into the stewed latin of
afterdream each song
makes a tiny whirlpool.
One of them zoozeezoozoozee, seems to be
making fun of
sleep with snores stolen from
comic books. Another hangs its teardrop high in
the mind, and melts; it was, after all, only
narrowed air, although it
punctuated something
unheard, perfectly. And what sort of noise would
the mind
make, if it could, here at the brink?
Scritch, scritch. A claw, a nib, a beak,
worrying
its surface. As though, for one second, it could let
the world leak back
to the world. Weep. If mindfulness is a virtue, then Canadian poet Don McKay should be
considered one of the major voices of our time. He describes his credo in “some
Remarks on Poetry and Poetic Attention” by comparing the act of writing to the mental set of bird-watching: “...a kind of
suspended expectancy, tools at the ready, full awareness that the creatures
cannot be compelled to appear.”
Writing about nature does not make one a nature
poet. It’s the quality of attention that is paid to language and to creatures
and objects in the natural world that makes all the difference.
“Waking at the Mouth of the Willow River” is one of
my favorite McKay pieces. I love this prose poem for its verbal play and for
the way it conjures the mysterious territory between sleep and waking, where
dreams unravel and things are no longer, or not yet, quite what they seem. Read
the first sentence aloud slowly and let its sounds and stresses linger on your
tongue and in your ear. It’s so subtly scored—its trochees, iambs, and the
final stress of the anapest that allows the metaphor to end with the same
authority as it began. Talk about tools at the ready; McKay’s poetic toolkit is
also equipped with near-perfect pitch, able to marshal all those recurring
consonants (f-, sh-, t-, l-, h-sounds) like an organ base and make them nest in
the ear.
If you know your Shakespeare, you might notice the
link between that first line and Macbeth’s speech in Act II, scene
II, which
refers to “sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of
care.” McKay, a less
troubled Scot, is not ashamed to riff off the master, making new music. In his
case, it’s a guiltless moment, thinking his way into and giving linguistic form
to the varieties of birdsong he hears on waking. A poet who can blend Shakespeare and comic books and turn them into a meditation, not so
much on the
act of naming as on that moment beforehand,
when the poet—suspended, expectant,
aware—struggles for the appropriate sound and can only weep at the folly,
unavoidability, and joy of the task, has clearly demonstrated a quality of
attention we could all do well to ponder.
Gary Geddes has been called Canada’s
best political poet. His most recent books are Swimming Ginger, poems
set in twelfth-century China, and the nonfiction book Drink the Bitter
Root: A search for Justice and Healing in Africa. He lives on Thetis Island,
British Columbia.
|
|
|
Books in Brief (May 2013) |
|
|
|
|
Shambhala Sun | May 2013
Books in Brief
THE TRUE SECRET OF WRITING
Connecting Life with Language
By Natalie Goldberg
Free Press 2013; 256 pp., $25 (cloth)
The title of this book is somewhat tongue in cheek. It’s a phrase
that Natalie Goldberg has long used when a student is late for
one of her writing classes: “Oh, I’m so sorry,” Goldberg likes to
tease the tardy individual. “You just missed it—a moment ago I
told the students the true secret of writing. I am only able to utter
it every five years or so.” In actuality, Goldberg’s stance is that
no one possesses the one single true secret of writing and that if
you ever meet someone who claims otherwise, you should make
a run for it, as all of life is about diversity—nothing is singular.
That being said, in this new release Goldberg does offer a fresh
practice for writing, and it is rooted in the Zen tradition. A frequent contributor to the Shambhala Sun, Goldberg is the author
of twelve books spanning fiction, poetry, and memoir, but is best
known for her writing guide, Writing Down the Bones, which has
sold more than 1.5 million copies.
FEARLESS AT WORK
Timeless Teachings for Awakening Confidence, Resilience, and Creativity in the Face of Life’s Demands
By Michael Carroll
Shambhala Publications 2012; 304 pp., $16.95 (paper)
WORK
How to Find Joy and Meaning in Each Hour of the Day
By Thich Nhat Hanh
Parallax Press 2012; 120 pp., $12.95 (paper)
Years ago, I taught ESL to children in Korea. Not well suited to
working with kids, I dreaded all my classes, but teaching students
aged two to four made me feel particularly hopeless. According
to the curriculum they were meant to learn colors, numbers, and animals, yet my little charges preferred (quite literally) to run in
circles. I remember one low moment when a tiny boy cried in
my lap and attempted over and over to tell me something in his
native tongue. “I’m sorry,” I kept repeating. “I don’t understand
Korean.” Clearly, I was in dire need of these two new titles: Fearless at Work and Work. Michael Carroll begins his book by asking
readers to complete the following sentence with the first word
that comes to mind: At work, I want to be... In his experience,
most people say, happy, successful, stress-free, effective, fulfilled,
or appreciated. Yet—since it’s not actually possible to always
be any of these idealized states—what we should really try to
cultivate is a sense of confidence no matter what arises. Fearless
at Work then lays out the path—rooted in Buddhist thought—
for developing this confidence. In Thich Nhat Hanh’s book, he
emphasizes the importance of right livelihood and teaches that
no matter what our profession, it offers us the opportunity to
help others and create a happy work environment. I particularly
enjoy Nhat Hanh’s final chapter in which he lists thirty practical
ways to reduce job-related stress.
THE WISDOM OF COMPASSION
Stories of Remarkable Encounters and Timeless Insight
By His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Victor Chan
Riverhead Books 2012; 272 pp., $26.95 (cloth)
Just out of college in 1972, Victor Chan drove a used VW camper
from the Netherlands to Afghanistan. When in Kabul he met a
New Yorker named Cheryl Crosby, and they were at a chai shop
when they were abducted at gunpoint. By the time they managed to escape their kidnappers, the harrowing experience had
bonded them, and they left for India together. There, because of
some of Crosby’s connections, they were granted an audience
with the Dalai Lama, yet Chan managed to blurt out just one question: “Do you hate the Chinese?” In
those days the Dalai lama’s English was
bare bones, so mostly he relied on a translator, but he answered this question in
English—emphatically. “No, I do not hate
the Chinese.” Then his secretary translated, “His Holiness considers the Chinese his brothers.” Fast-forward to today
and Chan, of Chinese descent, has written two books, which he has created by
interviewing the Dalai Lama extensively.
In their new release, Wisdom of Compassion, they explore the idea of compassion
in thought, speech, and action.
BUDDHA'S BOOK OF SLEEP
Sleep Better in Seven Weeks with
Mindfulness Meditation
By Joseph Emet
Tarcher 2012; 160 pp., $15.95 (paper)
A dharma teacher in Thich Nhat Hanh’s
tradition, Joseph Emet is the founder of
the Mindfulness Meditation Centre in
Montreal and the creator of A Basket of
Plums, a book with two CDs of songs for
the practice of mindfulness. In the introduction of his new release, Emet draws
attention to a recent survey that claims 75
percent of us have some difficulty sleeping, then goes on to say that many of us
have failed to find relief from the standard
recommendations. We’ve tried creating a
positive sleeping environment, we’ve tried
avoiding caffeine and alcohol in the evening, and maybe we’ve even tried medication. Still, however, we find ourselves
tossing and turning in bed. Now Buddha’s
Book of Sleep gets to the heart of the problem: our agitated minds. For readers new
to mindfulness meditation, Emet explains
the basics of the practice. Then he offers
seven guided meditation exercises geared
toward helping us get the rest we need.
GROWING IN LOVE AND WISDOM
Tibetan Buddhist Sources for Christian
Meditation
By Susan J. Stabile
Oxford University Press 2013; 272 pp., $19.95 (cloth)
Susan J. Stabile ordained as a Tibetan
Buddhist nun and followed the Buddhist
path for twenty years. This was such a long
time that even after she returned to the
religion she was raised in, Catholicism, she saw it through a Buddhist lens and
found herself spontaneously incorporating Buddhist practices into her Christian
prayer life. In Growing in Love and Wisdom, stabile explores why it’s helpful to
look outside one’s own tradition for the
means to spiritual growth and offers fif-
teen Tibetan Buddhist contemplative
practices adapted for Christian purposes.
One of the fifteen is a modified tantric visualization practice. Tibetan Buddhists visualize themselves as a Buddha or
bodhisattva for the purpose of recognizing and bringing forth their own buddhanature. So in this vein, Stabile suggests
that Christians visualize the shining face
of Jesus and generate a strong desire to
be Christ—to manifest his love and compassion. Stabile then makes compelling
arguments for why this practice, though
borrowed from Buddhism, is a fit for
Christianity. Scripture, of course, is her
starting point. she quotes Philippians 2:5,
“let this mind be in you that was also in
Christ Jesus.”
ZEN GARDENS
The Complete Works of Shunmyo Masuno,
Japan’s Leading Garden Designer
By Mira Locher
Tuttle Publishing 2012; 224 pp., $39.95 (cloth)
In addition to being a celebrated landscape
architect, Shunmyo Masuno is an eighteenth-generation Zen Buddhist priest
who presides over the Kenkohji Temple in Yokohama, Japan. When he was a child, he
and his family went to Kyoto, where they
visited various temple complexes with
outstanding gardens, and this affected him
deeply. By junior high he was tracing photographs of great Zen gardens and in high
school he was sketching his own designs.
At this point, he met Saito Katsuo, a garden designer who allowed him to observe
his work and later become his apprentice.
Now Masuno is the creator of both modern and traditional gardens across the
globe; their settings range from temple
grounds to high-end hotels to private residences and even to some more unexpected
locals, such as a crematorium. Zen Gardens is a stunning volume that showcases
thirty-seven of Masuno’s finest works.
|
|
|
3 Heroes, 5 Powers (May 2013) |
|
|
|
|
Shambhala Sun | May 2013
EXCERPT
3 Heroes, 5 Powers
Look inside the new comic book celebrating nonviolent heroes THICH NHAT HANH, ALFRED HASSLER, and SISTER CHAN KHONG.
After the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh is probably the most famous
Buddhist teacher of our time. But what’s this? He’s a superhero now?
Well, not quite. But Thich Nhat Hanh, or Thay, as he is affectionately known,
is most definitely a hero for peace, as is his closest collaborator, Sister Chan Khong, and
the late antiwar activist and guiding figure of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR),
Alfred Hassler. The three star together in The Secret of the 5 Powers.
In 1956, Hassler even published a comic book himself, called Martin Luther King and
The Montgomery Story. When Hassler’s daughter Laura showed it to Gregory Kennedy-Salemi, then a worker/volunteer at the FOR, Gregory saw the power of the medium.
“I had no background in comics,” he told me. “But when I met Laura, I discovered
that Alfred and Thay had been highly creative, ahead of their time. Then I learned
the comic’s story, that it was still being used today.” In fact, an Arab translation, with
its emphasis on nonviolent protest, has been cited as an inspiration for the Egyptian
revolution of 2011.
The seed of The Secret of the 5 Powers had been planted. It
would grow into a comic and a stylized hour-long documentary currently making film-festival rounds. Gregory and his
team—which includes comic artist Erich Tiefenbach, colorist
David Pridal, writer Gretl Satorius, and media editor Stuart
Jolley—kept Thich Nhat Hanh in the loop throughout the creative process and got his blessings and input. “We put in a lot of
twenty-hour days,” says Gregory, “but we did it for love.”
In this exclusive excerpt from The Secret of the 5 Powers, the Peace Comics team offers two rare looks at the young Buddhist activist Thich Nhat Hanh. First, we sit in on a real meeting, held as U.S. involvement
in Vietnam was escalating rapidly, between Thich Nhat Hanh and a delegation of
American pacifists led by Hassler.
This is their first encounter in what became a lifelong friendship. According to
Kennedy-Salemi, whose team prizes research, the dialogue in this scene is “about 80
or 90 percent verbatim.” We see that Thay’s articulation of how and why nonviolence
must be employed is already diplomatic, firm, and persuasive.
Next, the scene flashes back one year to a famous and formative scene in which Nhat
Hanh and his compatriots, including Sister Chan Khong, are face to face with war’s
horrors. There is gunfire all around as they travel upriver delivering supplies to desperate
refugees. It’s an impossible, intimate moment, emblematic of the commitment to peace
that Thich Nhat Hanh, Sister Chan Khong, and Alfred Hassler would come to embody.
—Rod Meade Sperry
You'll find an exclusive excerpt from The Secret of the 5 Powers inside the May Shambhala Sun. And for more about The Secret of the 5 Powers, visit peacecomics.com.
|
|
|
Quite a Cup of Tea (May 2013) |
|
|
|
|
Shambhala Sun | May 2013
EXCERPT
Quite a Cup of Tea
 The One Taste of Truth: Zen and the Art of Drinking Tea
By William Scott Wilson
Shambhala Publications, 2013; 256 pp., $14.95 (paperback)
Reviewed by BONNIE MYOTAI TREACE
We sat without the marking of
periods, without bells (or whistles).
It was the last night of the year. I’d
asked the tea master to set up at the
back of the temple hall and prepare tea every four hours or so, and instructed an attendant how to
quietly invite those sitting to line up when it was their time to be
served. But he surprised me, bringing the first cup forward, bowing toward the altar, and then to me in the teacher’s seat. The
grass scent blossoming like a green roar in the dark. Turning the
cup, lip to edge, suddenly nothing but bitter froth.
“Zen and tea are of one taste.” That famous phrase was coined
in the fifteenth century by Zen adherent Murata Juko. His story
is one of the charms of William Scott Wilson’s new book, The
One Taste of Truth: Zen and the Art of Drinking Tea. We learn
that Juko, a somewhat obscure Zen priest, was struggling with
some attitude issues. Wilson writes that he was “troubled by his own slack attitude toward his priestly superiors and the fact
that meditation simply put him to sleep.” Juko conferred with
a doctor, who prescribed tea, and Juko then went on to build a
small thatched hut for tea drinking, hang a scroll in the alcove
for inspiration, and not only seemed to turn his personal issues
around but also set in place an aesthetic and spiritual direction
lasting centuries. That’s quite a cup of tea.
Bonnie Myotai Treace, Sensei, is the founder
and head priest of
Hermitage Heart, a training program
that is primarily Zen
in flavor, and puts a
special emphasis on
home practice. A student of Zen for more
than thirty years, she
is a dharma heir of the
late John Daido Loori,
Roshi, and was abbess
of the Zen Center of New York City. In
addition to the literary
studies reflected in her
poetic writing style,
Treace had a career in
hydromechanics prior
to her monastic training. She lives in Garrison, New York, home
of Hermitage Heart’s
retreat house.
|
|
|
Outside the Tent (May 2013) |
|
|
|
|
Shambhala Sun | May 2013
EXCERPT
Outside the Tent
It’s true that DONNA JOHNSON was
raised under one of the world’s biggest gospel tents. But the truth of a story
moves like water, she says. It’s this, and this, and this too. We shape it, and
it shapes us. There is always something more.
I am not a Buddhist. Not by
traditional standards. I’m more a Buddhist wannabe, a self-taught meditator who
reads books by Buddhist thinkers and lets the ideas trickle through her
Judeo-Christian consciousness in their own sweet time. Don’t get me wrong, I’m
not exactly a Christian either, at least not a flavor most would recognize.
What I am, if I’m anything at all, is a writer. The
act of putting black on white, as Hemingway once described writing, has been
for me a way to organize and make sense of the world. The truth, you see, could
be found in the story. My early journalism training took it one step further:
the truth was the story. Only in recent years has it occurred to me to
ask which truth, which story.
My own narrative comes into focus under the world’s
largest gospel tent, an elephantine canvas that stretched the length of two
football fields. We were the crazies who believed in miracles, for whom religious ecstasy meant rolling in the
sawdust (hence the term holy roller) and jabbering in nonsensical words and
phrases. We were quite literally a rolling freak show. Respectable folks walked
blocks out of their way to avoid us.
As a kid I was conflicted about my place among
these people, my family. Arrogant and proud to be counted among them one
minute, daydreaming of escape, of becoming someone else, the next.
Donna M. Johnson escaped the
holy-roller life at the
age of seventeen and
has spent her time since
outrunning the apocalypse. “So far, so good,”
she says. She is the
author of Holy Ghost
Girl, an award-winning
memoir acclaimed by
The New York Times, O Magazine, and The
New York Review of
Books. She lives in
Austin, Texas, with her
husband, the poet and
author Kirk Wilson.
Illustration by Tara Hardy
|
|
| | << Start < Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Next > End >>
| | Results 1 - 9 of 1285 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
