Oighear os cionn an gaineamhlacht

Chaith muid dhá oíche ina Foinsí na Pailme. Iarr muid ag imeacht. Bhain sult as leathanta saoire beag againnsa.

Ní maith liom an te, ar ndóigh. Mar sin féin, is maith liom ag feiceáil an diseart. Is cuimhne liom an ghrian ag dealramh ar na beanna lom.

Is ábalta tú ag fáil an cnóc mór ar mo bhlog anseo, mar shampla. Thug mé an ghriangraf de ár fuinneoig óstlainne. Fhiafraigh mé faoi an dath dó chuige mo theaglach. Níl mé ábalta ag rá focal ceart dó.

Dúirt Leon orm: "Is cosúil sé donnbhuí. Is ag dul i gcosúlacht le briosca milese leis sceallóga sheacláide." Níl fhíos agam an focal go direach faoi dealramh deannachúil as Béarla.

Aontaím leis mo mhac is sine. Bhí an dubh-iontas orm nuair a chonaic sliabh eile in aice leis an ionad saoire cáiliúil ann. Is sí níos airde ann.

Chonaic mé leac oighir in ard an tsléibhte. In ard an lae, i measc na tsamraidh, tá dhá fána ghéar leis pócaí bídeach leis slisní oighir is airde os cionn na trá ghainimh. Bhí céad céim teochta suas go direach nuair ag tiománta ar an bóthar mór a feadh an bealach abhaile an ceathrú lá san Iúil ann.

Ice above the sandy desert.

We spent two nights in Palm Springs. We wanted to get away. We enjoyed a little holiday ourselves.

The heat does not please me, of course. All the same, to see the desert gives me pleasure. In my memory the sun's shining on the barren peaks.

You are able to find the great hill on my blog here, for example. I took this photo from our hotel window. I asked about the color of it to my family. I was not able to say the right word for it.

Leo said to me: "It's like a biscuit-color. It's resembling a sweet-biscuit [cookie] with chips of chocolate." I don't know the exact word for this dusty sheen in English.

I agree with my elder son. I was astonished when seeing another steep slope near this famous holiday resort. It is much higher.

I saw icy cliff-faces at the highest point on the mountain. At the height of the day, in the middle of summer, there's two steep slopes with tiny pockets of icy slices the highest up above the sandy shores. It was a hundred degrees exactly below when we drove along the highway there on the homeward journey on the Fourth of July.

Jeffery Paine's "Re-Enchantment: Tibetan Buddhism Comes to the West": Book Review

"When the story is told in these pages began, had most Americans tried to locate Tibet on a map, they would have pockmarked half the globe with bad-guess pinpricks. By the time the story ends, some Hollywood stars know more about Tibetan Buddhism than the Dalai Lama does-- or at least they act that way." Paine's wry sideswipe at Steven Seagal shows the wit and tone of this thoughtful-- if erratically edited-- introduction to a subject that will likely leave you craving more insight.

Paine takes us through not so much the tenets of Tibetan Buddhism, described by Alan Watts as "Roman Catholicism on acid"; the appeal in the West of what's surpassed Zen since Watts & the Beats lies in its panoply of approaches towards wisdom, its exotic teachings, and its colorful characters. As Paine in his best chapter, on the Dalai Lama's appeal to live with utmost conviction yet astonishing flexibility, shows us, most Tibetans despite their escape from the horrors of decimation seem-- unlike so many presenters of religious doctrine-- to be enjoying themselves amidst their substitution of dogma or dictate with philosophical ambiguity, non-theistic contemplation, unpredictable practices, and creative props that both represent and deny the ultimate existence of gods. Not taking themselves seriously, the Tibetan lamas teach us, he displays in case studies of teachers and students, how to approach our life with the sense it's a game, played that comes and goes perpetually beyond the brief brackets of our birth and death in our present form.

"With its compact emphasis on individual meditation, Buddhism may fit the overpopulated" century as "it can accomodate itself and take up less space." (136-7) He wonders if more people sought diminishment of goods, more people might "possess an 'overabundance' of food and housing." Many in these pages dream of a transformed world through ethical principles based in Buddhism that others may incorporate, if free of the panoply that surrounds Tibetan versions of its teachings. Paine defines universality, individual responsibility, and heightened capabilities for personal growth turned social improvement as three civilizing features the dharma can share with other religions and moral systems.

Certainly, the appeal of a self-generated, yet outwardly directed, way of life that avoids fruitless fretting about salvation, eternity, and sin may be timed for our times better than Vedanta was for Christopher Isherwood's Hollywood, or even Zen, Paine hints, for its countercultural adoption. This issue deserved far more depth, but Paine does touch on essential points. He wonders if religions would improve by being more contradictory, communal vs. individual, mystical vs. practical, angelic or unadorned, "flinty" or "firm," as they adapt to a human nature more akin to Buddhist notions of impermanence, the unknowable, and the evanescent that underlies the illusion of relative, conventional "reality" as a transcendent, perpetual state.

These ideas burrow into the text, more in its latter chapters. He begins with Thomas Merton's in retrospect still-naive pilgrimage, when the Dalai Lama was little known by most in 1968. Harold Talbott, whose own journey from Fifth Avenue scion to Buddhist scholar gains attention later on as one of three case studies, served as Merton's go-between. Paine gives a solid overview of what in the anthology "Merton & Buddhism" more recently has gained needed scrutiny by scholars. Tibet's context within Western imperialism follows, with French explorer and writer Alexandra David-Neel's long life (1868-1969) spanning the cultural shift from fabled Shangri-La to hippie destination, if one no less exotic in the eyes of typical Westerners.

The romanticization, decried later by Patrick French in "Tibet, Tibet," and the adulation of the Dalai Lama, have long been present in the West. The difference is now, unlike when Diane Perry grew up in the 1950s in London, millions know now what few knew only in fragments, as Merton did, given the lack of communication with the West by lamas who had not yet gained Western followings until around 1970. Thubten Geshe and then notoriously Chögyam Trungpa spearheaded the British and American popularity of Tibetan lore. Paine's ability to get inside the minds of both teachers and students shows him at his best as a writer and interpreter throughout the book.

Trungpa, he suggests, soon figured out that Westerners could be jumpstarted into higher-level teaching than customary in Tibetan monasteries. Inspired by Shunryu Suzuki's similar shifts when he brought Zen to San Francisco earlier, Trungpa decided to shift into higher gear. Paine explains: "Meditation is so empty of content that it's hard to turn it into spiritual materialism or appropriate it for egotistical purposes." (93) For newcomers, who had lost "the principles of sacredness," Trungpa reduced the dharma to a secular-friendly core; for those who wanted to restore the Tibetan brocades, visualizations and enthronements commenced.

Therefore (as the uncredited Fields narrates in his history), Tibetan monastic practices began to be transferred outside their origins. By the 1990s as the process advanced, Alyce Neoli/ Catherine Burroughs emerged as a "tulku" of a reincarnated female "lama" chosen by the same Penor Rinpoche who later "recognized" Seagal-- after a few donations were made. The uncredited Kamenetz records that when the rabbis found out about how a "tulku" was found, they wondered: what if the lama makes a mistake? I wondered this too, when reading Martha Sherrill's "The Buddha from Brooklyn" about Alyce who became Jetsunma; Paine takes a sympathetic tone towards her, noting Tenzin Palmo's conclusion after reading Sherrill: "her follies are such the way such a being would behave," as recounted by Sherrill, "if he or she lacked the proper training." (158) Tenzin should know, as a girl attracted to a teaching she could not even define as Buddhist, so little being known then about Tibetan dharma by all but a few scholars from a few glimpses such as David-Neel's.

Tenzin Palmo's transformation's amazing; born a Cockney fishmonger's daughter Diane Perry when nobody born humble in postwar Britain knew of such teachings, ordained in 1964 as one of the first Western nuns, she later spent twelve years as a hermit in a cave 13,200 feet high in Ladakh, and then returning from her harrowing yet inspiring story to found a nunnery. David-Neel saw Buddhism from the outside; Perry became Tenzin to enter it.

The widening attraction of hitherto inaccessible teachings from a remote land rippled out from the hippies to the celebrities and by films. Not only explicitly about Tibet as in the 1990s, but filtered through "The Matrix" and "Jacob's Ladder," the bardo dramatized for everyday folks. The fact I don't explain that term speaks for the rapid spread over a generation of a thousand-year-old, isolated, esoteric science of the mind into popular culture, as if a medieval monk found himself lauded in Manhattan.

This may be a fad, or it may be a genuine sign of shift: Robert Thurman argues the latter, while Jean-Francois Revel & Matthieu Ricard ("The Monk & The Philosopher" 1996) James William Coleman in "The New Buddhists" (2001, neither work cited here) examines the appeal of Buddhism for many intellectual elites in the West; the teachings he finds have not trickled down yet. Pankraj Mishra from the Indian p-o-v also wonders about Buddha vs. Nietzsche at length in "An End to Suffering" (2004). Paine favors Shakespeare, Henry and William James as his references, well-employed if hard for an eager reader to track back-- more later about this shortcoming.

Paine, considering music and film, seems to feel the dharma's widening, but I wonder about the permanence of its impacts. De Tocqueville noted the American withdrawal from "delineation of the soul to fix exclusively on that of the body, and they substitute the representation of motion and sensation with that of sentiment and thought."

Daringly, Paine then links this prescient observation to Buddhism, which as with film uses projection to record sensory experiences and motion while leaving the soul's mysteries intangible. "Hollywood calls the illusions it makes from bodies, sensation, and motion 'cinema.' Buddhism calls the illusions made from them 'conventional reality.'" Paine provides a novel image when recounting how cinema and Tibetan Buddhism are both roughly a century old in their Western transmissions: "In both a movie and Buddhism, 'reality' is palpably, sensuously before us, making us laugh one moment and cry the next, but then vanishing insubstantially when the projectionist (or, in Buddhism, our projection) flicks off the switch." (179)

Paine again excites the reader by his ability to convey the wonder: he juxtaposes Talbott's Gatsby-esque tale of reinvention. Here, as with "tonglin" and "ngondro" and "chöd" Paine illustrates Tibetan terms deftly. "Our usual mental states are like the audience in a theater that gets caught up in the drama that unfolds." Contrast this with the emptiness and luminosity registered by Tibetans at this high stage. The state of play demanded as in quantum physics demands Talbott as a "dzogchen" practitioner abandon "reality" as it seems solid to our senses, for a mind so trained "resembles the playwright who exults in the creative play with which he maneuvers his imaginary puppets."(221)

His next case: a (psuedonymous to protect her reputation) Princeton deconstructionist feminist mid-life wonders about the appeal her tentative forays into Tibetan practice and reading reveal. A literary critic such as herself, Paine relates, follows a long path of scholarship most of her career, with "few genuine knock-you-off-your-chair discoveries left to be made." Tibetan Buddhism provides "Christine" with "her ticket into the unknown," after idly finding used at the Strand Bookstore Sogyal Rinpoche's influential "Tibetan Book of Living and Dying." Yet, her colleagues, disdainful of any belief, may belittle her quest, so she pursues it in the morning at home, gingerly but with increasing fascination.

San Quentin's death row houses the final American turned Tibetan student, if at a distance behind bars. Jarvis Masters contemplates karma, impermanence, and mindfulness as translated into taking responsibility for one's actions, accepting how reality itself changes during one's sentence as faced with honesty, and how one must faced with one's term should cultivate an awareness to embrace not endure the present situation. As with Alyce Zeoli or Diane Perry in their ignorance of Buddhism constructed before their exposure to it a homespun notion of its dharma independently and even intuitively, so in prison, Paine considers, such stories "from both the sickbed and prison cell, indirectly support Buddhism's claim that it is not a religion but something that occurs 'in life'-- not a man-made, synthetic medicine but a plant with healing properties that grows of itself." (251)

The narrative concludes on such graceful notes. Still, the story needed more unfolding, given that Paine admits seven years' labor on its contents. Intended for the general reader, so lacking by his design footnotes or works cited, this superficially but persistently disappoints in its scattershot mention of many who've preceded Paine; Paine assures their books can be readily found, but his decision to eschew documentation makes this an uneven book, riddled with typos. W.Y. Evans-"Wenz" repeats, "Llasa" alternates with "Lhasa." "Arbie's" and "Guiness" appear; Stephen and Martine separately are surnamed "Bachelor" while "Into the Wild" is attributed to "John" Krakauer. The lack of credit given such as Rodger Kamenetz' "The Jew in the Lotus," the 1994 account of the 1990 visit by rabbis to Dharamsala, proves odd; Rick Fields' pioneering 1992 "How the Swans Came to the Lake" may also be familiar to readers already, but why not mention these popular and enduring predecessors that showed many Americans (as they did me) perhaps their first glimpses into Tibetan Buddhism?

These persistent shortcomings noted, the strength in Paine's narrative lies in his metaphorical mind. As he struggles, for instance, to match the mansion yearned for in Christian mentalities of the afterlife with the adding on of another room in a modern mind making room for hitherto unknown Tibetan dharma, he falters. But, he more often succeeds.

(P.S. I've reviewed Coleman, French, "Merton and Buddhism," Kamenetz, Mishra, Revel & Ricard, and Sherrill on Amazon U.S. and all but French's book also very recently on my "Blogtrotter." The review above's posted at Amazon 6/28/2009; cross-posted then to my blog for longer reviews also, "Not the L.A. Times Book Review.")

Rodger Kamenetz' "The Jew in the Lotus": Book Review

Rereading this fifteen years after it was published, I found it poignant and thoughtful. In '94, I'd known about Judaism but not Buddhism; now studying the latter while building upon a lifelong interest in Tibet, I realize how Kamenetz deftly moves between his secular American Jewish perspective and a 1990 encounter superficially utterly opposed to shul and shetl and shuckling. But, as he carefully delineates, both essentially different and ultimately united. This conclusion sounds facile, but he explores the fraught intersection where so many Jews have left their upbringing to find fuller lives within Buddhism, and this tension adds heft and relevance to what might have been in less-skilled hands a romanticized or castigating report.

The moral that animosity does not foster equanimity between foes early on divides Tibetan ability to see in their enemies a fellow sufferer deserving compassion from Jewish determination to pursue justice and never to forget Amalek or Hitler. I expected more about explicitly, in post-Holocaust debate, about this fundamental outlook permeating the rabbis who constituted the core of the entourage visiting the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala exile. But, exile being the key problem, the challenge may be less to recover past atrocities than to perpetuate present peace, promote future harmony, and to move wherever possible Tibetan treasures of wisdom to safety outside their tormented homeland, which has only worsened twenty years after this dialogue.

Tibet's wealth's compared to an archeological dig in Israel; from much that Jews barely understand today, they can retrieve parallel meditation and renewal practices that can appeal to disenchanted Jews tired of dull synagogues and rote ritual. For instance, the kabbalistic "ain sof" (no limit) concept meshes with "shunyata" (emptiness). The Star of David and tantric fertility symbols share a Mesopotamian inspiration as a venerable icon. "God is an atheist," renewal rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi reflects, for unlike the open space sought in Buddhism, perhaps Judaism at its core captures a lonely Creator "because God has no peer, God has no God" before Him for comfort. (251) This, ironically perhaps, becomes an emanation the writer, a poet-professor, can relate to best after a lifetime's search never expressed so.

Following ancient prophets appeals less to some Jewish-born seekers than discovering spirituality for one's self directly by dharma-doing. In transfer, neat comparisons may be lacking. The motif of the home and family that stands for Jewish continuity for the Tibetan lacks equivalence: the monastery and the celibate dominates. Yet, the joy many JUBUs (Jewish Buddhists being vastly overrepresented in those turning to dharma practice) find when leaving home and shul speaks to the profound lack of meaning many find, as Ram Dass (Hindu priest studying Hasidism, born to a prominent Jewish family as Richard Alpert) reminds Kamenetz, only outside their birth family and upbringing, for like family, one's born-religion may push a sensitive spirit's "buttons."

Interviewing malcontents like Allen Ginsberg and more composed JUBU leaders, the author finds that many of them early did not reject Judaism truly, as many were assimilated already within families who had left Orthodoxy generations ago. This is one issue that, interspersed awkwardly within a narrative that skips from October 1990 in India to later talks with JUBUs, does throw off the pace. Later chapters depart from the Dharamsala meetings to Kamenetz' valuable thoughts on Jewish-Buddhist relations outside Tibet. The book gains intensity in these closing sections, as the author faces his own enthusiasm and ambivalence and hope. (He followed this book with more journeys among Jewish mystics in "Stalking Elijah": now he's taken by studies of dreams.)

The trick becomes how to share within Judaism the vibrancy many find outside of it in dharma. And, as the Dalai Lama carefully reminds the rabbis, not to fret if some leave the fold to find inspiration. For the Jews, however, some rail at this, given the numerical impact of so many bright people leaving a diminishing population within the tribe. 30% of Jews died in the Shoah; but over 80% of rabbis were murdered who could have transmitted advanced teachings similar to Tibetan techniques that Shachter boldly struggles to pass on in compatible if countercultural form to open-minded Jews who like dharma, as one of the few teachers remaining from before the war from Eastern Europe.

So, rather than losing Jews to dharma, Kamenetz and his peers seek to inspire Jews to incorporate similar teachings into their own American lives. In exile from Jerusalem historically, the rabbis shifted from Temple sacrifice to school learning in Yavneh; Dharamsala may represent the same opportunity to make rebirth after the Chinese destruction of nearly all six thousand monasteries with a thousand years of accumulated knowledge preserved by Tibetan monks.

There's a necessity to never forget such horrors, but the Buddhists differ from the Jews crucially when it comes to how best remember them. Tibetans seem to favor, at least under the Dalai Lama's fraught diplomatic balance, to forgive rather than to take revenge: they warn that the Jews may raise up more trouble by not letting go of anger. Is anger justifiable? Is the Jewish tendency to argue and wrangle, whether over family issues, ideas, or Torah, commendable? Kamenetz considers tough questions.

He finds when meeting the Dalai Lama that, contrary to his suspicions of idolatry, the monk provides him an instant, sharp glimpse into the "quiet mind." Kamenetz welcomes this lesson, transmitted as if intuitively into the troubled soul of a disaffiliated Jew who's never found contentment in his cultural identity so much as contention. It took, he considers, three hundred years for the teachings of the Buddha to take root in other Asian countries. "It may be well that Buddhism may borrow a few dance steps from Judaism along the way" for the process may not be as one-sided as outsiders assume. Jews return to Torah too after Tibet, and in this circular pattern Kamenetz finds that their dialogue may strengthen all who meet.

(P.S. Those wanting more about Westerners talking with the Dalai Lama about Tibet may among an ever-expanding series of books find my Amazon US & blog reviews of Thomas Laird's "Tibet: A History" and Pico Iyer's "The Open Road" helpful. Review posted 6-26-2009 to Amazon US.)

Image: the hardcover's art's much better than the paperback! You can link from the author's website "here" to clips from Laurel Chiten's 1999 PBS film adaptation, which I'd never heard of until now.

Aravind Adiga's "Between the Assassinations": Book Review

1984-1991, between Indira & Rajiv Gandhi's murders, these stories tell of an Indian coastal city's impoverished, and how they long to break out of their status. Caste, class, and religion play crucial roles. Adiga's tone reminded me of Joyce's paralyzed "Dubliners;" both share a detached, yet sympathetic, eye towards people they've scrutinzed unsparingly, yet compassionately.

No romanticism remains. Chennaya, an ambitious cart-puller paid in cash from which he must pay back each day a rupee to his boss for the "privilege" of being chosen to work for him, expresses the common complaint over three-hundred-and-forty pages. "Somewhere, I hope, a poor man will strike a blow against the world. Because there is no God watching over us. There is no one coming to release us from the jail in which we have locked ourselves." (199)

No comic relief, no lighthearted rhapsodies of natural beauty, no whimsical culture clashes will be found here. This India, far off from the great cities, languishes in its own globalization as its peoples talk and pray in many languages and divide themselves into subdivisions that baffle even the natives. However, the clever ones sprinkle trendy English words into whatever tongue that betrays their discontent.

The best stories, from a very loosely joined, slightly overlapping cast of characters, involve the boy bomber, the cart-puller, a quack charlatan, and the mosquito sprayer. Others, such as that of a schoolteacher or a Brahmin spinster who must work as a maid for a Christian family, seem more character studies than stories that end in an unexpected way, however accurately shown in a fashion that reminds me of Flaubert's sharp preference for social studies.

Ardiga, like many naturalists of 19c literature, appears to aim at a style that follows characters who cannot escape their fate. Charity's withheld, and the cathedral remains unfinished while the old forest's razed for a stadium. The town itself finds itself swelling daily with desperate arrivals from the countryside, and India here contrasts the guidebook prose of the paired stories across seven days with the steady, unrelenting tone of the stories that unfold from the inhabitants who try to climb up the ladder away from those grasping at it below, only to fall back down again and again.

This does present a weighty set of stories, rather grimly arrayed one after the other by mostly males who resent, understandably would be an understatement, their predicament. Initiative and ingratiation, savvy and cruelty demand that each newcomer to Kittur climb up on the backs of his brother, his bunkmates, his fellow workers who sleep beside him in the gutter. Two hundred other men wait for each man to make a mistake. "The rich can make mistakes again and again," the mosquito-sprayer George laments. "We make only one mistake, and that's that for us." (246) The Communist Party of India (Marxist-Maoist) boasts a local membership of two; the capitalist system will not topple now.

Reading Ardiga, it's difficult for the reader to capture any hope; one finishes this book as depressed as the characters he portrays in recognizably downbeat, yet well-rounded and thoughtfully detailed depth. The fatalism of this collection may sink one's spirits. The imperial and traditional laws may have been changed, but castes and status burden those in Kittur long after the departure of the Portuguese or the British, and colonialism appears to stretch back to Brahmin times despite distant claims by corrupt parties and bribed bureaucrats of a democratic India today. The title speaks for itself, bracketing a bit of depressing normalcy amid the outbursts of chaos (Posted to Amazon US 7-1-09.)

Ag ól tae ar dhíthreabh Hiomalaethid

Léigh mé aréir faoi Tenzin Palmo. Is díthreabhach í. D'fhan sí ina Hiomalaetha dhá blianta déag ina aonar.

Tá scéal go iontach orm. Bhí sí ina chónai leis féin. Ar ndóigh, gach sé bhlianta, chríochnaigh sí soláthar bia leis a daoine a chothú. Bhí sí gan a ithe ach glasraí go fástha aici.

Níl Sasanach í, ar scor ar bith. D'fhoghlaim Diane Perry faoi Búdachas beagán ar bhéagan nuair ní raibh fhios ag daoine faoi sé go fíor ach mír bhídeach eolais ar feadh na caogidí ansiud go coitanta thar lear. Rugadh sí i Londain de dhream uiríseal. Bhí máthair coicnaíoch ag glanta iasc ansin.

D'imigh Diane go hÁise. Iarraidh sí bheith bean rialta. Bhí saol léanmhar aici. Rinneadh sí ord beannaithe i 1964.

I 1976, d'fhág Tenzin Palmo a mainistir. Bhí sí bean rialta amháin i measc manachaigh céad ann. Thósaigh Tenzin clochar ban rialta aici féin in hIndia nuair a fhilleadh sa deireadh ag bheith ceannródaí.

Féic "Gnó Ban i mBúdachas" anseo. Tá roinnt leis Tenzin Palmo le aiste. Insíonn sí faoi a dúshlán ag tabhairt glacadh níos mo chomh bean rialta téisclim.

Mar rinne sí móideanna crábhaidh a bheith uirthi ní dheachaigh ar ais ar lorg aici go dtí go bhfaighe tuiscint eolas aonair sisean féin. Ní dhéarna sí seo murab n-imeoidh ag fáil léargas a bheith aice. Chaith sí cúrsa spioradáilte saor faoi dheireadh de dhíobháil ar aghaidh uirthi.

Chaith sí ag aimsiú saoradh. Chuardaigh sí Búdachas gan imill. Níor chuireadh isteach ná amach uirthi. Tharchéimhnaigh sí míniúithe na manach i bhfad siar in am agus in ionad.

Thóg sí a díthreabh ar throigh 13,200 ardú i Ladach. Dheisigh sí uaicheas le haill. Chaith sí milliún nóimead ag déanamh machnamh istigh an cillín sé-agus-déag.

Bhí sí caillte leis an ocras is beag nár go minic. Mar sin féin, d'ól sí a tae gach lá idir cúig agus sé a chloig faoi dhó. Dúirt sí go Vicki Mackenzie leis a leabhar "Uaimh ina Sneachta": "Is mé Sasanach, tá fhios agat!"

Drinking tea in a Himalayan hermitage.

I read last night about Tenzin Palmo. She's a hermit. She stayed in the Himalayas twelve years alone.

It's an amazing story for me. She was always by herself. Of course, every six months, she gathered a food supply from a person to supply her. She ate nothing but vegetables that she grew.

She's not Tibetan, however. Diane Perry learned about Buddhism little by little when nobody really knew during the fifties but a tiny bit of information about it usually abroad. She grew up in London of humble stock. Her Cockney mother sold fish there.

Diane went off to Asia. She wanted to be a nun. She suffered great hardships. She became ordained in 1964.

In 1976, Tenzin left her monastery. She was the only nun there among a hundred monks. She founded her own nunnery in India when she eventually returned to be a leader.

See "Role of Women in Buddhism" here. There's a section with Tenzin Palmo in an essay. She tells more about her struggle to gain acceptance as a pioneer nun.

She made monastic vows to herself not to come back from her lone quest until she might find enlightenment by herself. She didn't go off for this unless she might leave to get insight for herself. She spent a very long retreat finally free of prejudice against her.

She had to discover liberation. She sought Buddhism without limits. She was left to herself. She trancended the monks' interpretations way back there in time and place.

She built her hermitage at 13,200 feet high in Ladakh. She repaired a lair on a cliff. She spent a million minutes meditating in a six-by-ten cell.

She often nearly starved to death. All the same, she drank her tea between six and eight o'clocks, twice daily. She told Vicki Mackenzie in her book "Cave in the Snow": "I'm English, you know!"

Ghriangraf/ Photo: "Amuigh an hUaimh/ Outside the Cave."

Altec UHP336 In-Ear Earphones: Product Review

My Ultimate Ears SuperFi5 Pro Studio pair blinked out a speaker after two-and-a-half loyal years; unable to afford their replacement, I downsized to this "Upgrader" series. Less than $40 compared to what were then $240 UE5s, so how do these compare?

I've heard recently with "cans" a friend's tube-amp iPod set-up, and with the UHP336 pair, while they may fall sort of the UE's fabled dual-speaker In-Ear Monitor separation, as the lower-level one-speaker equivalent of the UE3's, they sound nearly as great. The stats differ barely except in impedence: 21 for UE SuperFi 5 vs. 13 for UHP336.

I tested them on my standard trial: two Beatles songs that have breaths that lurk semi-audibly in "Taxman" and "Paperback Writer." I did this before and after a 24-hour period leaving the pair plugged into an online hip-hip station, at high volume, as recommended in Mr. Leonard's video here. The difference may not be dramatic, as the bass on these tends towards the reference, uncolored, non-equalized settings I have on my iPod, but there seemed a subtle vocal warmth after burn-in.

They performed well, similar to studio monitor headphones in the steady vocal clarity and ambient separation. Not playing bass-heavy hip-hop but my preferred rock and folk, through such tiny, therefore portable, devices, the pair satisfied me. I admit as I now lack hearing differences between lossy and 128 on my iPod, so be forewarned your results may differ.

I often listen on a train-bus commute, the reason for purchasing a small-sized in-ear pair anyway-- but I blank out in hearing at about 13-20 range so I may not need the resolution that musicians or better blessed, or younger, listeners may demand. Therefore, I need to save my ears; with the lower volume provided by in-ear phones, there is a protective element that adds to their aesthetic delight. They may lack elegance when in use, but you're far better off than earbuds needing a player cranked all the way up to be heard over traffic.

The straight rather than right-angle plug of the UE5 pair may disappoint, as this does put more pressure on the wiring. Yet, it also is easier to carry in a pocket. Cordwise, the slight gain of length not directed off at an angle may make more sense as a compromise. As with the UE's an additional reason for purchase was their detachable cable; UE replaced my SuperFi 5's cord readily, but it needs care in use. Watch the Y-junction and ends. The addition of the carrying case, alternative ear pieces, and cleaning tool's also a customer plus.

I do hope they are more easily cleaned than the Super 5's which perhaps due to the lack of a distancing, protective, double flange built up rapidly with gook deep down at the base of the speakers that was impossible to extricate with the cleaning tool. (The UHP pair lacks a tiny division in the plastic hole opening into the speaker chamber, perhaps as the cheaper pair obviously has one speaker rather than the woofer-tweeter SuperFi pair.) My ears aren't that dirty! The difficulty may be that while any such in-ear pair is in use in the ears, they go so deep out of necessity that the suction works too well. I hope the new double flange may offset the danger of dirtying the interior, literally beyond reach.

This is one problem that I predict may be endemic to in-ear phones; other than the obvious advice to keep them clean regularly, I'd be eager to find out extraction tips that preserve delicate IEM interior speakers. The vacuum created for a snug fit, I wonder, when in the ear may draw out into the speakers one's mucus deeply and irrevocably while they're inside your ears-- is this correct? No audiophile's favorite topic, but I'd figured I'd ask experts.

The other problem with the UE5's (reviewed by me on Amazon when I got them) was their plastic ear tips. They'd fall out easily, often separating off your ear as you pulled the speaker out, and got easily lost. The addition on the standard pair of a second flange works well to stabilize them in the ear. Also, if you need more outside ambiance to filter in, you can tip them farther out of the ear canal and still hear most of the sound fine-- this could not be done on my earlier pair without them falling out totally. Enjoy these and comment if you wish...

(Posted to Amazon US 6-26-2009, where such obsessively researched tech geek products inevitably gain far more reviews than my arcane books critiqued painstakingly. A great video review's here at the product site-- a feature lacking on books I admit!)

Daisaku Ikeda's "Buddhism: The First Millennium": Book Review

Reprinting this 1977 history translated in 1982, this welcome overview summarizes early Buddhist attempts to formulate a canon, institute practices, and solve disputes. Ikeda constantly laments the tendency of monks towards argument, but he reminds us how, unlike most religions or ideologies, debates ensued rather than for those who refused to compromise or submit to authority. For, Buddhism departs from centralized, external rulers by encouraging the seeker to look within to find the same teaching that the historical Buddha insisted can be found that leads to freedom.

A freedom based more on interior realization rather than social revolution has unfairly caused Westerners to stereotype Buddhism as nihilistic, passive, and disengaged from life. While the monastic tendencies early on strove to control the dharma's compilation and interpretation as it passed from oral to written form, their understandable worry about the dilution of the original message did push much of the control over the dharma out of the reach of lay people. Ikeda, as a leader of Soka Gakkai, a Japanese movement determined to bring the dharma into everyday, non-clerical dissemination, seeks the same tolerance and respect within the Buddhists who, in the Mahasamghika and later the Mahayana version, followed their reformist zeal.

The saga reminded me often of how St Francis of Assisi late in his life struggled against those followers who bickered over how the Rule was to be practiced; analogies to the Reformation certainly also will emerge for readers studying the dogmatist vs. revisionist tensions that may have led to schisms, but at least bloodless ones rather than burning alive heretics. This lesson teaches us all!

Ikeda, speaking of Christian parallels, considers suggestive if largely unverifiable ones that show how the spread of Aramaic throughout the Persian empire may have allowed influences to travel from India to Palestine at the time of Jesus. Even if indirectly, common conclusions about lofty wisdom, "doctrinal breadth and depth, and this invariable rejection of class distinctions and narrow racial and national concepts" can "qualify Buddhism and Christianity as world religions." (75) As in the previous volume (also reviewed by me) "The Living Buddha: An Interpretative Biography" in this newly launched series, Ikeda in Burton Watson's efficient translation employs "religion" for the non-theistic philosophy of Buddhism, but this does correspond to common if not technically precise usage among Westerners.

With the stories of King Ashoka, great reformer and disseminator of the dharma to even the West within Alexander's heirs in Hellenistic Asia Minor, Ikeda makes a subtle argument. Those familiar with Soka Gakkai in its Japanese manifestation as not only a social movement but a political party may recognize what's alluded to only here. Ikeda uses Ashoka's example to show how a leader can embody the dharma while still allowing others within a polity to follow freedom of religion; the dharma's universality remains untainted by reform, rather it is perfected as people bring Buddhist ethics into the world beyond the monasteries.

Naganesa's dialogue with the Greek-rooted King Menander of Bactria, in the "Questions of King Milinda," shows the power of dialogue between Eastern wisdom and Western reason as standards by which we judge truth. (A recent comparison: see my review of Jean-Francois Revel & Matthieu Ricard's "The Monk & the Philosopher.") Still, the question of how "transmigration" differs from rebirth or reincarnation deserved more elucidation.

Another interpretative crux, raised in my review of Ikeda's Buddha biography, also enters this sequel. The Therevada version of Buddhism favored monasticism, inward direction, a negative view of what keeps the person from freedom, and a liking for the pattern of earlier Hinduism repeated in the "arhat," the realized-one who as a "voice-hearer" finds enlightenment, if of a lower level. The Mahayana encourage the outward direction, the goal of a bodhisattva that after being freed stays in future incarnations to help others towards "salvation" (another word taken in this translation that may need caution for a Westerner's understanding within Buddhism).

The move from the Therevada's negatively tinged escape from this life's snares into a Mahayana embrace of the possibility of perfection by not individual endurance and renunciation so much as collective advancement may reflect again Ikeda's perspective. The Japanese title, after all's, "My View of Buddhism." Actively overcoming obstacles, bettering society, and enacting suffering as a means to rid one's self of its drawbacks give Ikeda's view energy and impact. Later chapters may flag somewhat by comparison with the historical ones about the dharma's spread, but the sincerity with which Ikeda carefully sifts legend from fact, textual claims from enduring revelation in the Lotus Sutra, do reveal the passion and the clarity of his encounter with the roots of his practice.

The book's appended with a helpful glossary and throughly cross-referenced index. Nearly all of the sources, however, are documented only in Japanese; I'd have loved to be able to read some of these that suggest fascinating research about earlier East-West contacts. In the meantime, those of us lacking Japanese can learn about the often overlooked attempts to widen the message of Shakyamuni's dharma to Asia and even beyond, as gleaned from scraps of chronicles, recovered carvings, and massive heaps of textual compendiums. (Posted to Amazon US at 1982 version 6/24/09. To be reprinted August 2009.)

Daisaku Ikeda's "Living Buddha": Book Review

In Japanese, the title's "My View of Shakyamuni." Ikeda, leader of the lay organization Soka Gakkai that stresses outreach, emphasizes how flexible Buddhism can be for our age. His "interpretative biography" cites Karl Jaspers on how in its origins, it emerged during what scholars call the Axial Age, when Socrates, Confucius, and later Jesus preached. Like them, the Buddha's messages weren't written down until later; like them, his teachings emerged from the "middle of the world" to spread to millions. (See Karen Armstrong's "Buddha" biography, also reviewed by me, in the Penguin Lives series for more context.)

Sharing the dharma teaching's foremost; the intellectual understanding, Ikeda tells us, cannot replace action. He places the little factually that we know about the historical Shakyamuni, the sage of the Shakyas, within the legends and suppositions that, as with Socrates and Jesus, grew up around the teacher after his death. One key difference: the Eastern conception of emancipation comes not from an oppressive political system so much as a deceptive personal structure. (See Pankraj Mishra's "An End to Suffering" for more on this comparison and contrast within Western & Hindu intellectual history and philosophy.)

Ikeda admits he searches the scanty information we can verify, while allowing the myths also to enter his study, for from both we, as with Jesus and Socrates, have built our perceptions of such men, far more imaginatively and powerfully than a few facts recited could sway so many millions in centuries since. This narrative takes time to look at those who as "voice hearers" (shravaka) listened to the teachings and found enlightenment.

Here, a comparison with Stephen Batchelor's agnostic "Buddhism Without Beliefs" may be helpful. Batchelor wonders why in the original time of the Buddha's talks, many listeners earned enlightenment by hearing them, whereas now, many eons may be necessary for practitioners to find release. Ikeda appears to at first downplay "voice hearers" as a lower level within the Hindu "arhat" stages of enlightenment; while later he puts this stage at a somewhat higher stage (four out of ten?) for some of the first Buddhists. This issue remained somewhat confusing, although looking up information on Soka Gakkai in Donald Mitchell's excellent "Buddhism: An Introduction" from Oxford UP, the importance of ten stages for SG is emphasized as a key precept that may account for Ikeda's subtle downplaying of hearing teachings rather than making them actively part of one's life.

Ikeda, similarly, favors promoting a simpler "Law of Life" as a core dharma rather than a 12-linked chain of causation to elucidate the difficult doctrine of "dependent origination" that underlies karma and rebirth, issues that gain minor attention here compared to a more socially directed, accessible, and practical Buddhism that allows the strengths of all involved in the world's pursuits to gain from it, not only monks. He shows why monks were sent out to spread the dharma not in groups or pairs, but alone. Why? Ikeda muses that this example demands individual initiative, and a creative, positive, and flexible application of Buddhism to one's own experience in the world. This direction unsurprisingly finds Ikeda reminding readers that Buddhism expects personal responsibility, not blind devotion to leaders, fanatical asceticism, or misdirected yoga marathons or Zen meditation that become ends in themselves for egotistical comfort rather than means to enlightenment.

The dying Buddha reminded listeners to take charge of their improvement. The guide, unlike other "religions" (this term is used throughout Burton Watson's fluid translation despite possible confusion for Westerners; I am not sure what the Japanese equivalent term may have been), remains not focused on some external "absolute," but within the self, where one finds the way to conquer the ego and transcend the same self's delusions. Transformation by active habit, rather than information by passive reception, sums up the heart of dharma.

Ikeda throughout reminds us that the few facts of the Buddha that are in this short text expanded, with nods to scholarship and dissenting perspectives and historical situations, do not tell us much in themselves. The data may be scanty, but the insights prove profound. The "dignity of the individual and one's subjective nature" occupy central stage for the dharma as Ikeda interprets it. From within ourselves, we draw out the Law of Life. Practice makes us responsible, he finds, for our own liberation.

He ends this primer: "In other words, one transforms the present changeable self into the self as it should be, the self that is in perfect harmony with the Law"-- the essence of Buddhism's in this "human revolution" inherent within each of us. (133) The book's glossary and index cross-reference and translate terms concisely for newcomers to the Sanskrit vocabulary and Indian places; this along with Karen Armstrong's work may prove ideal for beginners curious about Siddhartha Gautama, although Ikeda moves more into those who followed the Buddha and less on doctrine.

(P.S. I reviewed Armstrong, Batchelor, Mitchell, and Mishra's books on Amazon US & my blog along with the follow-up to Ikeda's biography, "Buddhism: The First Millennium." This review sent to Amazon US 6/18/09.)

What's your political typology?

"Beyond Red & Blue": the Pew Center analyzed U.S. political typology. Take this 2005 quiz. See where you stand.

I'm ranked among DISADVANTAGED DEMOCRATS

PAST TYPOLOGY COUNTERPART: Partisan Poor
10% OF GENERAL POPULATION
10% OF REGISTERED VOTERS
PARTY ID: 84% Democrat; 16% Independent/No Preference, 0% Republican (99% Dem/Lean Dem)

BASIC DESCRIPTION: Least financially secure of all the groups, these voters are very anti-business, and strong supporters of government efforts to help the needy. Minorities account for a significant proportion of this group; nearly a third (32%) are black, roughly the same proportion as among Conservative Democrats. Levels of disapproval of George W. Bush job performance (91%) and candidate choice in 2004 (82% for Kerry) are comparable to those among Liberals.

DEFINING VALUES: Most likely to be skeptical of an individual's ability to succeed without impediments and most anti-business. Strong belief that government should do more to help the poor, yet most are disenchanted with government. Strongly supportive of organized labor (71% have a favorable view of labor unions).

Key Beliefs: General Population [percentage polled] vs. Disadvantaged Democrats:
Hard work and determination are no guarantee of success for most people: 28% vs. 79%.
Poor people have hard lives because government benefits don't go far enough to help them live decently: 52% vs. 80%.
Most elected officials don't care what people like me think: 63% vs. 87%.
Business corporations make too much profit: 54% vs. 76%.
We should pay less attention to problems overseas and concentrate on problems here at home: 49% vs. 72%.

WHO THEY ARE: Low average incomes (32% below $20,000 in household income); most (77%) often can't make ends meet. Six-in-ten are female. Three-in-ten (32%) are black and 14% are Hispanic. Not very well educated, 67% have at most a high-school degree. Nearly half (47%) are parents of children living at home.

LIFESTYLE NOTES: Nearly a quarter (23%) report someone in their household is a member of a labor union, and 58% report that they or someone in the home has been unemployed in the past year­ both far larger proportions than in any other group. Only 27% have a gun in the home.

2004 ELECTION: 2% Bush, 82% Kerry

MEDIA USE: Largest viewership of CNN as main news source among all groups (31%). Only group in which a majority (53%) reads newspapers.

You can read all the typologies at "Typology Groups". It'd be intriguing to compare results four years later under a regime change and a faltering economy. Certainly "disenchanted" fits me, although I hope the condescending sneer of "not very well educated" no longer applies!

I follow the news (not CNN but newspapers!) and vote and fret. So, I'm not under "Disaffecteds"-- although as tallied above I share their frustration. Many of us retain "embittered" cynicism regarding the environment, economic prospects, wealth distribution, and population growth. Despite "20 years of schoolin' and they put you on the day shift," as his Bobness warbled in "Subterranean Homesick Blues," I've kept a mindset of my upbringing among the (gun-less) working class, risible as my wife regards my own smooth monkish hands that have known neither plow nor shovel.

At least since that Weedwhacker I got for my 16th birthday, no joke; my graduation present from college was a small color t.v.

P.S. After I wrote this, Anthony McIntyre over at "The Pensive Quill" blog posted his piece "Fraudsters & Their Ads," castigating the Irish government's Orwellian crackdown on "benefit fraud" (we'd say "welfare cheats"). The juxtaposition of blaming the few poor who abuse the system while the many rich scamper free meshes well with the suspicions defined as populist, yet resentful, "Defining Values" quoted above.

Thich Nhat Hanh's "No Death, No Fear": Book Review

From a flame and a cloud, these pages teach impermanence and no-self. Simple terms, complex doctrines made concise, meditative, and calming. I read this after my father's death and when parents of friends of mine died. While familiar with Buddhist basics already, I'm challenged by the intangible idea of continuity that transcends form and duration.

Nhat Hanh repeats his lessons. He returns to the cloud analogy, transformed into rain and water, milk and grass, cows and ice cream! In a cup of tea, our DNA, a burst of diffused fireworks, a plum tree's pit, he directs us to recognize life as it's sustained rather than ended. As cells live and die, so our consciousness comes and goes. Rather than "creation" or "departure" the monk prefers to say: "Manifestation and the cessation of manifestation are constantly taking place. We do not remain the same in two consecutive moments. The same is true of the river, the flame, the cloud or the sunflower." (71) This sums up the two hundred pages, but again, in the flow of the discourse, the recapitulation and elaboration of the spare lesson, we hear as if with a musical motif the theme deepened, played with, pondered, and intoned.

Christians may find this book especially helpful, for it explains some dharma teachings while comparing them to the Living Christ resurrected in our world. He notes how Christmas should be more a "Continuation Day" rather than a birthday of the One incarnated but not "created"; similarly, we are encouraged to think of ourselves as part of a continuum that has never begun or ended in the universal scheme that defies easy summary, but whose wisdom will, by "skillful means," blossom.

The latter half of the book shows how this can happen. "Touching the Earth" in three meditations offers ways to inculcate the notion of emptiness, impermanence, and how we connect to our ancestors and our progeny in non-theistic guided thoughts that anyone, regardless of their beliefs, can incorporate. While this book would not serve as a primer on dharma (try perhaps Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse's "What Makes You 'Not' a Buddhist" or "Buddhism Without Beliefs" by Stephen Batchelor for comparable introductions, both reviewed by me recently on Amazon & my blog), it can provide a welcome companion for those bereaved or mourning.

He reminds us how the Buddha continues in the people we see, and in our selves if we pause to reflect on our true nature and practice awareness. Again, fundamental truths, but ones often obscured and abandoned to our peril. "Practice like a wave. Take the time to look deeply into yourself and recognize that your nature is the nature of no-birth and no-death. You can break through to freedom and fearlessness this way. This method of practice will help us to live without fear, and it will help us to die peacefully without regret." Taken in slowly, this will begin to make more sense than many of these statements may seem initially to contain, if a reader's facing Buddhist discourse such as this for the first time.

He also adds in the final chapter advice on comforting a dying person, and ways that we can ease their pain and ours with confidence that "emptiness is not the opposite of existence." Rather than existing or not existing totally, Nhat Hanh interprets the Buddha's teaching as telling us that "notions of being and non-being cannot be applied to reality." This seems contradictory, but just as matter changes into other energy even if invisible to us, so does our consciousness manifest or cease; neither nihilism nor eternalism substitutes for this profound but, for Westerners, often elusive concept to conceive of, this notion of "nothing is born, nothing dies." The chapters pace themselves as if dictated from the meditative mind, often a few paragraphs suffice for a shorter reflection within each section. This makes therefore an ideal resource to dip into for spiritual refreshment and emotional support.

I read this on my birthday, and turned to find that "the vertical line" with a year inserted of the reader's imagined birth and death-date fit, at least so far, mine-- eerily to the year of my conception! I wondered about this coincidence, when news of Michael Jackson's sudden death then came into my household: a small reminder of the lessons this Buddhist monk warns us about, to never take the future for granted, to look not to fame or riches but to family and neighbors as our bodhissatvas to show us the way to a surer path to ultimate reality beyond the temptations and distractions peddled by so many in our world. There's no talk of karma here, only confidence that continuity demands us to accept that we must die to live again, and to leave fear behind to embrace love. (Posted 6-25-09 to Amazon US)

"Decline to State"

Today brings me two years short of jubilee's half-century. I ponder how my always eclectic, unpredictable political outlook mirrors my religious one. Or should I say, as is the fashion among so many who can no longer affirm without doubt a Deity's omnipresence, "spiritual"? As a Californian, perhaps stereotypical, but even for one raised Irish Catholic, the motherland's no bastion anymore either. It's caught up with the rest of a Western Europe where French Muslims and Buddhists outnumber its Jews or Protestants, and probably practicing Catholics.

I opened a library find, Christopher Brooke's text and Wim Swaan's photos in "The Monastic World," a splendid 1974 coffee-table survey of monasteries 1000-1300. I had only seen this book once, a quarter-century ago in my dissertation advisor's office, and I'd longed for a copy. Working so long on medieval literature and culture, the religious aspect doubtless allowed me a place to ponder my own conflicts while progressing within academia. With my immersion into the Irish expressions in older and newer centuries of similar longings, it's also an ideal realm to continue my quest as a scholarly seeker of information and a personal pilgrim of transformation.

Perusing Swaan's atmospheric, often shadowy and austere, cloistered angles, I remembered my lifelong fascination with such lives lived, and such ruins remaining. I've barely visited any: Our Lady of Guadalupe in Oregon which I stumbled upon by chance so could only see for an hour; the Brigittines where I could get no farther than the visitor's reception to buy fudge: my destination before the Trappists sign caught my eye on the highway!-- and before I left my hasty Williamette weekend, a walk around Mount Angel Abbey where all the Benedictines might have been at the choir rehearsal on a silent Sunday afternoon.

Well, the Trappists were constructing their lovely new church; Brigittines stay cloistered; Mount Angel's was in use-- no chapel visits for me that Oregon stint. I've attended an uninspiring Mass at the local abbey over the mountains in Valyermo; I mean to get to the Camaldolese (however abandoned to Zen the hermits may be, they grabbed a great domain name, "contemplation-dot-com") above Big Sur for more than a look at the empty parking lot (albeit with splendid Pacific vista) another visit north soon. One of my five favorite films ever's Philip Gröning's three-hour immersion into time's passing at the strictest monastery in Catholicism, La Grande Chartreuse: "Die Gross Stille" or "Into Great Silence." My attraction early on towards testing the possibility of a clerical calling I cannot account for with any particular association, but as a fair-complected, retiring intellectual type, I've always liked the coolness of a church (like a library, which ties into monasteries neatly!) entered for shelter and quiet on a typically smoggy, glaring, harsh day as found generally here where I've passed nearly five decades.

Far from rural retreats, the first friars sought their apostolate in polyglot cities. Lately, after getting a haircut near St. Francis in Silver Lake, or before picking up Niall from school near rival St. Dominic in Eagle Rock, I've popped in for a short prayer. Not for myself, for I cannot say I "pray" to God in an orthodox sense now. My thoughts seek a wider source of mercy and compassion, however imagined or diffused. Whether this emanation's a projection or a presence, I cannot determine. Is that enough to assert as a belief, or does this define its denial?

So, I now ask prayers for others whom I love, and who ask God for love. When in the house of a another as a guest, you follow their customs. I make the sign of a cross inside a church; I wear a yarmulke and tallis as I first did when I stood before the Torah. I stand before the same God I did at my First Communion. I'm not as sure as I once was at seven that He's looking back at me, but I figure if so, then He's tolerant of my ambiguity. I'd be roasted as a heretic and expelled as a "Judaizer" depending back in those Middle Ages and many centuries or places since. Now, one consolation of my own post-Christian identity in a secularizing society's my ability protected to make such statements, to publish them, and to check out books on them.

I'd ask God to help my dying father, my demented mother-in-law, my newly found birth mother and her husband, my feckless sister and the parents of my friends who've also watched more often recently as the Misters and Missuses (no first names back then, a generational gap now apparent as our children's pals call us by the same names as our spouses and our parents call us, a curious evolution) we knew as teens now crumble and collapse in hospitals and hospices.

Aging as is marked today, I consider how my Facebook Friends and blog readers differ: among them I count a fine priest, liberal Jews, fervent Catholics, hybrid Buddhists. And lukewarm doubters, so human, those Christ warned He'd regurgitate. I note Facebook allows you to select your political and religious preference. "Decline to State" might apply for both boxes today. Politically, I've always been all over the place; religiously, it's been a long winding path that makes me wonder if I lack conviction or I uphold integrity. My own identification, as I've mused before on this blog, challenges easy summary. My baptism and formation in a strict Catholicism as hermetic and uncompromising as could be allowed within post-Tridentine, Los Angeles, blue-collar sprawl made me proud yet detached. I always have felt out of place within a lazy, tawdry, and shallow local culture that has little room for me.

Making my own way, I spent years in college and grad school in and out of the Church. After my nadir in my late-twenties, I found my dear wife and together we found our way towards where we could both find solace, within a carefully skeptical, somewhat ambivalent, but nonetheless confident Judaism as common ground for us to raise our sons. Still, living as we do in a non-Jewish neighborhood with a non-Jewish name and little on the surface to mark ourselves as apart from the quondam assimilated neighbors of little or no faith, or those of an newly evangelical persuasion or again traditional Catholic allegiance, we lack the surroundings that others use to fortify their beliefs. For us, we can go to shul respectfully or critique "Religulous" with equal equanimity, comfortable in our range of responses.

On the treadmill, I've been re-reading Rodger Kamenentz' "The Jew in the Lotus." When it came out in '94, I'd been immersing myself five years in Jewish learning; today-- I research the cultural and historical, literary and devotional detour that comprises how Irish people have read and misread Buddhism. Funding pending (my birthday horoscope promises: "Travel in October"), I'll give a paper at a formidably named "European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism" conference on "Irish Alternative Spiritualities of the New Age and New Religious Movements" (aka "cults" among the untenured). Given the level of discourse by the members' monographs and affiliations, I confess a need to learn more about dharma teaching! The organizer wrote me how confused his colleagues were by my typically allusive and, well, esoteric, proposal! It's a topic with nearly nothing written about it. This in grad school, me scaling steep, well-worn trails of medievalists in search of novelty, was usually seen as a bad sign for good reason!

One of the few times that we can assert that, yes, this has not been found before comes when charting verifiable exchanges at a high level of Jews with Buddhists, New Age wishes for Jesus' lost years in India aside. Kamenentz' encounters as part of the Jewish entourage mainly of rabbis who met in October 1990 with the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala exile to teach and to learn remind me of my own skewed trajectory across skittery spiritual terrain. Ram Dass, aka Richard Alpert and scion of a big macher's family, Tim Leary's equally squirrely LSD counterpart, a Hindu priest and a Hasid student (however bemusedly) now, tells the author that few of us are lucky enough to be born within the spiritual tradition right for us. Like our families, we find that the denominational milieu that forms many of us "pushes our buttons" too readily. Early in life, he notes how many Catholics chafe at the discipline but only later find the beauty in their faith. Similarly, as Kamenentz' book explores and Ram Dass parallels, the drift of many Jews into Buddhism shows the lack of "fit" within their ancestral identification and familial expectations.

Maybe I'm a political and religious misfit at heart. Facebook offers profile choices that remind me of their crossover potential for me. Is my political affiliation also my religious one? Distrusting Obama, disagreeing with McCain, disgusted with the Greens' nominee Cynthia McKinney, last fall I changed my party registration. Disappointed with Clinton, I had switched to the Greens as soon as they'd been approved for the California ballots in the mid-90s. However, I remained only to boost their numbers to the 100,000 minimum voters needed to stay recognized here. Their open-borders platform (as with the Sierra Club) conflicted with my environmental stance that favors fewer people in my fragile and overcrowded Golden State. Greens, as many progressives, seem admirable for ideals more than practices.

Ideologically and devotionally, intellectually and bibliographically, I wander, suspicious by nature of traps. Maybe it's inherited Fenianism. Not that current representatives of that ideal have been any more coherent than the Greens' nominee.

My wife's commented on how my blog and my Amazon reviews (over a thousand now: go and rate I implore thee) show, as I intended, my interests as they ebb and flow. The blog indexes my tags, and I can see how beneath the book reviews that top it and the bilingual Irish-language ones that appear every few days, Buddhism's now a head ahead of Judaism, with belief nearby and Irish literature, Christianity, and Catholicism, not to mention Wales and surprisingly "sexuality" clustered high too.

Categories keep us apart and organize our thoughts. Even though if mine as blogged, they run together as often as the "labels for this post" boxes do below my entries. Such may be my spirituality to match my bookshelves.

I went to a library where I'd never been. Wearing an old t-shirt with large Hebrew lettering on the front: "tikkun" or "healing/ repair." Near Jackie Robinson Park, Pasadena's La Pintoresca Branch may acclaim its local baseball hero who broke another category over sixty years ago, the color barrier in the majors, but inside, I couldn't find what we still demand: discrimination in the positive, bibliographical sense. Keeping track of what needs to be kept apart! I had no idea where the adult fiction section lurked, although a children's summer art workshop may have blocked those shelves.

So, in the religion section, on a lark, I found a thin, dated children's book on Hanukkah as its Judaica in total; no Buddhism at all (they're neighbors in the Dewey Decimal System unless Hinduism shoulders between, which here it did not; Islam loomed large) but lots of inspirational lore, such as "Oh God! A Black Woman's Guide to Sex and Spirituality." Thin books tend to be found in the 200s: Christians choose covers with scenery and/or crosses, Buddhists get the Asian versions of the former element artistically rendered with a stolid statue or the ubiquitous maroon and saffron garb of the Dalai Lama XIV, but Jews aspire towards thickness-- unless in the form of joke books.

P.S. Amazing how an image hunt for "irish jewish joke book" (a paperback I own) shows my blog, at #9 for "Irish Erotic Art" (a blank book I do not own). Telling how quickly this search finds anti-Zionist placards, a RichardDawkins.net-hosted cartoon of the Pope yelling at an Arab, and skillets of latkes. Apropos reason I left the Greens: nominee McKinney's hatred of Israel. Lacking joke book's cover, asking Dutch pardon (I love the world's best beer brewed under license to Trappists there and among their Flemish cousins; buying it should constitute a charitable deduction) here's an ecumenical substitute. Not sure if it's as funny as "Oh God!"(book/film).

Credit: Archives of Irish America. Mick Moloney Collection of Irish-American Music and Popular Culture (AIA 31) Part IV: Irish Americana. It's named for that wonderful archivist and musician I actually met once and exchanged if not a joke a small witticism with! He took it with good grace, given my 'goyische' delivery. Caption warns, dutifully: "Twenty-one jokebooks, or comedic material, make up Series D. In addition to Irish-American subject matter, these contain hackneyed stereotypes about Jewish, African-American, and German immigrants such as Jew Jokes and Job Lots (Box 1, Folder 8)and The Comical Sayings of Paddy from Cork (Box 1, Folder 15)."

Peter Murphy's "John the Revelator": Book Review

This bog-gothic coming-of-age novel moves rapidly, if obliquely, into an off-kilter portrayal of small-town Irish savagery, mystery, and unsolved goings-on. I read this story quickly, and its pace pleased me. I finished it puzzled, but this did not displease me. It's not a tidy novel, rather a dreamlike one as ordinary and ethereal, menacing and disjointed, as dreams often can combine their telling to us.

Murphy's not the Peter M. of (musical) Bauhaus fame, although his publicity photo makes him look the part. He, similarly gloomily but more wryly, intersperses the narrative told by the teen protagonist John Devine (heavy symbolism with the evangelist and his apocalyptic revelations) with stories related in speech and on the page by his new friend, the roguish Rimbaud-loving Jamey Corboy, who wanders into the misfit young man's life, under the spell of his Bible-spouting, somewhat bewitched mother, full of fables from Irish myth that threaten malfeasants with doom or at least shape-shifting. This mordant theme underlies the book, which cleverly, if perhaps too allusively for a wider audience, interprets through the doings of creator crows and persistent worms a gory, visceral, and primal scene of a restless earth's magic that thrives despite the veneer of our own time's complacency in a southwest Ireland market town.

The novel's best at the interspersed short stories Jamey writes to John. These arguably suggest Murphy's talent may lie in short fiction; the dream of the "hellavator" itself could be a novella, as that of the world's end vision John dreams. The prose sharpens too in the musical story in Morocco, and I note Murphy's background as a music journalist. As for the dialogue, as in many Irish works, it opens promisingly. John's mother Lily, asked if the book she's reading's any good, tells her son: "Too many descriptions. I know what a tree looks like." On the same page, as the wind howls and reminds them of the night of his birth: "'You were a typical boy," she muttered under her breath. 'You came early.'" (4)

Later, John's at a disco: "I felt the alcohol buzz kick in, that feeling of being surrounded by a force field, like I had the gift of temporary invincibility." (70) Losing his virginity in a car, John observes in front of the dashboard figurine: "Our bodies made slapping noises. The plastic Jesus watched it all, palms up." (161) A cuckolded lug wanders about his home disconsolately: "He was pouring stale cornflakes into a small saucepan" after a couple of days of abandonment by his gal. (182) Death's related effectively more by suggestion than exhaustion of its potential to move the reader as it has the teller. The book's last few paragraphs end the narrative beautifully with a primal image rivalling Joyce's Anna Livia, although again I'm not sure what to make of all the suggestive comparisons to earlier archetypes as the scriptural ones recede and the Celtic ones persist throughout the twisted, erratic course of this elusive array of tales.

Into this milieu, rumors of African witchcraft, demonic desecration, and everyday adultery invade Ballo town and Kilcody village. I wasn't clear often what exactly was going on in the narrative. While sparely and vividly told, the details don't seem to add up to a cohesive, linear novel. However, somehow I'm sure Murphy meant it this way; its meandering madness within an outwardly complacent context reminded me not only of the earlier, better work of Pat McCabe ("The Butcher Boy") but also Roddy Doyle's "Paddy Clarke", Ardal O'Hanlon's "Knick Knack, Paddywhack," Patrick McGinley's "Bogmail" and "Foggage," and Jamie O'Neill's curious if little known fiction "Kilbrack". These all, in turn, nod to Flann O'Brien and perhaps Beckett in parts for their send-ups of conversation and quirk, reliable standbys for the Hibernian storyteller of strange doings behind closed doors pried open by nosy neighbors and corrupt criminals. As with such predecessors, your confidence as a reader who can figure out every motive amidst the stubbornly illogical course of events may be undermined, and this may be to your delight or your frustration.

(Review posted to Amazon US 6/23/09. 6/24: Happy Feast of St John if the Baptist and not the Evangelist. Lord knows as I do well how common a name this is or was, even among those of us less sainted. So's Murphy, come to think of it!)

"Sin Chew Daily" meets "Garp"

Remember that scene in "The World According to Garp"? Today's my 18th anniversary; my wife sent me this tender story from this well-named Malaysian paper, life imitating art. I turned six the month "Sgt. Pepper" came out and hippies reminisce about hearing it played all around them that June; I read John Irving's novel, in the foil-colored mass-market paperback hyped in different colors. Mine was a masculine if royal blue, on my second plane ride and my first overseas twelve Junes later on my way to the kingdom itself and the Beatles' adopted city of London.

All around me, in those pre-iPod, pre-laptop, book-toting, cabin-smoking, pre-3/3/3 TSA rule flight days, I heard chuckles from fellow readers of this same bestseller. Never read anything by this middlebrow muse since, but when you're turning eighteen and encounter a frontseat oral sex scenario, you pay attention! Especially when it ends in fiction as badly as it did in fact:

Tuesday May 5, 2009
"Secretary accidentally bites off boss’ penis"

A SECRETARY accidentally bit off the penis of her employer while giving him oral sex in a car.

Sin Chew Daily and China Press reported yesterday that while the 30-year-old woman was performing oral sex on the man, the car was hit by a reversing van.

The impact of the crash, China Press reported, caused the woman to bite off her lover’s organ.

The daily reported that the incident occurred in a Singapore park where the couple met after work.

To make matters worse for the woman, her husband had sent a private investigator to spy on her after suspecting that she was being unfaithful.

The investigator said he had followed the woman and her boss to the park.

“On reaching the park, they did not alight from the car. Not long after, the car started to shake violently.

After the car was hit by the van, there was a loud scream from the woman whose mouth was covered with blood,” he said.

The woman later followed her lover to the hospital with part of the sexual organ.

The investigator, who called an ambulance to send the man to hospital, said that this was the first time he had encountered such an incident.

"Ex-stewardess publishes memoir."

The dailies also reported that a former stewardess has published a memoir of her sexual escapades in the sky.

The Singaporean stewardess, identified as Chew, 35, published The Mile Hi! Club: Memoirs of a Stewardess last Wednesday.

Chew confided that she had received more than 20 requests for sex from passengers in her years as a stewardess but claimed she had turned down all of them.

Other News & Views is compiled from the vernacular newspapers (Bahasa Malaysia, Chinese and Tamil dailies). Link to stories here.

Me again: I know "Chew" is some transliteration of some common surname into Chinglish, but note the repetition here. Also, as I asked my spouse, why would Stewardess (I like feminine endings for occupations, rapidly non-PC here as we'd have to say "flight attendant") Chew if she'd been so prim have any memoirs to publish? The Mile Hi[gh] Club's not named for the chaste.

Also, I know Singapore's a puritanical place, but their prime minister was urging couples to copulate to procreate more to boost that enclave's birth rate. You'd think given the cramped conditions of Asian cities they'd welcome fewer folks, but that's like Europeans getting chastised for low birth rates that, in that hippie age, people were told to adopt so as to spare our planet's dwindling resources, another conundrum that now puzzles me: we're blamed for lower populations as if it's economically sinful! Well, as randy teens are counselled by scions more permissive than certainly my adolescence found, "alternatives" to intercourse at least keep the pregnancy rate down.

Photo: with my Safe Search Mode on, I was curious what I'd find for an image linked to particularly evocative or explicit keywords. Comparatively tame "oral sex car" revealed little of interest over the first hundred images, only this, lots of snaps of clothed women, both sexy and sullen, and a bumper sticker "My car sucks but so does my wife." Although I think in America the laws on such PDAs in parked cars are enforced, in the public interest, I append the Sunday Mirror (Britain being more free-wheeling apparently) "Put the brakes on car sex" in the "Sex Doctor" 1 Feb. 2009 column by Dr Catherine Hood, with my chosen photo, for your edification.

Dear Dr Cath,

My boyfriend is very lively, both in and out of the bedroom. He wants us to have sex in the car, but isn’t this illegal?

Dear reader,

Having sex in a stationary car isn’t an offence, but if somebody spots you and complains then you’ll be in trouble.

Ensuring privacy can be a challenge, but it’s essential if you don’t want to get caught – so pick your spot carefully.

Having sex in a moving car, however, is most definitely illegal.

Some idiots like to drive fast and get sexual pleasure at the same time.

But masturbating, receiving oral sex or having penetration while driving a vehicle is dangerous.

Don’t be tempted – no matter how “lively"? your boyfriend is feeling.

Jean-François Revel & Matthieu Ricard's "The Monk & the Philosopher": Book Review.

Political philosopher, "Without Marx or Jesus" author, talks to his son, molecular biologist Ph.D. turned Tibetan monk. The result: dense, philosophical, fair-minded, and stubbornly opposed showdown. Empiricism confronts contemplation. While the results, as they've been since the Axial Age that found Socrates spearheading rational progress while the Buddha sought personal transformation, find neither contestant giving in, the two provide 300 stimulating pages full of insight.

They discuss in 1996, as Revel sums up halfway: "Buddhism's metaphysics, its theory of consciousness, its cosmology, and the repercussions of these great philosophical and metaphysical edifices on the conduct of human life" are the "problems" that engage Buddhists; Westerners, Revel contrasts, gave up "public debate" long ago on these issues, which may account for the interest aroused now in the West by the East. Revel, as a leading French intellectual and editor, finds that science took over from philosophy after the Renaissance; ethics seems to have been surrendered by philosophers retreating to academic quibbles, and religion has been consumed by its co-option with Islamic hegemony or its Christian desertion in most of today's Europe.

Jack Miles notes in his preface the lack of comparative coverage of Judaism and Christianity by Revel & Ricard; as Ricard served as the Dalai Lama's translator on a visit to the Carthusian monastery of La Grande Chartreuse, I would have also liked more than the page or two devoted to this fascinating detour. On one monk from the West who came East, Thomas Merton, Ricard puzzled me when he credited that dramatic 1968 pilgrimage of Merton "who was sent to the East by Pope John XXIII" (154)-- who died five years before Merton's final journey. Similarly, the previous dialogue between a Greek-trained positivist, Menander who ruled Bactria the second half of the 2nd c. BCE, and a Buddhist practitioner Nagasena, "Milindapanha" or "The Questions of King Milinda"--alluded to here but unnamed-- deserves clarification (and expansion) as an early predecessor for such a high-level meeting of minds.

Ricard's advantage? Unlike his monastic peers, he comes with a grounding in science and the West, as one from the unbelievers such as his father. Like his peers, his quarter-century of immersion in the Himalayan culture and languages affords him an enviable position for comparison and contrast with the Western ideas that formed him. Miles locates the clash of father's demands for Enlightenment-encouraged external proof for assertions as challenging the son's confidence that they can be traced along internal stages towards ego-dissolution into ultimately intangible but nonetheless existing-- if at a level beyond demonstration to an external device-- of nirvanic enlightenment. Miles defines "enlightened self-interest" as dynamically compelling Westerners on to a narcissism pretending to be a nirvana, one of "cultural autism" as we solipsistically confuse material gain for real wisdom. (x)

Ricard in my opinion's weak in refuting the Uncreated Creator argument, but he often gets the better of the contest; he provides a wealth of anecdotes and metaphors to balance Revel's tangible results via concrete reasoning. Metaphysics takes place on a different level, yet it's "an undeniable reality" as "contemplative experience" shows "the direct vision of a truth that the mind is obliged to accept because it corresponds, in that domain, to the nature of things." It's not irrational: "It simply goes beyond conceptual reasoning." (68) Revel can respect his son's assertions, but he denies their independently verifiable proof. Ricard counters that 2500 years of experimentation into the inner mind have revealed truths as persuasive as Revel's education that's built on 2500 years of progress into philosophy, politics, science, and ethics. Mind sciences in the East are not taken seriously by Revel-- and all but a handful of Ricard's former colleagues.

Revel constantly returns to the deleterious effects that an inward bent has done for the Eastern lack of progress, its despotism, its poverty, and its indifference to suffering on a physical level. For Ricard, the balance between medical progress and spiritual advancement's essential for the East, but he cautions how the Western consumers have lost their moorings in a welter of existential, Freudian, structuralist theory that cannot substitute for the loss of faith. He reminds his father that a prisoner must figure a way out of his chains before he can free his fellow inmates. Spiritual transformation within must precede the efforts of creating a better life for others; this follows, nonetheless, as an inevitable corollary for one is impelled to liberate others from suffering once freed. This teaching's a core truth to act upon for Mahayana Buddhism and Tibetan bodhisattva models.

Perverted faith, they agree, has its dangers when monotheistic missionaries (Moghul India for Islam and Christianity) or polytheistic (as with the Hindu) regimes have decimated Buddhism in its homeland. Revel reminds us often of the failure of Marxism and political utopias; his skepticism about collective idealism whether in religion or doctrine, manifesto or dogma's bracing and relevant as Communist China's oppression of Tibet reminds both men of how power and profit strives to crush idealism and compassion. The rebirth by the painful transfer of teachings outside Tibet, as documented here sadly, may however allow more people in the West such as Ricard-- and us by extension who read this-- to learn or at least debate with the dharma. The Buddha himself told his listeners to test and sift what they heard, not to take on faith what had not been found true by experience, reflection, and application. This jibes well with Revel's rationalism, although he can never countenance Buddha's claims for an inner progress as provable by the same "scientific" proof as a lab experiment. Yet, Revel also tells us how the root of "theoria" itself rests in "contemplation."

The chapter on the dangers of cultural influences that dilute a spiritual tradition, however, proved skimpy compared to the satisfaction of earlier epistemological discussions, and the parts on Buddhism in the West suffer by comparison with their lack of heft. The second half of the book's markedly easier to read, however, after the foundations of investigation and debate have been built. I encourage readers to persevere until chapter seven. The scope shifts from interior to exterior terrain and the altitude's a bit easier to breathe in for those less skilled in moral and scientific discourse than these two formidably learned men!

For instance, psychoanalysis is lauded by Revel while Ricard warns: "It's no use to keep on stirring up the mud from the bottom of a lake if you want to purify the water." (260) Ricard offers the Buddhist alternatives to free one from the delusions of the ego; "the only good thing about negativity is that it can be purified and dissolved. All those sediments down in the unconscious aren't made of rock. They're just ice-- ice that can be melted in the sun of wisdom." (264)

Revel's not having any of this without measuring results: "All just metaphors!" Ricard hits another target with a fresh aim when considering how novelty drives the Westerner towards always another item, another idea, another goal that then itself recedes as one tries in vain to grasp it so as to prop up the ego, the "personality." Sacred art, he shows, doesn't let the imagination run riot. It calms the mind, whereas "Western art often tries to create an imaginary world." Rather than arousing passions, sacred art, dance, and painting give one objects to meditate upon "to penetrate to the nature of reality." Which, for a Buddhist, pulls beyond the commonsensical relative truth to an ultimate emptiness in a welcome void.

The nihilism that distorted 19th c. translations of Buddhism for Westerners Ricard corrects throughout; there's no escape from the world but a non-theistic, non-coercive re-orientation of the viewer towards its insubstantial nature vs. the everlasting quest for inner freedom from the tangibles that trap us. For Revel, these material gains outweigh the spiritual journey taken by an individual; the social progress and practical demands impel an activist to trust in real-world progress and not illusory esoteric exercises.

Perhaps, there's an impasse remaining at the conclusion. Two centuries of Westerners pursue "the idea that all human problems-- questions of personal happiness, personal development, wisdom, the ability to bear suffering or be rid of it-- could be solved through historical dialectic, as Hegel and Marx said." Anything interior or personal became demeaned as "ideological fantasies, illusory remains of the belief that happiness and equilibrium could be attained on an individual level. That desertion of personal wisdom in favor of collective transformation reached fever pitch with Marxism." (276) Revel knows intimately the dangers of true belief by non-believers in conventional faith. The intransigence and dogmatism endure within many even as popes and pashas are overthrown. The lack of morality and personal wisdom left by secularism in the West-- on both sides of the Iron Curtain-- account for the appeal that Buddhism may be finding today.

Both men would agree we live in a dissatisfied state. They differ on how to regain our comfort. Both stress morality, kindness, and compassion. Out of these common goals, the direction where they follow their paths converge. As Ricard sums it up: "What Buddhism could help to change is the overall attitude that consists in giving priority to 'having' over 'being'" (138); Revel agrees, but he also fears that Western distortions of Buddhism may lead to its dilution before its inner, if frustratingly for him, untestable promises can bear fruition. Ricard, calmly, invites us to try the path inside the mind to test his confidence in its healing: he cites the Buddha's "it is up to you to follow it" by one's own personal experience that leads into silence. Revel might prefer to see a brain scan, for his knowledge must be documented externally. Out of this standoff, the two men part ways, one on the way to wisdom, one to "scientific certitude."

(P.S. See Daisaku Ikeda's chapter on King Milinda in "Buddhism: The First Millennium," to be reviewed by me when reprinted in August 2009. Also compare Pankraj Mishra's "An End to Suffering" for a post-9/11 perspective from an Indian who compares especially post-Enlightenment Western intellectual history to the Buddha in his historical and contemporary socio-political contexts.)

Earr an Earraigh

Tá earr an Earraigh inniu. Titeann bláthannaí shaicarandaigh go talamh. Ag imeall mo theach, féicim siad ag titeadh anois agus ansin.

Súim. Féachaim. Éistim.

Eitilíonn bláthannaí labhandair go tobann suas. Tagann siad suas gan rabhaidh. Tumann siad chomh má bheadh ag fáil báis. Muise, faigheann siadsan le hadhairt a fháil.

Caithfidh muid ár ndóchas a choinneáil gach uair. Smaoiním go mbeadh siad beo fós ar aghaide mo shúile, mar sin féin. Fanann muid i measc na beo idir an dá am.

Cruinním aon bláth tite nuabhainte. Iniúchaim sé go grinn é. Coimeádaim sé ina láimh agam.

Is cosúil é lena páipéar Seapanách go cuanna. Scrúdaím pistil aige istigh leis fionnadh is lú. Tá siad mothal mínchatach gruaige go domhain nach beag in íochtar.

Chríochnaíonn an bláth seo. Tosaím luach blátha sin a ardú amháin anois ar scor ar bith. Is cosúil é go beo breis agam níos faide an bás anabaí le déanái de.

Tá lá is faide inniu. Éiríonn an gréine is airde ar spéir gorm os ár gcionn. Titeann bláthannái anuas go lag ach go socair suaimhneach. Foghlaimíonn muid ag tuigeann faoi caitheamh ama. Béidh an lá a rugadh mé eile leis ceithre laethanta.

The End of Spring.

It's the end of Spring today. Jacaranda blossoms fall to earth. Around my house, I see them falling now and then.

I sit. I look. I listen.

The lavender blooms fly down unexpectedly. They come down without warning. They plunge as if death's finding them. Indeed, they themselves meet a natural death.

I think they may be still alive before my eyes, all the same. We must hold on to hope against hope. We remain among the living in the meantime.

I gather one freshly fallen blossom. I scrutinize it carefully. I hold it in my hand.

It resembles elegant Japanese paper. I examine its pistil inside with tiniest cilia. They're a fuzzy head of hair deep down almost at the bottom.

This blossom's finished. I start to appreciate the value of that bloom only now, however. It seems more real to me beyond its recent sudden death.

Today's the longest day. The sun rises highest in the blue sky above us. The blooms fall down slowly but quietly and peacefully. They teach us to understand the passing of time. It will be another birthday for me in four days.

Ghriangraf/ Photo: "Bláth shaicarandaigh ar mo ghloine gaoithe"/ "Jacaranda flower on my windscreen" le/by "Dalinean" 2007.