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Showing posts from April, 2014

Emptiness: A Word Doodle

Emptiness is something I have experienced all my life though I only attributed the word to the experience after my initial exposure to Buddhism in college.  Emptiness, as I mean it here, is a particularly Buddhist project and it is the single most important aspect of Buddhism infused into my personal spirituality. Appreciating and incorporating Emptiness is tricky because it is so easily misunderstood.  My own understanding of it has shifted and evolved through the years.  The connotation of the word "empty" is more negative than positive in our western way of appreciation.  For that reason it is best to begin with what emptiness is not before proceeding to what it is and how it can positively affect the Lifeworld . Emptiness is not nothingness .  That Emptiness is a fundamental part of human Being does not mean things are illusions or pointless or even less inspiring.  Zen master Shunryu Suzuki clarifies: "I do not mean voidness. There is something, but that som

Mostly a Bull Story

My parents live in the house I was raised in - about 4 miles from my present property as the crow flies. The house was built in 1957 next to my dad's parents' house which was built in the 1880's. My dad grew up in that old house with a well for water, no indoor plumbing, and no electricity.  All that came to the old house as my dad grew into his teens.  He grew up on the small family farm of about 60 acres. Dad always wanted to be a farmer. But he married my mother in a world where 60 acres was inadequate to generate enough money to feed and cloth an early-consumerist family, though it generated tremendous garden vegetables of all kinds that could be canned or frozen, cows for milk and butter, beef and pork for slaughtering. Farm families ate very well around here in the late 1950's. The main groceries you needed were grain related, bread and flour. That was when I was born. My dad worked for a manufacturing company.  He was there when that company unionized.  Like

The Nude in Western Art: Part Four

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Note:  This completes my recent four-part tour of the nude as an art form in western culture. After Renoir and Rodin the artistic nude continued to evolve. The nature of symmetry became a multitude of tastes. With the advent of modernity there was no longer a roughly consistent symmetry for either the feminine or the masculine form. The classic nude remained potentially erotic but the nude as art was also transformed by cubism and other modern influences which objectified the human form in ways often competing with Eros . The nude was fragmented, dissected, abstracted beyond the presentation of a beautiful or sexual physique.  The representation of the human nude form became far more varied than ever before. In this sense the history of the nude in western art represents an expansion of human expression, freedom, and experience with the physical human form. That it can be so completely abstracted is a reflection of human experience that is as genuine as anything else hum

20-Game Losers

Major League Baseball started up this week. Baseball is my favorite professional sport.  More specifically, I am a lifelong Atlanta Braves fan, as my baseball posts reflect.  This post has a slight Braves ingredient to it but it has a broader focus in honor of the start of the 2014 season.  It deals with one aspect of the game that has changed through the years. There is a list in the "frivolities" category at baseball-reference.com of 20-game losers .  The fact that such a list is today considered "frivolous" says a great deal about Major League Baseball and how it has changed over the many decades of its history. What is frivolous today didn't used to be.  In the 19th century it was commonplace for starting pitchers to lose 20 games or more in a season. That is because back then each team only had 2-3 regular starters; there were no regular relief pitchers or closers.  You took the dirty, tobacco-juiced ball and you threw 8 or 9 innings. You did that 2-3 g