At our organization, Mindfulness Peace Project, where I work as the “Co-Executive Director,” the lion’s share of what we do consists of helping prison inmates to learn dharma. This has resulted in some cases in many year relationships with people I’ve never directly met, done entirely through writing personal letters and commenting on […]
The enduring interest in any artistic production, as I started to address in the previous post, remains a hard thing to pin down, as much as critics might monumentalize it. Why this photo comes to the fore and not that one–I don’t necessarily have a language to describe it. That’s the most interesting thing. […]
A fundamental element to my practice of taking pictures, particularly of the natural world, comes from the perceptual sense that I could take a thousand pictures standing in one spot—that everything I see constitutes an organic artfulness that doesn’t require fashioning. What the eye can see has […]
I arrived in South Korea in September 1995, and I’d been there 3-4 months. I started to think about my camera, a beloved Minolta 35 mm. film camera I’d had by then for about ten years. I hadn’t put it to use, but here I was in a perceptual world quite distinct from my lifelong […]
Last year I addressed Taylor Swift’s divahood in this space, but with her “Eras” tour that’s dominated the music industry and media this year, she’s raised herself via apotheosis to pop goddess. What else can you call her, as the camera descends on the roof of the state of the art SoFi Stadium in LA, […]
Am I the only one who sees the Israeli-Hamas conflict as psychotic? Am I the only one who wasn’t surprised when it arrived at a whole new level of savagery? If the Israelis in any way still wondered what Hamas thinks of them, now they know: Hamas’ hatred burns so intensely it wants to chop […]
The last episode of Winning Time’s second season on HBO charts the 1984 NBA finals between Magic Johnson’s LA Lakers and Larry Bird’s Boston Celtics, an animosity great enough for the Boston fans to pummel the Laker’s bus in a flurry of garbage as it pulled out of Boston Garden. In a signature brutal moment […]
If you live in the western US, on the grassland plains, you probably know prairie dogs, whom you can find tunneling vacant lots, quite possibly in your neighborhood. At least, they’re certainly in my neighborhood. When I walk out through King’s Ridge and take the bike path out to Cottonwood Trail, I pass them foraging […]
“The pure products of America go crazy—” –William Carlos Williams, “To Elsie” While his name may live on in militant rightwing bunkers on the internet as a martyr to government tyranny, most likely most of us won’t remember his story a day later. Americans have extraordinarily […]
In 1981, my first year at Naropa, Ram Dass came and did some talks. One thing he said has always stuck with me: “People ask me what I think about the theory of reincarnation, and they get mad when I tell them it’s not a theory, it’s a fact.” It’s not a theory, it’s a […]
