Crossing Nebraska

The commencement of any solitary creative endeavor is an act of faith. Depending upon our area of interest, we sit down with our notebooks or in front of our computers, we reflect upon the materials available to us, or we gaze upon our subject while sitting in front of a fresh white canvas. And as we do we have faith that something will materialize: a poem, a manuscript, a sculpture, a painting, etc. I’m steeped in such faith as I write these words, having promised the world in my last post that I’d have something meaningful to say under the title “Beyond Faith and Reason” -- without my having written a single word on the subject up until now! In addition to faith, the creative process requires at least a modicum of reason and objectivity. The writing process especially requires a great deal of time spent in rational reflection on the work in progress: Have I made any spelling or grammatical mistakes? Is that the most appropriate word to use in this instance? Have I made my point ...

Sweltering summer afternoons such as these inevitably remind me of my childhood – the still air, the unrelenting sun, and the silence only intermittently punctuated by the ratcheting sound of a grasshopper in mid hop, or the unanswered call of a field sparrow, or the sticking sound that automobile tires make as they accelerate down an almost melting asphalt road. “How about we go fossil hunting?” I’d pose the question over the phone to my childhood friend, Charlie, or he to me. “What time?” was the usual response, neither of us needing much in the way of convincing when it came to such suggestions. “After lunch. One o’clock. Under the railroad trestle.” And so we’d meet in the shade of the old wooden bridge and ride our bicycles along the dusty trail to where the new highway cut through the layers of a limestone undergirded hillside. Once there, we’d make our way slowly, almost wordlessly along the fractured strata, carefully overturning the loose rock, becoming more ...

The Buddhist concept of shunyata , or emptiness, is perhaps one of the most difficult to grasp of all. One reason for this difficulty, of course, relates to the fact that there is simply no really good English equivalent for it. The Western mind is too used to thinking of the world in dualistic terms to have invented vocabulary suitable to the discussion of such a foreign concept. And so we scratch our heads and pick a word that comes close, and then we spend a little time (or a lot of time) expounding upon what we really mean. The problem with a concept like shunyata is that it is so far removed from how we normally think about the world that we have no ready frame of reference for it. It’s a little like trying to imagine a five-dimensional universe when all we’ve ever known are the four dimensions of space and time. How do we even begin to comprehend five dimensions when the very blood and bone and nerves and tissue of our body/mind have evolved over billions of years tightly enmes...

With so much being written about Buddhism these days, it would seem difficult to find someone who doesn’t have at least a passing familiarity with such concepts as impermanence and emptiness . The teaching that undergirds these two, however – namely, dependent origination – is far less well known and almost certainly less well understood. In the most general sense, dependent origination conveys the reality that absolutely every “thing” that comes into being owes its existence to myriad causes and conditions, constantly in flux, that form the ground from which and the environment into which that “thing” arises. A number of Buddhist teachings expound upon this reality within the context of helping us understand the process by which suffering arises – thereby helping us understand its cessation. The so-called twelve-fold chain of dependent origination is a detailed description of this process. I’ll be exploring this chain in greater detail in a future post. For now, though, I’m merel...