THE FIRST FREE WOMEN

2.9

2020

An inspired evening of women’s voices, poetry filled with Buddhist teachings and community. Composed around the Buddha’s lifetime, the Therigatha (Verses of the Elder Nuns) contains poems by the first Buddhist women. Here you’ll find princesses and courtesans, tired wives of arranged marriages and the desperately in love, those born into limitless wealth and those born with nothing at all. Their voices are all here.

www.shambhala.com/the-first-free-women.html

Matty Weingast revives this ancient collection with a contemporary and radical adaptation that remains true to the essence of each poem and highlights the struggles and doubts, as well as the strength, perseverance, and profound compassion, embodied by these courageous women.

Matty Weingast with Koshin Paley Ellison

~*~

Readers

Tenku Ruff - Victoria Redel - Sebebene Selassie - Marie Howe

Robert Chodo Campbell-Marie Howe and Koshin Paley Ellison

 

Teku Ruff with Sebebene Selassie

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The New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care

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The Moon

<<>>

NIGHT and DAY

Manhattan Moon

5.17.2019

Another Way of Seeing

5.18.2019
6 a.m.


7 a.m.
7:10 a.m.

 7:20 a.m.

~*~

TRANSITION

(double click to enlarge any image)
 
March 29th
Visiting Barbara
(after successful knee surgery)

The Present
by Billy Collins

Much has been said about being in the present.
It’s the place to be, according to the gurus,
like the latest club on the downtown scene,
but no one, it seems, is able to give you directions.

It doesn’t seem desirable or even possible
to wake up every morning and begin
leaping from one second into the next
until you fall exhausted back into bed.

Plush, there’d be no past
with so many scenes to savor and regret,
and no future, the place you will die
but not before flying around with a jet-pack.

The trouble with the present is
that it’s always in a state of vanishing.
Take the second it takes to end
this sentence with a period–already gone.

What about the moment that exists
between banging your thumb
with a hammer and realizing
you are in a whole lot of pain?

What about the one that occurs
after you hear the punch line
but before you get the joke?
Is this the where the wise men want us to live

in that intervening tick, the time slot
that occurs after you have spent hours
searching downtown for that new club
and just before you die up and head back
home?

from "The Rain In Portugal"
Random House, 2016

 ~*~

March 30th

Manhattan Midnight
Full Moon in the crook of a crooked branch

~*~

March 31st

This City
Old and New

*

 ~*~

April 1st

Lines for Future Haiku
(7s and 5s)

by Ms.

An angel passes over

The egg proves rebirth

Surely Spring is here

Geese have returned once again

Sunday Christ rises from death

We'll celebrate April fools

Eat Candy, be glad

Hyacinth will bloom

And, all wars will end

I'm sending a wish

May you be well and content

Scatter seeds like promises
~*~

Sunny Morning
Duckling Dear

 Supper
Wild caught Alaskan Cod, Green sauce (one Cilantro salad dressing + Fresh Spinach pureed), Organic Pasta

 5PM

  Snow Tonight

 ~*~

Easter Past

https://mscomfortzone.blogspot.com/2013/03/sunday-morning.html
~*~ 

IMAGES

If what you see is what you get, then I'm not through my getting yet

Yellow Jasper

Fragment of the head of a Queen:
http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/544514
Photo behind it:

Egyptian workers on an excavation site

carrying sand or artifacts in small woven baskets

"The Ground On Which I Stand"
An American Masters documentary about August Wilson
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Wilson
Scene from
"Jem Of The Ocean"

http://youtu.be/IOlSXgcIoPU

Flight Feathers
Screen Capture
"Owl Power"

Throwback Thursday
Seventies when a photographer friend used me in a series
'Cat-Cape-Effigy-Mask-Attitude'

Another Throwback

Women I knew from my film days

Agnes Varda-Carol Clement-Ariel Dougherty

The Quilt I loved
from Deanna Cohen's recent post at Face book

Postcard
Painting by Michael Sowa

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Sowa

Out Back In Manhattan
Shadows and Textures

Lines and Tracks

 Fragment of Cloth Art
by Grace Forest

 See the whole cloth still in process:
http://windthread.typepad.com/windthread/2015/02/flow.html

Postcard
Lower Manhattan Full Moon Collage
On February 23rd in 1927, physicist Werner Heisenberg first described his Uncertainty Principle in a letter. In a nutshell, the Uncertainty Principle states that the more precisely we can determine a particle's momentum, the less information we have about its position, and vice versa. The principle represents one of the most fundamental differences between quantum mechanics and classical physics.  Albert Einstein - who was a classical physicist - disagreed with quantum mechanics in general and the Uncertainty Principle in particular; he said, "I like to believe that the moon is still there even if we don't look at it."

The most potent part of everything is invisible and unknowable,
 It's transmitted through words that suggest it--by images, by gestures,
by thoughts that float on the air we share, and yet it remains itself.