Arts, Sports, Idleness
Spring 1997 Vol. 13 #2
Spring 1997 Vol. 13 #2
Introduction
In this issue of Inquiring Mind, we look at how the truths of dharma are expressed and realized through the arts of theater, poetry and even idleness.
Features
The Improvisation of Presence: A Conversation with Ruth Zaporah
By Mudita Nisker, Barbara Gates, Wes Nisker
Performance artist Ruth Zaporah explains Action Theater, her skillful means of taking people out of their personal stories and into the embodied truth of the moment, both on stage and off.
Poet Anne Waldman explores her creative process and her “vow to poetry” as sacred text.
Vipassana teacher Anna Douglas shares an art-making process that keeps the practitioner in the moment.
Patrick McMahon muses on the inspiration he and others of our generation find in our dharma ancestor Jack Kerouac, who makes us look straight into the face of suffering—his, ours, and that of the bum on the corner.
Barbara Gates seeks to ease strife both within and outside, with a lullaby that points toward some of life’s mysteries.
. . . Centers & Practice
Caitriona Reed’s Manzanita Village offers meditation practice with the flavors of wilderness and a dharma of deep ecology.
Ajahn Amaro introduces this excerpt from a lively talk by Robert A. F. Thurman on the importance of monasticism’s usefulness or uselessness.
Larry Rosenberg describes daily-life practices at Cambridge Insight Meditation Center, a modern, urban, working-world sangha.
Poems & Not Poems
Just for fun, this issue’s “Not Poem” is a word puzzle in the form of a koan by Susan Moon and Wes Nisker.
Reviews
That’s Funny, You Don’t Look Buddhist, by Sylvia Boorstein
(170 pp., HarperSanFrancisco, 1997)
The Jew in the Lotus, by Rodger Kamenetz
(304 pp., HarperSanFrancisco, 1994)
Jerusalem Moonlight: An American Zen Teacher Walks the Path of his Ancestors, by Norman Fischer
Reviewed By Alan Senauke
(190 pp., Clear Glass Press, 1995)
Buddhist Women on the Edge: Contemporary Perspectives from the Western Frontier, edited by Marianne Dresser
Reviewed By Suzie Rashkis
(344 pp., North Atlantic Books, 1996)
Bare-Bones Meditation: Waking Up from the Story of My Life by Joan Tollifson
Reviewed By Martha Boesing
(239 pp., Bell Tower, New York, 1996)
From A Burning House: The AIDS Project Los Angeles Writers Workshop Collection Edited by Irene Borger
Reviewed By Ronna Kabatznick
(356 pp., Washington Square Press, 1996)
Practice
With poetic beauty, Ken Jones portrays doing Idleness Practice on self-retreat in the rugged mountains of Wales.
The Dharma & the Drama
Wes Nisker looks at the origins of Western self-identity and sees that “we don’t create our self as much as the evolving idea of self creates us.”