Earth Now
Spring 2012 Vol. 28 #2
Spring 2012 Vol. 28 #2
Introduction
Drawing from the wisdom of Zen elders, the news of our times, and personal experience, Sue Moon’s opening essay lays a foundation for the offerings that follow.
Features
Impermanence doesn’t mean we lose our manners! Veteran environmentalist Gary Snyder invites us to bring some dignity to our relations with our non-human neighbors. It’s a matter of etiquette. And of course he reminds us to simplify our lives.
Imagine your life as a leaf in the generations of leaves, says Susan Moon, who invokes Zen Master Dogen, the Andromeda galaxy and a 2,000-year-old baby to remind us we are timepieces, albeit flashes in the perennial pan.
Elder Joanna Macy discusses the mind-destroying acceleration of time and urges us toward an expanded inner clock that encompasses ancestors and future generations alike.
Physicist Robert Fraser describes how the effects of our actions will be especially significant in the case of climate change.
Step by step and breath by breath, professor Joe Galewsky visits the melting Quelccaya Ice Cap and reflects on change. Even glaciers are impermanent. All the more reason to save all beings
Did you know that we share 26 percent of our genes with yeast? Zenshin Florence Caplow feels the flutter of moth wings upon her face and asks, “Is there anything that is not a relation?”
In the aftermath of Fukushima, artist and activist Mayumi Oda works despair into hope through art, practice, “vegetable nirvana” and pilgrimage.
Sitting under a tree is not enough, even if it’s the bodhi tree. Venerable Bhikkhu Bodhi warns us to wake up to systemic greed and delusion before it takes us all over the cliff.
In the park, love reigned. Artist Noah Fischer takes us with him into the streets of New York City to turn confrontations into connection. “Occupy-operas” and the trust of hundreds of strangers blur lines between real life and performance, between us and them.
“May I touch this pain, may I touch this sorrow.” Rebecca Johnson takes us to Mossville, LA, where local people join together and stand up to the corporations and factories that are poisoning their community.
Richard Lang and his wife Judith comb the beach for polymerized hydrocarbon (plastic trash). They turn this detritus of our consumer consciousness into art.
Up to her elbows in slurry, Barbara Gates makes love and war come alive through combat papermaking.
On a Sacred Sites Peace Walk for a Nuclear-Free World, Joan Lohman joins Ohlone elders in chanting the Lotus Sutra, and washes the tired feet of walkers.
Launching off the cushion and into the action. Naropa student Kate Josephson reviews Dharmic video clips from the Occupy movement.
Peruse online resources for a more in-depth look at the effects of climate change.
Poems & Not Poems
Dharma Jewel
Remembering Mysteries of Death: Personal Encounters with The Tibetan Book of the Dead
By Steven D. Goodman
Steven D. Goodman offers intimate glimpses of Tibetan Buddhist practices for guiding the dying through the journey between this life and what comes after.
Reviews
Haiku Before Haiku: From the Renga Masters to Basho, Translated by Steven D. Carter
Reviewed By Diana K. McLean
(163 pp., Columbia University Press, 2011)
(160 pp., Snow Lion Publications, 2012)
(177 pp., Snow Lion Publications, 2011)
(65 min., International Society for Ecology and Culture, 2011)
Practice
From Mt. Tamalpais to Rio de Janeiro to butter lettuce fields by the sea at Green Gulch, Wendy Johnson walks with intention, bringing the Dharma down to earth.
The Dharma & The Drama
Wes Nisker gives us good reason to love all beings as ourselves, including LUCA (“last universal common ancestor”) and the ill-fated frog. From marine worms to pre-human primates, all of our ancestors deserve our devotion.