This is a portion of a dharma talk I gave at Monmouth Zen Circle, Compassion Ocean Sangha Saturday May 5, 2012. It covers the first section of Dogen's, Bodhisattva's Four Methods of Guidance: Giving. We're new to recording here and the last portion of the talk and the discussion are missing because I am mostly technologically inept.. It was recorded directly on to my "telephone".
http://soundcloud.com/kotatsu-1/john-bailes-dharma-talk
Friday, May 11, 2012
Wednesday, May 9, 2012
I hear the lyric voice of this gruesome beauty in your free verse. which is why I love it so.
John High
2:57 PM (7 hours ago)
to John
Taking off a tattered dress worn by the dead & dancing in mud
the girl glanced over the snows of an empty
field— the horse stood by the edge of a cliff
& the voices circling about their wandering
all of this time she had thought that she
& the boy were following them, that there was
some purpose & destiny in their pilgrimage, & now
she sensed in the night that we were
following her here in night, she & the boy trailed by
monks and ghosts & birds & trees & all of
the others, and in that moment in a perfect silent
pitch—we are here.
John Bailes
10:53 PM (0 minutes ago)
to John
Destined to be here,
eyes open
or
not...
There's something about
an American poet
who loves Russians
and is a Buddhist.
There are all these boys and girls
blind and dumb
running around on the steppes,
down to creeks
and
all that land and sky
so alive from before time
and even during;
butterflies and bugs,
mosquito swarms,
clouds, horses, swords and slaughter:
some kind of
destiny.
Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, the Czar;
Akhmatova, Mandelstam and Mayakovsky;
Stalin, pogroms, and Pushkin;
Finn's starving north of Leningrad,
St. Petersburg;Solzhenitsyn's archipelagos:
Not one ever returns
as in the river,
Neva.
Who is paddling now?
I hear the lyric voice
of this gruesome beauty
in your free verse
which is why
I love it
so.
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