Peter Clothier's Blog, page 185

Saturday AM

A good night's sleep. No Ambien.

Unintended Acceleration

I'm suffering from unintended acceleration. I woke this morning greatly relived to have had a good night's sleep. It has become something of a rarity these past few weeks, and I have consequently been suffering from a good deal of fatigue.
Here's how it goes: I get to sleep just fine. Occasionally, worrying about the lack of sleep the night before, I will take half an Ambien to help me drop off. But then, even with the Ambien, Nature will insist on calling in the middle of the night--at ...

Planning

I woke this morning greatly relived to have had a good night's sleep. It has become something of a rarity these past few weeks, and I have consequently been suffering from a good deal of fatigue.
Here's how it goes: I get to sleep just fine. Occasionally, worrying about the lack of sleep the night before, I will take half an Ambien to help me drop off. But then, even with the Ambien, Nature will insist on calling in the middle of the night--at 2:30, say, or 3:00. I stagger off sleepily t...

"CAIRNS ALONG THE ROAD"

I now have the information I lacked before--how to lay your hands on a copy of the book I write about below. It's simple: write a check for $10 plus $2 shipping and handling to Bill Mawhinney and mail it off to him at 25 McKenzie Lane, Port Ludlow, WA 98365. Simple!

Poems...

Here comes my friend, Bill Mawhinney, with a new book of poems. Bill is not famous. Oh, yes, these days you can Google him and find a couple of his poems online. You can even watch him read. But famous? No. Which does not mean the man is not capable of stringing together some beautiful lines that will reach directly from his heart to yours.
Here he is, addressing one Leonard Gregg, arsonist, whose action destroyed the beloved Show Low, Arizona landscape where he lived:

Leonard, Tuesday...

Avatar: A Film Review

Well, we finally succumbed to the hype and went to see Avatar. A friend had told us she had heard it was "anti-American." No worries on that score. I see it as profoundly American in its depiction of the perennial battle within the American soul between the individual and the collective vision, between self-interest and idealism, between the avid pursuit of material gain and ecstatic transcendentalism. If there are, on the one side, the abject creatures of American capitalism, the other ...

Megaphones

This morning, rather than write anything myself--because I feel lazy--I offer you this link sent to me by my friend Stuart, an artist and a stalwart reader of The Buddha Diaries. In other words, he has his head screwed on right. I think this video is brilliant, because it shows us how we could make our voices heard, if we chose to do so. Too often I know I sit around and mope a bit about how bad things are and wish I knew how to wake people up, because in my judgment vast numbers of us are...

1001; and a Sneeze

If it was 1000 yesterday, it must be 1001 today, and counting... Entries, that is. In The Buddha Diaries. It's a good number. There were, as I recall, 1001 nights...
Anyway, this sneeze. It came during meditation this morning, and I thought it worth writing about, because its sudden arrival reminded me how valuable a sneeze can be. It announces its imminent eruption with a tiny tickle in the back of the nose--a tickle to which it's impossible to pay attention. It comes as wake-up call t...

1,000; and Some Art

Here's another milestone. Today, I get to write my 1,000th entry in The Buddha Diaries... Hard to believe!
We made a few gallery stops yesterday. I had been intending for a while to stop by the Taylor De Cordoba Gallery to see some new paintings by Kimberly Brooks. A word of disclosure here: Kimberly is a colleague on The Huffington Post, and has been a welcome reader and supporter of my writing. I don't suppose that anyone comes here to The Buddha Diaries looking for anything other than ...

Teaching Ignorance

Did anyone else come across this article in yesterday's New York Times? It seems that, not content with promulgating their absurd antipathy to evolutionary science, the "creationists" in several states are now seeking to include their rejection of the science of climate change in school curricula. I tend to attribute most of this country's problems to its long-standing starvation of the basic education system for its citizens. The willful ignorance of much of the electorate has led us int...