Gabriel Gudding's Blog, page 35

how to write better poetry

Ride your bicycle - wend in stuff

Watch a documentary - The Future of Food

Maybe you are an intimate thing
What about that guy Jean Dubuffet proponent of art brut who said "it is usually by racing on stilts that you learn to ride a bike, by sailing on a stormy sea that you become a fine dancer, and by playing the flute that you learn to paint" -- Letter to Jacques Berne, 17 March 1947, Prospectus II, p. 248 and Prospectus IV, p. 110 Eat well? Know who Norman Borlaug was, died Saturday in...

mind of boundless love

Puññameva so sikkheyya
āyataggaṃ sukhudrayaṃ
Dānañca samacariyañca
mettacittañca bhāvaye

Train oneself in doing the good that lasts and invites happiness

Cultivate generosity, a life of peace
a mind of boundless love

Itivuttaka 1.22

[photo - the New Delhi police force sitting a ten-day course in Vipassana meditation. Their female Chief of Police, Dr. Kiran Bedi, third from left, front row.]

new essays in moral philosophy

An extraordinary collection of essays on moral philosophy edited by Cheshire Calhoun. This book and two others serve as texts in the senior seminar I teach this semester, the course serving as our department's capstone course. Decided to teach it as an ethics course, and this book serves extraordinarily well. What ethical purpose do your studies here give you? To what ethical use do you put your degree in English Studies? How will what you learned here benefit others upon your graduation? Its TO

william james to teachers -- on meditation

We have lately had a number of accomplished Hindoo visitors at Cambridge, who talked freely of life and philosophy. More than one of them has confided to me that the sight of our faces, all contracted as they are with the habitual American over-intensity and anxiety of expression, and our ungraceful and distorted attitudes when sitting, made on him a very painful impression. "I do not see," said one, "how it is possible for you to live as you do, without a single minute in your day deliberately

the poem of lovingkindness - kariniya metta sutta - as re...

the poem of lovingkindness - kariniya metta sutta - as read by thanissaro bhikkhu

one of the things remarkable about this ars vivendiis that it was the first such tradition to practice extending a deliberately loving attitudetoward other creatures, other species

video podcast of paul fleischman, vipassana teacher in th...

video podcast of paul fleischman, vipassana teacher 
in the tradition of sayagyi u ba khin (as taught by s n goenka)germany december 2007
the topic - how a practice of vipassana orients a practitioner in both the causal momentum of recent and past action (kamma) and in the chaos of what arises moment to moment

Video podcast of lay Acariya Paul Fleischman, vipassana t...

Video podcast of lay Acariya Paul Fleischman, vipassana teacher 
in the tradition of Sayagyi U Ba Khin (as taught by S N Goenka)Germany December 2007
The topic - how the practice of vipassana orients a practitioner in both the causal momentum of recent and past action (kamma) and in the chaos of what arises from moment to moment

Ajahn Candasiri b. 1947 Edinburgh Scotland senior nun in...

Ajahn Candasiri  b. 1947 Edinburgh Scotland 

senior nun in Thai Forest Tradition ordained in 1979 

reads Padhana Sutta: The Striving

[translated here a little differently by Thanissaro Bhikkhu]

Audio files of dhamma talks by Thanissaro Bhikkhu, arrang...

Audio files of dhamma talks by Thanissaro Bhikkhu, arranged by topic. Simple. Clear. Skillful.
An American from Ohio, Thanissaro Bhikkhu is a translator of Pali. He ordained as a Thai forest monk decades ago in the kammaṭṭhāna tradition, an austere monastic tradition devoted to constant meditation.
He is fluent in Thai and in fact has talks you can listen to in Thai, which I have done.
Here he reads from various suttas, including the Kariniya Metta Sutta, the hymn of lovingkindness.

Clio, Daniel Borzutzky and I at the Printer's Ball at the...

Clio, Daniel Borzutzky and I at the Printer's Ball at the Chicago Art Institute, July 31. Photo by Kristin Dykstra. Daniel and I were there giving readings and representing Mandorla: Nueva Escritura de las Américas, for which we both serve as contributing editors. Clio was there being her cheery, funny, happy self.