In Memoriam: Daigan Lueck, 1931-2015
Let Daigans Be Daigans Daigan and his partner Arlene at Tassajara, summer 1995 In May of 1995, I was perched nervously on a chair at the yurt in Tassajara, a Zen Buddhist monastery deep in the mid-coast California mountains, waiting for an evening talk to begin, trying to draw keep my spine straight and look stern yet serene, as I imagined real Zen students to be. A newly arrived resident at Zen Center and at Tassajara, one question was uppermost in my mind: Am I doing it right? Of course, other questions were waiting in the hold as well, questions that had led me to leave my home and reside...
Read MoreThe Power of No Images
The punk versus the monk In the wake of the recent horrific attacks on the Charlie Hebdo headquarters in France, there has been a vigorous debate waging in my online circles and in much of the media. While all unequivocally condemn the violence with which this attack was carried out, there are those who pose the matter entirely as one of free speech and the rights of cartoonists to lampoon whom they please, while others (many of them Muslim, or members of other religions) say that the cartoons are indeed offensive, and show an arrogance born of colonialism in general and an insensitivity to...
Read MoreTrayvon Martin and categories
The writer is aware of the propensity for categories. She has different names for the ways she spends her time and fills in spreadsheets where these types of work are duly recorded. She knows and employs known categories for food, weather, terrain, books, and people. When the furor over the Trayvon Martin case erupted, she figured that one’s reaction to it would vary depending on the group one belonged to. African-Americans would be certain that Martin was deliberately murdered for being black, as has happened so much in their history in this country, and would call for justice to be...
Read MoreRatcheting it up
I suppose I should be offended by Joan Rivers’ recent remark about German model Heidi Klum that referenced to gassing Jews, and by the casualness and callousness by which mention of the Holocaust is tossed around. But it’s hard to find the time, for soon a fresh form of outrage—some racial or homophobic slur, or just a slaphand nasty remark—will hit the airwaves, now crowded with smartphones, cell phones, iPods, iPads, and laptops. Soon some other politician or revered cultural figure will be photographed with his pants down or her stockings torn. It’s not that we...
Read MoreCountry Diary, mid-winter 2012
You get up on a Sunday morning and discover the water is off. You ran the sinks three nights in a row to avoid freezing pipes, but you overdid it, and now the water tank is dry and you cannot pump until your landlady reinstalls the pump mechanism. But she is out of town, and when she gets back she says that nothing can be done for a few days, for more freezes are expected and the pipes must stay drained. She delivers you two jugs of the good water that runs on the land: you pour it into water glasses, take a bottle upstairs to brush your teeth. You pour water from the ten-gallon jugs you...
Read MoreBlog Author
Read About Roberta Werdinger 
Recent Comments