Recently noted:

These days, I watch no television, listen to no radio, read no newspapers or periodicals, and studiously avoid news on the web. ("News is the last addiction before - what?" - Bill Gray in Don DeLillo's Mao II.) The phenomenal and the numinous grow identical.

"...To the mind

there is such a thing as news, whereas
to inner knowing, it's all in the middle

of its happening. To doubters, this is
a pain. To believers, it's gospel.

To the lover and the visionary,
it's life as its being lived."

- Rumi

"He would say, though, that poetry can be dangerous, especially beautiful poetry, because it gives the illusion of having had the experience without actually going through it." - Coleman Barks.

In August of 2006, after an interregnum of about 10 years without, a computer and web connect arrived at me. I now make a quotidian habit of visiting the Guardian Allotment Blog. I greatly savor the musings of and correspondence with friends john chris jones (what's new) in London, and Toby Hemenway in Portland, OR. I use online dictionaries; I do occasional plant, book and people research. That, in a nutshell, has been the sum of my web surfing. I receive no measureable listserv traffic.

Public libraries remain one of the most courageous outposts of civilized life in the United States. I'm a Big Fan. My most enjoyable read of the past 12 months? George Steiner's Errata: An Examined Life. The perennial bedside influence? Gary Paul Nabhan. My favorite nostalgic romp, of late? Pat Gilbert's Passion is a fashion: the real story of The Clash. My most treasured recent find? New Zealand herbalist Isla Burgess' Weeds Heal. My most-overdue encounter, this year, has been with the work of Thomas Moore. Another recent read, The Culture of Pain by David Morris, strikes me as monumentally humane. Wendell Berry is a farmer where I am a gardener, but I find his particularizing critiques of materialist fundamentalism consistently revelatory. I stand with his latest, The Way of Ignorance: And Other Essays. The art and poetry I most commonly attend to is created locally by friends.

Quickly, off the toppa my head, here are 10 books I have recently recommended to those close to me: The Lost Language of Plants: The Ecological Importance of Plant Medicines for Life on Earth by Stephen Harrod Buhner; Why We Garden: Cultivating A Sense of Place by Jim Nollman; The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World by David Abram; Healing Wise by Susun Weed; The Essential Rumi by Coleman Barks; A Beginner's Guide to Constructing the Universe: Mathematical Archetypes of Nature, Art, and Science by Michael S. Schneider; Eternal Echoes by John O'Donohue; The Musical Life by W.A. Mathieu; Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady by Florence King; The Forgotten Pollinators by Gary Paul Nabhan et al...

A confession. I make a lousy advertisement for horticultural booksellers - I've glanced at literally no more than a handful of how-to gardening books through the years, even as I arrived at plants only recently, clueless. I struggle mightily for the wavelength of native experience hence, for all the bookishness (words are magical), I am wary indeed of the cave of books - "for life is not literary" as Louis MacNeice observes. How then, to redeem the Logos? To make the revelation in language, experiential; the Word, flesh? "Performance is implicit in the role of the poet. " - Anne Waldman.

A smattering then, of the recently noted:

"On the highest throne in the world we can sit only on our own arse [cul]." - Michel de Montaigne in 'Essays'.

"These typing fingers are transmitters. On and off the page." - Anne Waldman

"...and has tried to advance this craft beyond dailiness into the reaches of that-which-endures, what James Agee called 'the cruel radiance of what is.' Has tried to do so by enlisting those charged elements - narrative and critical analysis, formed out of vivid observation and direct experience in the service of themes that matter to him. Paramount among them, the location and affirmation of human community...Why does this precision of origin and purpose matter? I think because the origin and the purpose I have described (and lived) are currently imperiled - at least as they relate to 'serious' writing and the writerly consciousness. That is to say, both 'journalism' and 'community' as they are now understood have been transmuted - reduced - from replenishing elements of a stable society to the marginalized, often synthetic vestige of a convulsive one." - Ron Powers

"...dedicated to work that insists on history and its moral consequences - especially the history that coheres in specific places and community" - Ron Powers

"We are destroying our country - I mean our country itself, our land." - Wendell Berry

"We cannot immunize the continents and the oceans against our contempt for small places and small streams." - Berry

"...its prodigious cultural heritage kept certain officious brutalities at one remove." - George Steiner

"What are the civic and spiritual costs of America's new penchant for "attractions," "historic redevelopment," vast and glittering theme parks, and other devices for superimposing a synthetic community on an authentic one?" - Ron Powers

"How does one writer respond to stop the linguacide?" - Anne Waldman

"Civil courage in an ecological age means not only demanding social justice, but also aesthetic justice and the will to make judgments of taste, to stand for beauty in the public arena and speak about about it." - Hillman

"The only way I can justify using the term 'individuation' today is by extending it to mean the individuation of each moment in life, each action, each relationship, each thing." - Hillman

"More recently, therapy is learning that the psyche exists wholly in relational systems. It is not a free radical, a monad, self-determined. The Greeks knew this. The 'polis' was the other half of 'mythos.' Mythos was lived in polis...The Gods take part and are felt in civic life...The collective unconscious, as Jung said, is the world, and - also, as he said - the psyche is not in you, you are in the psyche." - Hillman

"What Nietzsche was denouncing was an insidious love of abstractions indulged in by priests, teachers and idealists of every kind." ...the Bildungphilister, 'educated philistine'. Bildung - education. Philister - philistine. - Friedrich Nietzsche, Curtis Cate

"After all, anybody is as their land and sea is...It is that which makes them and the arts they make and the work they do and the way they eat and the way they drink." - Gertrude Stein, quoted in Why Some Like It Hot: Food, Genes and Cultural Diversity, Gary Paul Nabhan

"Individuum est ineffabile" - Goethe in a letter to Lavater

"The question is not so much what is going on the room, but what is happening to me because of it." - O'Donohue

"Post-modern culture is deeply lonely. This loneliness derives in large part from the intense drive to avoid suffering and pain and the repudiation of commitment." - O'Donohue

Paul Saffo: "The first thing you learn in forecasting is the longer view you take, the more is in your self-interest. Seemingly altruistic acts are not altruistic if you take the long view." In the long run, saving yourself requires saving the whole world. - Stewart Brand

"Robert Axelrod proved [The Evolution of Cooperation, 1984]...even in a game that rewards distrust, time teaches the players the value of co-operation, however guarded they may be...To produce the benefits of more co-operation in the world, Axelrod proves, all you need to do is lengthen the shadow of the future - that is, ensure more durable relationships...We don't know what's coming. We do know we're in it together." - Stewart Brand

"'The greatest good for the greatest number' means the longest good, because the majority of people affected is always yet to come...Accepting responsibility for the health of the planet, we are gradually realizing, also means responsibility for the whole future. The worst of destructive selfishness is not "Me!" but "Me! Right now!" The generous opposite could be phrased as "All of us all of the time" - presumably including non-humans. Zen Buddhists define this task as "Infinite gratitude for the past. Infinite service to the present. Infinite responsibility to the future."

"Avoid those whose views on every subject can be confidently predicted after you have discovered what they think about one. You know, with some people who utter dire threats about global warming, for instance, that they are going to be hostile to smokers, motor cars, jokes about mothers-in-law, school nativity plays, strip shows and the swallowing of live oysters. Equally tedious are those who complain about high taxes and are bound to be in favour of the death penalty, take a tough line on asylum seekers and are hostile to gay weddings, homeopathic medicines, Muslims and conceptual art." - John Mortimer, Where There's a Will, Viking, 2005

"Terrorisits. Terrorists. Terrorists. In the Middle East, in the entire Muslim world, this word would become a plague, a meaningless punctuation mark in all our lives, a full stop erected to finish all discussion of injustice, constructed as a wall by Russians, Americans, Israelis, British, Pakistanis Saudis, Turks, to shut us up. Who would ever say a word in favor of terrorists? What cause could justify terror? So our enemies are always "terrorists." In the seventeenth century, governments used "heretic" in much the same way, to end all dialog, to prescribe obedience. Karmal's policy was simple: you are either with us or against us. For decades I have listed to this dangerous equation, uttered by capitalist and communist, presidents and prime ministers, generals and intelligence officers and, of course, newspaper editors." - Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilization.

"The land here is fertile,
keep up the gait
Revulsion is the foot of meditation, as is said
Then glory-sounding beyond remorse
A place hard to get to, pilgrim, kept walking
In hot day walk the scorching miles
Words that could fray or join the task
OM MANE PADME HUM
In syncretic dance, in syncretic salutation
My Hebrew Aleph my Arabic twain of twin
My old Etruscan tongue, dark stubble
My coming to hear inside a Muslim land
A dharma song, hip to still be lovin' you oh people
Yet we cry out "water! water!"
We cry out innumerable epithets
Is not that the miserable human method?"
-- Anne Waldman, Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble

Scraperboard by n. after E. Gill.

"It is highly important to complicate your orientation by expanding your horizon beyond your death that ends this life, when you seek victory in the struggle against anger." - Thurman

"Mortality is a gift that reveals the integrity of our lives,
discloses their uniqueness and worth,
For we are only the rind and the leaf.
The great death, that each of us carries inside, is the fruit.
Everything enfolds it."
- III, 7 Rilke, Elegy

"...pain is not receding under the assault of biomedical science but consolidating its position as an immovable force...As the statistics mount, they add solid weight to Norman Cousin's intuitive claim...that no form of illiteracy in the United States is more widespread or more costly than ignorance about pain..."what it is, what causes it, how to deal with it without panic." - N. Cousins, Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient (NY W.W. Norton, 1979)...We are left then, with a large scale crisis of pain that our systems of public and professional education have so far been unable to address effectively. They are ineffectual partly because through error or silence, they perpetuate the limitations of the standard biomedical model that over the past two centuries we have absorbed into our cultural thinking about pain." - David Morris

"When a design problem resists solution, reframe the problem in such a way that it invites solution." - Stewart Brand

"Illness is the point of departure for the process of personality integration and for a radical spiritual transformation." - Mircea Eliade

"What is needed is a view of life that includes the dark." - Thomas More

"The metaphor of light doesn't work without dark." - Ivan Illich

"To light a candle is to cast a shadow..." - The Master Hand in Ursula Le Guin's 'A Wizard of Earthsea.'

"Tragedy always upholds the human spirit because it is an exploration of human nature in terms of its strengths. One simply cannot know strengths unless suffering, misfortune, and violence are explored quite frankly by the writer...Tragedy does not seem to me to be cathartic, but to deepen our sense of the mystery and sanctity of the human predicament." - Oates

"He has seen but half the universe who has not been show the house of pain." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The Imperfect is our paradise." - Wallace Stevens

"True beauty must be able to engage the dark desolations of pain; perhaps it is on this frontier that it finest light appears." - O'Donohue

"At the extreme limit of art's transforming powers...we might say that...pain becomes, no matter how improbable the thought, not merely an occasion for art but even a possible source of beauty." - Morris

"...those [cultures] which demonize death or pain or sickness are thus less able to deal with the bitter side of nature...making themselves doubly sick." - Gary Snyder

"Yet he was not much concerned with Himself as a physician. He was rather preoccupied with the religion and the politics of this land. And this I regret, for first of all things we must needs be sound of body. But these Syrians, when they are visited by an illness, seek an argument rather than medicine. And pity it is that the greatest of all their physicians chose rather to be but a maker of speeches in the market-place." - Philemon, a Greek Apothecay, in Gibran's Jesus Son Of Man

"Barring a republic of excellence, the social contract should, so far as I can mke out, reduce, among its participants,the aggregate of pain and hatred. Our communal and international relations are awash with both. Totalitarian (Hegelian) systems conscript hatred and institutionalize pain. They marshal, they direct them towards the internal scapegoat and the foreign foe...Police states are functional rationalizations of both hatred and pain. Open and democratic societies are therapeutic. They endeavor to alleviate pain and hatred." - Steiner

"To calm the imagination of the invalid, so that at least he should not, a hitherto, have to suffer more from thinking about his illness than from the illness itself - that, I think, would be something!" - Nietzsche

"Countercultures are transgressive, avant-garde movements. The countercultural embrace of change and experimentation inevitably results in going beyond accepted views and aesthetics...We are looking at boundary transgressions that change history." - Ken Goffman

"The craft of the comparatist, of the translator, is one of honest treason, of a persistent infidelity to any one tradition, culture or community of recognition. - Steiner

“Narratives of unfinished change are often unwelcome...Do we really need an account of illness that requires us to confront immense and perhaps irremedial problems of culture and public health?...A vision appropriate to the age...must not focus solely on disarray and upheaval. It must also convey the sense of a complex new order coming into view within the turmoil, controversy and bewilderment, as we learn how to recognize the intricate interactions set in motion when biology and culture meet...[It] certainly immerses us in confusion, as befits a transitional moment when ideas about health and illness are in flux.” – Morris

"This, though, is the method - creative indirection taking us around the houses." - James Fenton

"The dark night may be profoundly unsettling, offering no conceivable way out, except perhaps to rely on pure faith and resources far beond your understanding and capability. The dark night calls for a spiritual response, not only a theraputic one." - Thomas More

“The opportunity for a major shift in our relationship to pain is at hand. Indeed, the new thinking that lies ahead - when we learn what pain can teach us, when we apply what we learn to the arena of cultural change - may just lead to a future worth the pain it takes to create...[it] will not help us live forever - nothing will - but it might just reorient our thinking about health, prevent a disastrous medical error, and keep us from wasting our lifeblood in the pursuit of a shopworn mechanistic illusion." - Morris

"Imagine a different paradigm borrowed from an earlier era. Once the most learned physicians in the Western world were monks. The monasteries were the best hospitals one could find. Often, all the monks could do was comfort rather than cure, though comfort is hardly to be underrestimated as a healing quality. Healing was then praciced by men - and sometimes by nuns too - who were spritually trained, people who could prescribe for the soul as well as the body. They were contemplatives rather than men of a worldly calling. Can we imagine something like this re-emerging in our time - medicine practiced as a spiritual discipline within the setting of an intentional community of men and women who see their work as a vocation?

"That possibility may seem outlandish if the vision we have of modern medicine is that of television dramas like ER or Chicago Hope. But medicine was once so pursued; the monks even carried on a kind of research, exploring the medicinal power of herbs. If something of that spirit could be reinvented in our time, many of the financial issues surrounding medicine would be far less urgent. Physicians would not need to evaluate themselve by the money they make. And from such a stance, they might be better positioned to challenge the obscene profiteering of the health care industry. Vocational healers could be fully trained in their science; they surely would not need to be ascetics or mendicants, but neither would they be entrepreneurs. The honor due them would not depend upon their earnings, but upon their role as true therapists, healers of body and soul.

"As strange as this may sound, I can imagine medical practice attracting a new kind of caregiving talent, the same sort of talent that volunteers for the Peace Corps...

What if we provided people like this with the support and opportunity they need to band together into medical orders, keeping a common house, maintaining a nursing home and hospice, offering the medicine appropriate to the living and dying needs of the New People? Would we not be creating a new cultural category: compassionate heroism?

The training of the traditional healers would be rich in the ars moriendi." - Theodore Roszak, America the Wise.

Why hast thou any need to come at all?
Thou hast come down into a struggling world
To aid a blind and suffering mortal race,
To open to Light the eyes that could not see,
To bring down bliss into the heart of grief,
To make thy life a bridge twixt earth and heaven;
If thou wouldst save the toiling universe
The vast universal suffering feel as thine:
Thou must bear the sorrow that thou claims to heal;
The day-bringer must walk in darkest night.
He who would save the world must share its pain.
If he knows not grief, how shall he find grief's cure?
If far he walks above mortality's head,
How shall the mortal reach that too high path?
If one of their they see scale heaven's peaks,
Men then can hope to learn that titan climb.
- Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

Neurosurgeon Abul-Qasim Al-Zahrawi, 936 to 1013 CE wrote a 30 volume treatise on medicine. A significant part of his work on surgery consists of neurosurgical diagnosis and treatment including surgical treatment of head injuries, skull fractures, spinal injuries and disclocations...His works have been translated into Latin, Hebrew and Turkish with only recent or limited translation into modern occidental languages.

"It may seem tood to put it this way, but the compassionate use of the medical crisis as a rite of passage might be a poltically signficant act of the highest order...I cannot say what sort of politics might follow from the careful instructional use of the medical crisis; it would very likely be a politics that transcends the categories of conservative or liberal or radical, none of which were created to delve into eternal questions." - Roszak

"...successful treatment for chronic pain will require a medicine that seeks to work within - not against or in disregard of - each patient's individual system of belief." – Morris

"Blessing is the gift we want from the old and the one gift only they can bestow. I can bless my own virtues, but I need a well-trained, long-suffering eye to bless the virtues concealed in my vices." - James Hillman

“We must always hold to what is difficult, then that which still seems to us the most hostile will become what we most trust and find most faithful…Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.” - Rilke

--

Philoctetes:
“I’ve got this store of herbs put by, for when
The sore gets bad. They ease the pain a bit.”

- The cure at Troy : a version of Sophocles' Philoctetes, Seamus Heaney

Philoctetes:
Here is the bow for you. Here are the arrows.
Dangerous weapons. And dangerous because
They tempt the gods to be jealous of your luck.

Chorus:
History says, ‘Don’t hope
On this side of the grave.’
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

- The cure at Troy : a version of Sophocles' Philoctetes, Seamus Heaney

"Whether it was was will or fate or chance I do not know." - Dante's Inferno.

"Was the presumption of public speech he wondered, endlessly haunted by private misgiving? It was a question he could ill afford. Even as he teetered, only a hair's breadth away from the podium, teenage gangs were beginning to cluster at Block Station. He clamped a namesake lid on the recollection. The train slowed down to a halt. "I'm here," he said to himself, rapping the podium with his clenched right hand." - Nathaniel MacKey, Bedouin Hornbook, quoted in Anne Waldman's Kali Yoga Poetics: A manifesto for Hakim Bey.

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Last updated: May30, 2007