tales of copper city

Inexperience as asset

David Ignatius of the Washington Post makes and interesting and important argument for why Senator Obama's inexperience may be a powerful asset in the years to come, as China, Russia, India (and I would add Europe) all have moved to new forms of competition, eschewing the models of military power forged in the Cold War.

Jesus and the gospel of life itself

John Cowan in Taking Jesus Seriously: Buddhist Meditation for Christians, says that culture is a way of defending ourselves against the fear of death and impermanence.

“He who wears a blue suit won’t die,” is a line from Cowan, a line I added to my short story, “The Blue Suit.”

Jesus says, “He who tries to hang onto life will forfeit it but whoever forfeits life will preserve it.”

Life itself in Generica

Generica is the term my Bisbee friend Dennis Nelson uses to describe a paved-over, malled-over America, where everything not only looks alike but is suffocating from sameness, a sameness that seeks to disguise the openness, the impermanence, and the fragility of existence, of our lives.

We humans shield ourselves from life itself, from the contingency and the vulnerability of life, with Generica. We buy the same computers, the same clothes, the same automobiles, the same perfect smiles, the same trim waistlines, the same perfect breasts, and all the while dying to the energies and the vitality of life itself.

"He who wears a blue suit won't die."

Life itself is what is exposed when our defenses and our schemes are breached, when the cracks appear, and when the light breaks in.

Life itself is the shared and common experience of life itself for all humans, the fears, the joys, the suffering, the change, the decline, all of it.

Life itself is what is awaiting us when we wake up.

More than anything else, I think Jesus was asking us to surrender ourselves to life itself, to awaken our hearts, to open ourselves to the world and to others, and that to live like this is what he meant by God’s Kingdom, God’s imperial reign, where we are reminded in every way and every turn of our common fate and our common joy and our common suffering.

Life itself as bodhichitta

In listening to “The Love That Will Not Die,” from the audible book, When Things Fall Apart, Pema Chodron discusses the awakened heart, pain that is felt as the pain of all beings, not only the pain of our life but rather the pain of others, the pain of all life, of life itself.

This is a potent clue to what we mean by life itself.  It is the life we all share, the life of birth, growth, joy, suffering, struggle, sex, the form and cycle of all life that is common and not peculiar to just me or to someone else.

When I say that I am waiting for life itself, I am saying that I am waiting for a life that is shared and common, a felt awareness of my bond with others in both joy and pain.

The awakened heart is the path to life itself: Bodhichitta.