Random Images

I shot both of these one day several months ago in San Francisco.

Turkeys for Thanksgiving

We have a lot of wild turkeys wandering around the grounds at Spirit Rock, where I work. Here are some photos of them (by me) for Thanksgiving week. Just don't get any bright ideas about a free turkey dinner!

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Under the Volcano (Criterion) Review

I just wrote a short DVD review for the 1984 film Under the Volcano, which starred Albert Finney and was directed by John Huston. It is up on Greencine.com's Guru blog now. Here's a brief excerpt of my review (which may or may not be entirely coherent):

Under the Volcano was Huston's 34th feature film, and he would only make two more before his death (including The Dead, based on a story by James Joyce). Ultimately, this is a fairly coherent film about a nearly incoherent man living a rather incoherent life who will soon die an entirely incoherent death (late one night in the rain).

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Pop-Eye the Mini-Dachshund at Muir Beach

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Green Gulch Folks Help with Oil-Spill Clean-up at Muir Beach

It’s nice to see hard-working Buddhists making a difference! I was just there at both Green Gulch and Muir Beach the Sunday before the terrible oil spill in San Francisco Bay. Muir Beach is such a magnificent spot.

Green Gulch Residents Support Oil-Spill Clean-up
Written by Sangha-e Staff

On the afternoon of Friday, Nov 9th, approximately thirty people, twenty of whom were Green Gulch Farm Zen Center residents, participated in an oil-spill clean-up action on Muir Beach. The efforts of Green Gulch Farm residents were mentioned in an article that appeared in Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle.

Manfred Krautter, a Greenpeace Campaign coordinator writes in, "I really appreciate the work done by Green Gulch Farm staff and Practice Period students, I am sure it helped a lot to limit the impacts of the oil spill in the Muir Beach area."

http://news.sfzc.org/content/view/437/40/

This is from the Chronicle article (ridiculous):

Things were more tense Friday in Marin County, where Sigward Moser led a 30-person volunteer group - including 20 monks-in-training from the Mill Valley Zen Center - onto Muir Beach. For his efforts, he was detained and handcuffed.

The little army managed to scoop up nearly 500 bags of gloppy, sandy oil between 2 and 5 p.m. Moser said it was easy duty: "It rolls up like kitty litter, right off the surface of the sand. Went right into the bags with no problem."

They got almost all the oil they could find - and then a National Park Service ranger showed up.

"He asked us to leave, and we said we needed to do what we were doing, so he put me in handcuffs," said Moser, a communications consultant. "I told him, 'Well, there was nobody else doing the cleanup before we began.' But he just said I was breaking the law and this is hazardous material that I shouldn't be dealing with."

Moser was cited for two misdemeanors - failure to obey an official order and entry into a restricted area - and released.

Now he has 500 bags of glop in his yard, and he has no idea how to get rid of it.

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Aung San Suu Kyi Meets with Her Democratic Party

A demonstrator holds a mask with a photograph of Myanmar's pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi near the Chinese Embassy in central London, October 24, 2007, on a day of protests to mark twelve years of her detention.

REUTERS/Toby Melville

November 10, 2007 -- New York Times

Myanmar Dissident Meets With Party

By THOMAS FULLER

BANGKOK, Nov. 9 — The pro-democracy leader in Myanmar, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, met on Friday with members of her party, the National League for Democracy, for the first time in three years as well as with Aung Kyi, the general appointed as a liaison by Myanmar’s military government, news agencies reported from Yangon.

Nyan Win, a spokesman for the National League for Democracy, said Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi believed that the military government was “serious and really willing to work for national reconciliation,” Reuters reported.

Six weeks after its violent crackdown on protests led by Buddhist monks, Myanmar’s military government has telegraphed alternating signs of combativeness and flexibility. Analysts say they are watching to determine whether the ruling generals’ outreach to Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi is genuine or whether it falls into a well-established pattern of short-lived concessions toward dissidents followed by a return to a hard-line stance. Myanmar has been under military rule for 45 years.

The state-run newspaper New Light of Myanmar said Friday that the government would continue to carry out democratic change, as promised in a convention in July to set up guidelines for a constitution that the junta said was the first of a seven-stage process to establish what it called a disciplined form of democratic rule. But junta has given no time frame for the overall process.

The government will “continue striving earnestly for national reconsolidation in true cooperation with the U.N. Secretariat,” said the paper, which is closely read by diplomats and analysts seeking hints to the secretive government’s intentions.

Ibrahim Gambari, the United Nations envoy who ended a six-day mission to the country on Thursday, said the government and its political opponents had agreed on a “process” that would “lead to substantive dialogue.”

But it is a reflection of the glacial pace of change in Myanmar that allowing Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi to meet with her colleagues passes for progress.

Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi, 62, who has been held under house arrest on and off since 1990, said in a statement released by the United Nations late Thursday that she was willing to “cooperate” with the government in the “interest of the nation.”

She said she would represent “as broad a range of political organizations and forces as possible,” not just her party.

This may be out of necessity, analysts say. The National League for Democracy, which won the 1990 elections that were ignored by the military, has been reduced to a skeletal party after many of its leaders were harassed, jailed or fled the country.

“She’s got a pretty weak hand,” said Sean Turnell, a specialist on Myanmar at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. “So many people have been arrested, she’s isolated, she’s been imprisoned for 19 years, her husband has died, her children have grown up without her. That’s got to wear you down.”

Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi has been called to negotiate with the generals several times over the past 17 years. None of these talks has persuaded the government to begin relinquishing control.

So far there is little to suggest that these negotiations are different, said Win Min, a lecturer in contemporary Burmese politics at Payap University in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai.

“They are just making procedural concessions,” Mr. Win Min said.

But he noted that the junta had stopped dismissing her as “irrelevant” in state media, the word used to describe her for years.

Anger over the crackdown may have also led to cracks within the government, especially among younger officers in the military. Mr. Win Min said he had heard reports of lenient treatment from recently released leaders of the September demonstrations.

“They thought they would be very hurt,” he said of the released dissidents. Instead, he said, the officers told them: “We are just doing our jobs. We are not going to torture you.”

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Zen Cook Ed Brown at Green Gulch

The photos above were taken (by me) yesterday at Green Gulch Farm & Zen Center in Marin County. I went to meditate and listen to Ed Brown give a public lecture/dharma talk. Ed is the subject of a new documentary called "How to Cook Your Life" by German filmmaker Doris Dörrie (who also made the hilarious film "Enlightenment Guaranteed" about two German brothers who spend time at a Zen monastery in Japan). In the top photo, the sign the guy was holding said "FREE HUGS" (and yes, he gave Ed a hug).

I saw the film on Ed at the Shattuck in Berkeley last night after spending the day at Green Gulch and Muir Beach. It was a wonderful way to spend a Sunday. Ed's talk began with a 10-minute exercise on eating an apple slice with a group of kids (whose parents are probably part of the Zen community). The kids shared how the apple tasted ("It tastes like apple cider," said one boy) and Ed had a great time talking about how in our culture we can't even slow down long enough to slice up our fruit any more. He ended the talk, as I recall, by telling us, "You are worth sliced fruit!" Go see the film if you get a chance--it's also worth sliced fruit (see short review below).

Documentary, 01:40 minutes, Rated PG-13 Full Review
Playfully billing itself as a “cooking class” with Zen priest and cookbook author Edward Espe Brown, this is a film you can sink your teeth into. You’ll never mistake this movie for a Food Network show, because Brown believes that working in the kitchen can be an intensely spiritual activity. It's about the perils of living in a world of abundance and how cooking can reconnect us with ourselves and each other. It's about nourishing the soul as well as the body. German filmmaker Doris Dörrie directs with humor and a sense of openness that is quite Zen-like.

-- W. Addiego, SF Chronicle

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