A sinful old moon tempts a Coyote
It's the Moon's day if ever … we are being gifted by a rare cosmic combination of a supermoon and blue moon. The Super Blue Moon follows the peak of the Perseid meteor shower last week and is the first of the year’s four consecutive supermoons, and will be visible easily after sunset. The next Super Blue Moon won't be until 2037.
The venture into space is meaningless unless it coincides with a certain interior expansion, an ever growing universe within, to correspond with the far flight of the galaxies our telescopes follow from without… That inward world… can be more volatile and mobile, more terrible and impoverished, yet withal more ennobling in its self-consciousness, than the universe that gave it birth. – Loren Eiseley (whose birthdate is coming up next month) in Maria Popova's Marginalian.
And while on the space frontier, today is the birth anniversary of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, in 1921 El Paso, Texas.
…the majority of Western Buddhists are secular and many don’t meditate, wear robes, shave their heads, or believe in reincarnation...the mental/physical states achieved by Buddhist practice are universal human states, ones we may already be familiar with but perhaps never considered as possessing spiritual dimensions. – Peter Coyote (yes, the actor/narrator who is also a Buddhist priest), whose new book “Zen in the Vernacular: Things As It Is” has just been published.
If you are so inclined, you can get a taste of Coyote's latest, excerpted in the Fall issue of the Tricycle Magazine, with the title “Welcome to Delusionville: Our self is not what we think it is.”
You can also catch a recent video with Coyote on a tribute to Gary Snyder's recent 94th birthday with a brief insight into the “Zen in the Vernacular” perspective.
Other birthdays today: Author Frank McCourt (Angela's Ashes) was born in 1930 Brooklyn, New York; and the humorist poet Ogden Nash was born in 1902 Rye, New York.
Portrait of the Artist as a Prematurely Old Man
It is common knowledge to every schoolboy and even every Bachelor of Arts,
That all sin is divided into two parts.
One kind of sin is called a sin of commission, and that is very important,
And it is what you are doing when you are doing something you ortant,
And the other kind of sin is just the opposite and is called a sin of omission
and is equally bad in the eyes of all right-thinking people, from
Billy Sunday to Buddha, and it consists of not having done something you shuddha.
…
you never get any fun
Out of things you haven't done,
But they are the things that I do not like to be amid,
Because the suitable things you didn't do give you a lot more trouble than the
unsuitable things you did.
The moral is that it is probably better not to sin at all, but if some kind of
sin you must be pursuing,
Well, remember to do it by doing rather than by not doing.
– Ogden Nash, “Portrait of the Artist as a Prematurely Old Man”