I Answer My Email

First of all, thank you very much to Kathleen Callon, Linda, Mumon, Summersun, and Greensmile for your kind words and consolations. I'm fine, and my lack of posts this past week or so hasn't been because of grief or depression, but merely due to a loss of words - after posting your father's obituary, what's the point of talking about your daily activities, re-telling ancient Zen stories or expressing one's political opinions? What more needs to be said? Life and death is the great matter, and how can it be addressed any more eloquently than that?

But even getting past that, once the rhythm and discipline of daily blogging was broken, it was hard to find the time to post once again, what with my earlier bedtime now that I've been getting up for the early morning zazen services, and due to a series of evening meetings this week.

But here I find myself once again back at the usual keyboard and this old and familiar site. This post may be nothing more than a figurative clearing of my voice to be followed by more of the usual stuff, but first allow me to address some of the questions and comments that have been emailed to me earlier this month.

Back on February 7, Kathleen Callon said, regarding the thought experiment, "Never thought of this... but if you have two flashlights, then the light is still moving at the speed of light, even though the distance they are moving away from each other is double it." Yes, the photons will still be moving at the speed of light relative to the person holding the flashlight, but that's a rather egocentric view, isn't it? I was trying to point out that it was moving at 2x the speed of light relative to the opposing photons to counter this egocentric viewpoint. But the real question is, what is the absolute speed of light, not relative to anything else in the universe? Not the observer, not other phenomena, nothing. Would it be motionless?

On February 19, Spider63 asked, regarding the long and the short versions of the Daibai/Plum Mountain story, "How about your version? What does it mean to you?" Very good question, and I refer the reader to my post of February 4, or better still, my post of February 17. Actually, I meant to discuss this at length over several posts during the month, but was silenced by the events discussed above. Perhaps I will pick this thread up again later.

Concerning that February 17 post, Eratio posed the often-asked question, "Where do you get your pictures from?" I generally refrain from answering this, first out of fear of an admission of guilt on copyright infringement (this blog is nothing if not one big, fat copyright infringement), but also to preserve the mystery. A magician doesn't explain his tricks, and very few people are interested in hearing a musician explain his technique. But the real truth is I don't really always know. While cruising the web and usenet, I come across many, many graphic images, and I download some of the ones I like into a cache file and when they seem appropriate, I post them. Sometimes, I find that I've saved several from many different sources that have some graphical or thematic similarity, like the mountains of February 17 or the yin-yang of February 3, so I post them in one big batch, usually on Fridays (by the end of the work week, I'm sick of words anyway). But I can't recall where I got each individual picture.

Also, let me add, there are occasionally my own digital photos posted here, and many of the pictures that were copied have been subsequently altered, cropped or otherwise manipulated, so there is at least a modicum of self expression here. So this blog isn't so much a ripoff as it is a pastiche or a collage - yeah, that's it, it's post-modernism, recycling the detrius of the internet's visual overload until it reaches a sort of visual/virtual satori. Or something.

There, glad to get all of that out of the way, and it feels like I'm finding my voice again. Way back on February 9 I had promised to blog about the Zen retreat in Bloomington, and the experience certainly was worthy of a post or two, so perhaps I will take that on over this coming weekend.

After I dump some pics from their cache on Friday, of course.