Categories
Arts Observations Poetry

May Magnolia

maymagnolia1

May Magnolia trumpet

Summer approaching

another moment passing

 

 

 

 

https://www.almostseventy-one.com/2016/05/01/three-photographs-and-haiku-poems/

© James R (Jim) Martin – Photographs and words.

Categories
Arts Contemplation Observations Photography Poetry

Three Photographs and Haiku Poems

IMG_1041cloudsA photograph can be a Haiku without words.

 

Afternoon gray clouds crowding

patches  April blue sky

Trees wave green greetings

 

 

 

 

IMG_1045a

Crow on a roof peak

Squawks presence loudly

Indifferent Blue Jay waits

 

 

 

 

maymagnolia1

May Magnolia trumpet

Summer approaching

another moment passing

 

 

 

Photographs and words by James (Jim) Martin ©2016

Categories
Contemplation News Poetry Reading

Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums — Review by James R (Jim) Martin

 kerouac HaiI wasn’t sure what to expect when I started reading The Dharma Bums. I didn’t remember much about Jack Kerouac’s writing having read On The Road, many back in the day years ago; the experience was stuck in my mind’s dusty archives. I wasn’t the same person who read On The Road back then, I was here now in the present suspecting I might be a Dharma Bum of sorts myself.

The Dharma Bums is a cultural walk-about America in the late 1950’s with the spread of suburbia, a growing middle class with an increasing addiction to television and sameness. It also includes vivid and beautiful representations of natural phenomenon from the desert to the high mountains. The characters that Ray Smith, the narrator of the story, meets in his travels range from intellectuals, artists, poets and beatnik friends, to hobos he meets as he hops fast freight trains up the California Coast or thumbs rides with truck drivers and others while he travels across the country a couple of times. He carries his home on his back and to some extent depends on the good will of those he meets on his path. He meditates in the desert, mountain meadows and the woods. He exchanges what he has learned with his fellow Dharma Bums and gains insight from them and his travels. At times Ray Smith and his Dharma buddies seem like modern-day  bhikkhu (monks), each on the path of enlightenment in their own way.

This is a trip that anyone can enjoy, from the first time Ray Smith, the main character, hops a freight train, headed North up the California coast.  Even though it was written some time ago it feels contemporary and relevant today. One thing I knew as I began reading The Dharma Bums, was that Jack Kerouac knows how to tell a story. I also became happily aware that this book was an adventure entwined with the basis of Mindfulness including the “Four Noble Truths” and the “Eight-fold Path;” a Bodhisattva’s journey looking for nothing, knowing and not knowing.   The two main characters Ray Smith and Japhy Ryder are on a quest for truth that finds them climbing mountains in the high sierras, partying with San Fransisco Bohemians, and others and writing their own poetry.

“…Pray tell us, good buddy, and don’t make it muddy, who played this trick, on Harry and Dick, and why is so mean this Eternal Scene, just what’s the point, of this whole joint? I thought maybe I could find out at last from these Dharma Bums.” — Jack Kerouac — The Dharma Bums

I’d be willing to bet that a lot of people these days may not know much about Jack Kerouac. I wonder if his work is read in high school or college English classes? It should be. Probably banned in Texas or Alabama, like Salinger’s Catcher In The Rye. Kerouac was born in Lowell Massachusetts in 1922, went to public school and ended up with a scholarship to Columbia in New York City where he met Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs who  turn up in The Dharma Bums. Kerouac died in St. Pete Florida in 1969 at the age of forty-seven.

Those who do remember Jack Kerouac would probably think of the classic “On The Road” that was published in 1957 and made Kerouac one of the most appreciated writers of that time. “On The Road” came to personify what was called the “Beat Generation.” Other books followed including those in what Kerouac included in the “The Duluoz Legend Series” including The Dharma Bums, The Subterraneans, Big Sur, other novels and poetry. But Kerouac’s writing is a lot more than “Beat Generation” tales.

The Dharma Bums was published in 1958, after On the Road.  Written in College Park, a neighborhood in Orlando, Florida. It is a subtle, non-preachy primer, in some ways, on certain concepts found in Buddhism, in particular Zen Buddhism. But written as a novel, in Kerouac’s rhythmic, descriptive and first person conversational storytelling style, these notions come up naturally. Words, sentences and paragraphs loose their individual functions as they create a new actuality, moving, nudging and seducing the reader into the strokes and colors of  the author’s word paintings.

            “But I had my own little bangtail ideas and they had nothing to do with the ‘lunatic’ part of this. I wanted to get me a full pack complete with everything necessary to sleep, shelter, eat, cook, in fact a regular kitchen and bedroom right on my back, and go off somewhere and find perfect solitude and look into the perfect emptiness of my mind and be completely neutral from any and all ideas. I intended to pray, too, as my only activity, pray for all living creatures; I saw it was the only decent activity left in the world. To be in some riverbottom somewhere, or in a desert, or in mountains, or in some hut in Mexico or shack in Adirondack, and rest and be kind, and do nothing else, practice what the Chinese call ‘do-nothing.” I didn’t want to have anything to do, really, either with Japhy’s ideas about society (I figured it would be better just to avoid it altogether, walk around it) or with any of Alvah’s ideas about grasping after life as much as you can because of its sweet sadness and because you would be dead some day.”      — Jack Kerouac The Dharma Bums

Ray Smith’s journey moves along spontaneously and as fast paced as Jack Kerouac’s prose. This timeless story is hard to put down with a bonus if you are interested in Dharma, mindfulness and Buddhist philosophy; you will find many moments in the book with which to relate. Beyond the philosophy you will find a artfully crafted novel that is engaging and classic, as a spiritual journey to find self or perhaps no self. Jack Kerouac, intentionally or not created his own Buddha book of “sutras” and left them with us.

The Dharma Bums – Jack Kerouac – 1957 – Penguin Books – 244 pages

The Dharma Bums

The Dharma Bums

 

Review by James R (Jim) Martin

Books by James R Martin

Documentary Directing and Storytelling: How to Direct Documentaries and More!

Listen Learn Share: How & Why Listening, Learning and Sharing can Transform Your Life Experience In Practical Ways

Create Documentary Films, Videos and Multimedia: A Comprehensive Guide to Using Documentary Storytelling Techniques for Film, Video, the Internet and Digital Media Projects.

Actuality Interviewing and Listening: How to conduct successful interviews for nonfiction storytelling, actuality documentaries and other disciplines … (Documentary and Nonfiction Storytelling)

Categories
Arts News Poetry

MORNING TIME

IMG_0043A

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Life is not a simple

choice between

deciding yes or no,

picking black or white.

There, hidden 

among the many

shades of gray, lies

a journey through

cascading colors,

inspirational ideas,

challenging choices,

lusty loves,

possible paths

twists, turns,

secret sounds

magical music,

and those mystical

moments that no

words dare describe.

JRM

Categories
Arts News Poetry

Birthday Year Begins – Linda Rubin

Birthday

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The morning chill finally shrugged off
Café espresso works again
The bones and the flesh warm
The mind returns to thinking

An Angers morning in France
My birthday year begins
Again, in my adopted country
Old stone walls, warming slowly

Perhaps a day in the country
Driving through old vineyards
A cool and crisp Chenin Blanc
Why not,it’s France after all

Still later, a romp à pied
Always the surest way to explore
It’s a country woven of diversity
Melded together through la cuisine

Why not wash new memories down
With a lovely wine de région
Perhaps a lovely tarte à pomme
Lively company to share with

And yet another séjour à France
To mark my “anniversaire”
We call them birthdays at home
And so begins my next year!

Linda Rubin

Categories
Arts News Poetry

Windows – suzanne m steiner

NewWin1IMG_0582[1]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Autumn dancing in
the honey locust, clinging
still to golden days.

 

 

 

 

 

 

© suzanne m steiner

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now naked branches
Prepare their slender state,to
Dance frosty tangos

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

© susanne m steiner
© suzanne m steiner

 

 

 

Chubby, cherry-red doves
Inside on this snowy day
Warm and toasty we.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SuzanneS1967

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

suzanne m steiner –  photo by Jim Martin

Categories
Arts Poetry

Poems by LInda Rubin

Poems by Linda Rubin

Oh ocean
I do hear you
Your message beats the rocks
Who would contain you
You keep coming
Barriers withstand  your pleas
To be heard amongst the noise
Sometimes birds or maybe ships
All at once demand attention
What importance holds your message
Only that you’re here

 

LRubin

Cradling trees
Tall and majestic
Lost inside limbs strong
Crumpled leaves rest for a moment and away
Blows through your wooden arms
I pass through now
Tunneling into your darkness
A pattern of light
Peeks from afar
The headlights of my mind
Guide my way
Out the other side
Briefly sheltered by you
Out again on my own
Thankful for the moment

Categories
Arts News Poetry

PAUSED IN THE SHADE

By Linda Rubin

©JRM

Paused in the shade
The knowing ivy drinks in the moisture I only smell
Rich with green life
Whose gift flows through stems and leaves
Makes for me a canopy
Shades the sun, cools the earth beneath
Simply nature at home
Taking its place among the neighborhood of trees and bushes and grass
I walk only through it
Am I of it
I feel but a guest
Invited to look
Nay to keep

Categories
Arts News Poetry

Morning and Time – Two Poems by Linda Rubin

Morning

by Linda Rubin

Time-always marked

This morning

Christmas

Reflections-like a mirror

Stomachs still full

Digesting the memories

Hearts full as stomachs

Emotions, contact, meaning

Ties, bonds, commonality

Across space

Intersecting

Heartening

Full

Another year

Memories

Next

 

Time

Photographs©JRM

By Linda Rubin

time stands

in front of me

behind it sits

my move

always

it seemed

starting new

not before

all ahead

fresh

rebirth

forward

ready

 

Categories
Arts Poetry

Relationships flicker by as light

A poem by Linda Rubin

 

Relationships flicker by as light
Stops for a look
Leaves and splintered wood basks in their touch
Only staying a minute or a second
Time measures it’s metered rest
Poof and we are returned to earthly tomes
To ponder the thoughts coming
Stopping them can’t be done
Trying stops shortly
Only remain the thoughts
Building houses in the space
Left by occasional voids
Conscious openings laying the framework
Tidying up after layers added
The door locked for now