Rugged Interdependency - Amaravati Buddhist Monastery

Golden Highways Revisited: 1998to the meeting as he had had to spend the last week lying on his front, to keepthe pressure on his eye down. It’s also his only good eye – the other is almostblind already – so the stakes are high on this one. It’s a raw truth, but, indeed, thisis the inevitable path that we’re all on: “Byādhi-dhammomhi byādhim anatīto…” “Iam of the nature to sicken, I have not gone beyond sickness…” It’s a question ofwholeheartedly embracing the fact that “my plan” is not the same as Nature’s andsurrendering to endings without complaint.As if there had not been enough talking already, at the end of the afternoonwe sat down with the family program folks – Seth Castleman, Julie Wester, LisaMcCool and Gary Buck, and met to discuss the first family retreat. Julie then followedus back to Edward’s so we could do the fine detail planning for this.By the time all that was complete, and the last phone calls had been made, theday was definitely over – good words spoken, goodwill generated and good-heartednesssustained but enough engagement with the world of things. Time to let itgo and disappear.May 5 th – 6 thA quiet morning at Edward’s with he and Don fielding phone calls whilst I finishedoff Slaughterhouse Five in blissful solitude.After the meal we set off into a rainy afternoon to visit Glenn McKay at hishouseboat and studio in Sausalito. Famous for his pioneering Headlights opticaldisplays with Jefferson Airplane in the ‘60s, he has recently been working with afew computer people and now has many of his lightshow slides on disc. The programsthey have created for him allow him to manipulate the flow of images, freezethem, print out their mixtures or whatever. Don and I sat transfixed as the astoundingsuccession of flowing colored forms took shape and dissolved in front of us.He still had many of the slides he had created in the days of his classic Headlightsshows, along with the patterns he had been conjuring in recent weeks.He also showed us the outline for a retrospective show he was invited to doat the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art next January, consisting of four separatepieces for each of the ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s. Along with all this we got to seea video that he had been making for many months, No Strings Attached – a combinationof his light art and various musical pieces, all forms of stringed instrumentsbut varying from cello to sarod to Celtic harp.We took a cup of mint tea aboard his houseboat and chatted for a while longerbefore setting off for the City. We arrived at Theresa Owen’s house in Noe Valleyand settled in for some more tea and conversation – the plan had been to have acouple of quiet days, however, the space got somewhat embellished by a successionof video tragedies: Rashomon, Trainspotting and, the next afternoon, Branagh’sHamlet. Perhaps not the lightest mix of influences for an already weary brain buthey, the human condition does not always wait for a convenient time to impart itslessons to us.By the end of Wednesday afternoon my circuits were well and truly satiated:as Don drove me to the monthly gathering out at 46 th Avenue, my mind flashed58