BootsnAll Travel Network
Add this blog to: MyYahoo, Google, Bloglines, RSS


Articles Tagged ‘Books and Movies’

More articles about ‘Books and Movies’
« Previous Page
Next Entries »
« Home

Theatre for development?

Tuesday, November 21st, 2006

In this afternoon’s mail I got a copy of an international journal published in 2002, devoted to “Theatre for Development” in Africa, including an article about my struggles and failures in Lesotho from 1992-94. I wrote the article in the late 90s, while I was working in South Africa, and then forgot about it. Eight years later it has found its way to my mailbox. The article is good-humored and self-deprecating. In it I look back at my ideals as I first arrived in Africa and met the first of the theatre groups I was to lead. “From my book-learning I knew how to label what I was about to do: it would be theatre-for-liberation, not theatre-for-domestication, top-down theatre, or theatre-of-indoctrination. It would come from within the community it was meant to serve; it would be shaped and directed by that community, with skillful intervention from me…. People would flock to see it, would understand and enjoy it, and would be moved and liberated by it. We would begin with information-gathering, discussion, and script-development; then would come workshopping and performance, then followup.” Dear, naive, hopeful, idealistic young Kendall that I was, I really did think it would work. [read on]

Posted in About Africa, Books and Movies, What does it mean? | 21 Comments »

St. Sebastian, Holes, and Choreography

Sunday, October 29th, 2006

What a weekend! Sao Sebastiao, as I saw him in Guimaraes on my birthday, continues to smile in my bones. Swan Isle Press, in Chicago, sent me (at Christopher’s instigation, I’m sure) Christopher’s book about Salvador Dali and Federico Garcia Lorca—entitled wonderfully, Sebastian’s Arrows. Christopher writes tenderly that for Dali and Lorca, St. Sebastian was “a symbol of poetry,” of “the poet’s vulnerability,” “deliriously content with his punctured state.” The book arrived Thursday and took me more deeply into St. Sebastian’s territory: transcendent bliss, despite the “punctured state,” despite the “holes,” no: because of the holes. Once again my head spins from so much evenement, from the conjunction of ironies, miracles, and large and small joys. [read on]

Posted in Books and Movies, Prisons and Prisoners | No Comments »

The Fruitful Darkness

Thursday, October 19th, 2006

One of the four places I’m exploring as the site of the rest of my life is Upaya Zen Center, in Santa Fe, NM, where Joan Halifax is the abbot. I wanted to know more about her, her beliefs, her values–so I ordered a copy of her book, The Fruitful Darkness: A Journey through Buddhist Practice and Tribal Wisdom. She’s an anthropologist, she worked with Joseph Campbell for a time, and she’s the ex-wife of Stan Grof, the breath-man, with whom she wrote a book. She spent years studying shamanism; at a point fairly early on, she stopped being an anthropologist and became a student: in west Africa, in Mexico, in the southwestern USA, in Asia. Then her charmed life took her to some of the great Buddhist teachers: Thay Nhat Hanh, His Holiness the Dalai Lama himself, and some powerful Korean and Japanese teachers. She’s an eclectic learner, like me, and reading her book makes me feel better about my own wanderings, my own thinly-spread and widely-encompassing quest. She’s also a skilled writer whose prose reads like poetry. [read on]

Posted in Books and Movies, Buddhism, Where to plant myself | 1 Comment »

Rich with possibilities

Wednesday, October 11th, 2006

I have now received warm, welcoming, encouraging emails from HKF and Sravasti, and I also got info from the Chamber of Commerce in Spokane (60 miles south of Sravasti), which slighly allays my fears about the winters at Sravasti. Maybe the winters are less long and severe than those in Massachusetts. On paper it seems so. Every time I pick up a book, an essay, or a dharma talk by Thubten Chodron, who has built Sravasti from a vision to a solid place on the earth, I am drawn to the teacher and the teaching like hummingbirds are drawn to the blossoms in the hanging baskets on my balcony. Then I play one of Bo Lozoff’s tapes, and I lean back and smile with his easy, laughing wisdom. Then I think about Joan Halifax and her wonderful work for prisoners, for the planet, and for the dying, and I think Upaya, in Santa Fe, is a great place to toss my small energy into the mix. The least logical place, because the only thing I know they do is gardening, and I am no gardener, is Green Gulch, but I can’t get its beauty out of my heart. Is it not astonishing that there are four such places, that all of them might take me as part of their community, and that the world is completely lit with possibility! Oh brave world, that has such people in it. [read on]

Posted in Books and Movies, Buddhism, Manko, Seth, Where to plant myself | 1 Comment »

Intelligence reports and a whiff of Africa.

Monday, September 25th, 2006

Glorious weather in south Texas, and wonderful news abroad in the world. At last our sneering President’s own intelligence (I hesitate to use both words in the same sentence) agencies have reported what the Buddha said: VIOLENCE BEGETS VIOLENCE. Violencia faz violencia. It was never enough for our media-numbed populace that thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were dying bloody deaths from high-tech killing machinery; but at last we have word from a “conservative” source that the war has made life less safe for Americans. If that can just get people’s attention, maybe the movement for peace, or at least for a change in government, can take hold. So I hope. And as I was beaming in the gentler heat and grinning at the news, I stumbled over a book about southern Africa that is so achingly well-written it takes my breath away: Scribbling the Cat, by Alexandra Fuller. [read on]

Posted in About Africa, Books and Movies, Texas | No Comments »

The way we learn

Wednesday, June 28th, 2006

Suddenly time, which flapped wetly about me for days, is speeding up. I’m teaching Manko to drive (but she won’t be ready before I go), doing back and leg exercises the physical therapist gave me, making hurricane plans for Manko and the animals, teaching this interminable course (we’re on Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs now, much better, and on a roll headed for Whitman and Dickinson and final exams). I keep going back to Phil Cousineau’s wonderful instructions, from The Art of Pilgrimage, and today, his instructions (for pilgrimage, for life) and Manko’s driving lesson came together like a clash of cymbals (pun not intended, I groan), like a clash of Zildjians from Seth’s rock n roll drum kit, like a great crash. Here is the juxtaposition: [read on]

Posted in Books and Movies, Manko, Preparation | 1 Comment »

Reading Portugal

Wednesday, June 14th, 2006

First, read. Do people who were not invalids as children hold this rule to their hearts as I do? Don’t know. But I know that since mid-February, four months ago, I have accumulated, read, highlighted, and written marginal comments in fifteen books about Portugal. I have spent days and nights on the internet, reading blogs, emails, websites, photo galleries, and adventure stories. If I were hit by a truck tomorrow (which is always possible on Houston area freeways), my brain would spill out images, pictures, stories, and descriptions of a place I have never been except in imagination. Books. Books have always been my goad to adventure, my ticket to freedom. These are some of the passages that would tumble out of my brain:

 

“Some of the most idyllic spots on the stretch of coast west of Leiria are in the Pinhal de leiria, a vast 700-year-old pine forest . . . an area of great natural beauty with sunlight filtering through endless miles of trees and the sea air perfumed with the scent of resin”(Rough Guide). [read on]

Posted in Books and Movies, Preparation | No Comments »

« Previous Page
Next Entries »