An Unavoidable Excess of Motion

The image above and the video below remind me of how city life and monastery life are not so different. It's a question of framing, as is everything... and then, maybe, the frame drops away; revealing the "great big 'I don't know' in the sky" as a meditator friend of mine says.



For people with a contemplative bent, everything is in motion and the solidity of things is in doubt. In this way of seeing, is New York really any different than a zendo?

Well, New York and zendos are both filled with dharma bums. I saw someone reading Jack Kerouac's Aftermath: The Philosophy of the Beat Generation on the subway.

I looked it up when I got home. Here's an excerpt:

The Beat Generation, that was a vision that we had, John Clellon Holmes and I, and Allen Ginsberg in an even wilder way, in the late Forties, of a generation of crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way—a vision gleaned from the way we had heard the word "beat" spoken on street corners on Times Square and in the Village, in other cities in the downtown city night of postwar America—beat, meaning down and out but full of intense conviction. We'd even heard old 1910 Daddy Hipsters of the streets speak the word that way, with a melancholy sneer. It never meant juvenile delinquents, it meant characters of a special spirituality who didn't gang up but were solitary Bartlebies staring out the dead wall window of our civilization...