Dinty Moore’s Book on Writing and Meditation
As both a meditator and a writer, I wondered what Dinty Moore would have to say in his new book, The Mindful Writer, about the relation of one to the other. He sent me his book and answered a few questions I asked him after I read it. Q: Young writers for years have been told to “show, don’t tell,” and to “pay attention.” Is what you mean here in your book a different kind of attention, different in quantity or quality in some way? A: Paying attention is always a good thing, but I think my book is arguing for a different type of paying attention. We can fool ourselves when...
Read MoreI’m Thinking about Meditaton and Art
As a long-time Buddhist practitioner, I’ve particularly liked teaching Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” I get to ask, “Is it true? Is ‘beauty truth, truth beauty’? Is that really ‘all we know and all we need to know’? If they have all their cylinders firing, students get curious about what Keats means by truth, where it can be seen, what it has to do with beauty, and what beauty might mean. Buddhists, of course, have been asking such questions for over 2500 years. If I take Keats’s assertion and question it from a Buddhist perspective, I get something like: Are there...
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