tapestry

I was listening to 'Tapestry' on CBC while drinking coffee in bed this morning. Buddhist Lama Surya Das was on and I liked what he said: "patience is a form of action." He was talking about virtue becoming action. As I rid my life of distractions, what is left at first looks like emptiness and inaction, but in the same way that an artist removes parts of a stone to unveil a sculpture, it only becomes more unified.

Occasional distractions become more like costumes for the sculpture, like a Rodin wearing a cowboy hat or a pirate patch.

Now Irish playwright Conor McPherson is on, talking about his play, "The Seafarer." This is perhaps the only time I will ever have an Irish playwright in my bed. He is reading an incredible description of hell as an icy frozen hole (as in Dante's Inferno) beneath a frozen ocean where you experience time as completely boundless. He believes that in hell everyone is totally alone; he says that in the conventional description of hell, "even if you're in hell, you are still sort of in a relationship; your torturer lavishes attention on you."

He wrote his first play when he was twenty-five. I keep track of these things now.