CxD #240: Greatest Concert film of All-Time? Too much baseball, and wiping your ass is the same as mystical enlgightenment
1.
This concert that’s also a movie made me feel so alive with the wonder of what people and music and art and the art of community can do when everyone does their own thing while simultaneously doing it all on behalf of the emergent whole. Below is my favorite movie critic’s review of this film, his 26th favorite of all time. And this man has watched tens of thousands of movies!
“In the Shobogenzo, the Dogen who could write breathlessly about the inseparability of being and time (Uji) was the same Dogen who could in the next moment write about the proper manner of cleaning your body, including how to wipe your ass after defecating in the woods after practicing Zazen (sitting mediation) outdoors, or washing your face. It is not only cleansing the body and mind, but also cleansing the entire land. Dogen gave equal attention to the great and small. Everything mattered.” ~ Jason Wirth Nietzsche and Other Buddhas
I loved the story of this former Major League baseball player who retired early in order to sail. Much wisdom🦉 here:
But he found the M.L.B. life to be unfulfilling in some unexpected ways. “Baseball set me up for life,” he said. “I love it, and I respect it. But it was part of this culture of consumerism and overconsumption that began to weigh really heavily on me. Even when I retired, people said: ‘You might be walking away from millions of dollars!’ But I’d already made millions of dollars. Why do we always have to have more, more, more?”
Boating filled the void in his life. He familiarized himself with every foot of the ship. He took a class for diesel motor mechanics and installed solar panels and a wind generator. He devoured hours of YouTube videos about the electronics and made sure he knew what every wire did. “If anything goes wrong in the open ocean,” he said, “I’m the only one out there to fix it.”
All that was left to do: Learn how to sail.
When you’re sailing, you’re going back to something primitive,” he said. “You’re removing yourself from the material world — this concrete, electronic world. And you’re returning to this sense of wonder. It’s the same sense you get when you’re holding a newborn baby, looking into their eyes, and feeling the world disappear around you.
Sometimes it’s easy to forget that we all come from the same place. When you’re out there on the water, you remember.”
Free link to the entire Nytimes article here.
🦉Widom alert!🦉
We regard being independent of outward things as a great good, not in order always to make use of little, but so that we are not inconvenienced when we do not have much; for they most enjoy luxury who have no need of it, and we know that what is natural is easily procured, while only vain and worthless things are hard to get. ~Epicurus
🙏
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