The France-based, Chinese artist Huang Yong Ping, who was known for weaving Chinese and Western historical canons together to create provocative results, died suddenly on Saturday. The pioneering member of the Chinese avant-garde was 65 years old.

Born in 1954 in Xiamen, China, Huang was a founding member of the Xiamen Dada group. The collective first came to attention when in 1986 they torched a number of the paintings they had recently shown at the Xiamen Peoples Art Museum. The radical act was prompted by their dissatisfaction with the circumstances around the show. The collectives motto was Zen is Dada, Dada is Zen, and Huangs hero was Marcel Duchamp.

Over the following decades, Huang continued to fuse elements of Zen Buddhism, Dadaism, and a Duchampian sense of irony to create large-scale surrealistic installations and sculptures, some of which fell foul of political censorship in China, while one notorious work upset animal rights activists in North America.

Huang Yong Ping was a giant of the avant-garde, a father figure for generations of artists and thinkers, the Paris-based art dealer Kamel Mennour told artnet News. He opened up the delicate path of the dialogue between worlds with intact engagement and philosophical view on the worlds turbulences, Mennour said, adding, He was an immense artist. He was my friend. The dealer began formally representing the artist a decade ago by which time Huang was already settled in Paris.

The self-taught artist, who numbered Joseph Beuys, John Cage, as well as Duchamp as inspirations, maintained a critical position and cast a skeptical eye on a rapidly globalizing world, which his career personified.

In 1987, he made what would become an iconic work, The History of Chinese Painting and the History of Modern Western Art Washed in the Washing Machine for Two Minutes, by destroying art history books by Wang Bomin andHerbert Read in the laundry. The artist placed the resulting pulp atop of piece of broken glass on a Chinese teabox.

In 1989, Huangtraveled toParisto take part in the groundbreaking Centre Pompidou exhibition Magiciens de la Terre. He stayed in France, which he went on to represent at theVenice Biennale in 1999. For his prestigious Monumenta commission in 2016, he filled the Grand Palais in Paris with a giant, serpentine sculpture and shipping containers to createEmpires.

Huangs controversialBat Project 2was censored at the inauguralGuangzhou Triennial in 2002. His installation featured a model of the cockpit of an American EP-3 spy plane,and referenced a fatal collision between a US and a Chinese plane in Chinese airspace. In Huangs sculpture, the US plane included taxidermy bats hanging from its blasted-out windows. The animals signified the gap in understanding between the West, where bats are often feared, and China, where they symbolize happiness.

It would not be the last time his work, which often featured animals, was pulled from a major exhibition. In 2018, HuangsTheater of the Worldwas heavily modified by the Guggenheim Museum after vehement protests from animal rights activists. A petition to take down the title work and two other pieces from the group showArt and China After 1989 garnered half a million signatories within days.

In Huangs work, caged snakes and lizards were meant to devour insects, and probably each other, during the show. The Guggenheim showed the artists sculptural cage without the animals.

In an interview with artnet Newss editor-in-chief, Andrew Goldstein, Guggenheim director Richard Armstrong described Huang as an artist asking tough questions, and that is brutal. New Yorks Gladstone Gallery, which also represents the artist, put up a show of Huangs work following the museums decision.

Huang maintained that he was against provocation for its own sake, asking: How can an artwork be created just to be censored? HisTheatre of the Worldwas shown as the artist intended at the Guggenheim Bilbao but only as an empty cage at SFMOMA.

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He Was an Immense Artist: The Chinese Artist Huang Yong Ping, Who Fused the Spirit of Duchamp with Zen Buddhism, Has Died - artnet News

Its the start of the workweek. Another ordinary workweek. This likely includes the same old routine, a mix of getting ready, wrangling a kid or two, getting stuck in traffic, getting stuck in meetings, responding to never-ending email, running errands, making dinner, doing bedtime. And doing it all over again.

In short, theres a lot of rushing from one place to the next, from one task to another. And it all feels all-too familiar.

Its natural to get bored with the seemingly mundane. Its natural to dismiss your days as dull and uninteresting. Similar days will blend into each other, and before you know it, the week is up.

But it doesnthaveto be this way.

When Shonda Moraliss son was 4 years old, he asked her how babies in the womb received nourishment. After Moralis did her best to give an age-appropriate answer, her son shared his summary: So let me get this straight. You ate food, it went into yourbelly, then intomybelly button through your extension cord?

Moralis replied, Extension cord. Exactly, and there has been an invisible extension cord connecting our hearts ever since.

Moralis, MSW, LCSW, a psychotherapist and coach, shares this sweet story in her new book Breathe, Empower, Achieve: 5-Minute Mindfulness for Women Who Do It All.In it, she encourages readers to reconnect to our childhood sense of awe, curiosity, and wonder. Which is similar, she writes, to the idea of beginners mind from Zen Buddhism.

Moralis suggests exploring this idea by picking one activity, either at work or at home. She writes, Imagine that you have never encountered this situation before. What do you notice? What is most prevalent? How does this impact or shift the moment for you?

We can apply beginners mind to all kinds of activities, according to Moralisfrom driving to emailing to (even) being at a meeting.

When we bring beginners mind to everyday mundane or rote tasks, we are not only granted a fresh perspective; we will consequently reach our goals with less resistance or frustration.

When you apply beginners mind to an email, you can marvel at the technology, at your ability to connect with someone whos three thousand miles away or in another country. When you apply beginners mind to your morning, you can marvel at the sunrise and at your childs surprising questions. You can marvel at the convenience of your toaster oven, the delicious flavor of your fresh bagel, and the aroma of your hot coffeeeven as youre running out the door (and running back in, because lets be honest, you probably forgot something).

Our mindset determines our mood and our behavior. When we open our eyes (and tune into our other senses), when we take less for granted, we enjoy brighter, happier, less stressful days. We also feel alive. Energized. Invigorated. Empowered. Maybe were even kinder and more patient.

Moralis includes a beautiful quote from Maya Angelou, which we can regularly remind ourselves of (and maybe even recite every morning): This is a wonderful day. Ive never seen this one before.

And, of course, you havent.

Photo byAleksandr LedogorovonUnsplash.

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When You're Bored with the Day to Day - PsychCentral.com

Huang Yong Ping.

BRUNO BEBERT/EPA/SHUTTERSTOCK

Huang Yong Ping, the Chinese artist whose propensity for provocation allowed him to address taboo subjects in China and beyond with audacity and wit, has died at 65. His death on Saturday was confirmed by Gladstone Gallery, which represented him in New York and Brussels. A representative for the gallery did not immediately state a cause of death.

In his sly installations and sculptural work, Huang often melded techniques derived from the history of Chinese art and international avant-garde movements alike. His ability to deftly combine seemingly opposed methods of art-making made him one of the foremost artists in an emergent group of Chinese artists during the late 1980s.

Like his colleagues, Huang chafed at the boundaries surrounding what could be presented as artwork, in the process addressing eroding traditional mores and the Westernization of the country he called home. Among his most famous works is The History of Chinese Painting and the History of Modern Western Art Washed in the Washing Machine for Two Minutes (1987), for which he put copies of Wang Bomins History of Chinese Painting and Herbert Reads A Concise History of Modern Painting (the first book about modern art history translated into Chinese) into a would-be laundry cycle. Huang then placed the pulped remains of the water-pummeled tomes atop a piece of glass, put it on a teabox, and exhibited it as an artwork.

Huang Yong Ping, The History of Chinese Painting and A Concise History of Modern Painting Washed in a Washing Machine for Two Minutes, 1987 (reconstructed 1993).

WALKER ART CENTER

What could have been a wry, ironic gesture became, in Huangs hands, an iconic statement about globalism and the merging of thought processes. It alluded to the anarchistic quality of Dadaist artworks, which proposed that reason was meaningless in modern society and placed an emphasis on concepts over aesthetics, and it also showed how Western values were colliding with non-Western onesin this case, with Chan Buddhist philosophy, which holds that everyday objects are not freighted with symbolism.

In an interview with Post, a website affiliated with the Museum of Modern Art, Huang once said, I applied Chan Buddhism because I believed that the juxtaposition of Chan Buddhism and Dadaism would create new meanings, especially since I placed an Eastern element with a Western onea term from intellectual history with one from art history. According to Huang, both Dada and Chan Buddhist philosophy have in common an interest in empty signifiers.

The washed-out history work would become a preview of some of the provocations Huang would stage throughout his career. In later pieces, he made use of live animals and politically weighty objects, incurring the wrath of officials and activists alike. But Huang often said that he did not make art with the hope of getting into trouble. First of all, I do not predetermine the works audience, he told Ocula in 2018. How can an artwork be created just to be censored? I am also against the idea of provocation for its own sake.

Huang was speaking on the occasion of one of the greatest controversies of his careerthe exhibition of a piece to involve live insects, snakes, and lizards. That work, Theater of the World (1993), was included last year in a Guggenheim Museum Chinese art survey in New York that took its name from the Huang piece, and it was one of several works on view that involved animals. (The others were by Xu Bing and the duo Sun Yuan and Peng Yu.) In the Huang work, the animals were to prey on one another in a see-through case shaped like a tortoise shell.

Huang Yong Ping, Theater of the World, 1993, wood and metal structure with warming lamps, electric cable, insects (spiders, scorpions, crickets, cockroaches, black beetles, stick insects, centipedes), lizards, toads, and snakes.

HUANG YONG PING/GUGGENHEIM ABU DHABI

After an outcry from animal-rights activists and a Change.org petition that was signed by thousands, the Guggenheim altered the work, presenting just its shellwithout the animals. It was not the first time Theater of the World had drawn ire, but it was the most high-profile instance of controversy surrounding the work. Huang, who was traveling on an Air France plane when his piece was altered, responded by writing an essay on an air sickness bag that was then exhibited at the Guggenheim.

[T]his work has repeatedly encountered premature death without ever having a chance to live, Huang wrote, adding, An empty cage is not, by itself, reality. Reality is chaos inside calmness, violence under peace, and vice versa.

The use of animals in the work was of a piece with Huangs larger interest in comparing humans to beings lower on the food chain, and his point was partly to create a microcosm that paralleled the state of modern affairs. For the installation Arche 2009, shown in 2009 at the cole Nationale Suprieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Huang created a 50-foot-long paper boat filled with taxidermy animals that alluded to the story of Noahs Ark. What may have at first glance seemed cute revealed itself instead as something darkeras some of the the animals Huang included were disfigured or partly burned (an allusion to a fire at Deyrolle, a Paris shop that had been a destination for natural-history objects).

As Huangs installations grew in size, further controversy followed. His series Bat Project involved the exhibition of Lockheed airplane fuselages that bear an almost exact likeness to an American spy craft that hit a Chinese fighter jet. (The spy plane was called a bat, but the animal is also a symbol of good fortune in China, lending the title of the series a layer of irony typical of Huang.) One work from the series was to go on view in an exhibition in the Chinese city of Shenzhen, much to the dismay of officials from China, France (which was co-sponsoring the show), and the United States. With the aim of patching over damaged diplomatic relations, the work was yanked before it even went on view.

Huang Yong Pings Monumenta commission at the Grand Palais in Paris in 2016.

JEREMY LEMPIN/EPA/SHUTTERSTOCK

I still dont know whether it was the Chinese or the French who put pressure on the organizers to suppress it, Huang told the New Statesman America in 2008. The U.S. embassy sent people to take pictures of it, and asked the Chinese government to do an investigation. This was later retracted.

That the work became ensnared in a global power play may have been Huangs very intention. Huang was one of the most incisive artists dealing with the complex systems of power that guide international relations todaysomething he often observed from afar while working in Europe.

In 1989, at the age of 35, Huang went to Parisand he would remain there for the rest of his career. His reasons for doing so were related to the state of China at the time: students were revolting against an oppressive regime, and it was potentially dangerous to be making art there. Huang was in Paris to show his work at the the Centre Pompidous famed 1989 exhibition Magiciens de la Terre, which is regarded as one of the first major globalist art exhibitions in the West (it has also been controversial for the way it tokenized certain cultures). France went on to become an important home for Huanghe represented the country at the 1999 Venice Biennale, and in 2016 he was commissioned for the Grand Palaiss Monumenta exhibition, one of the largest and most esteemed art projects in Paris.

While working in Paris, Huang continued to deal head-on with politics in China in ways that were nuanced and rigorous. Bank of Sand, Sand of Bank (2000), a sculpture originally shown at the Shanghai Biennale, is a 20-ton replica of the Pudong Development Bank. Many Western critics pointed out that the structure will eventually fall apart, possibly referring to the instability of institutions during the age of globalism. But Huang had in mind something different: a statement about the legacy of colonialism in China. Colonialism is closely linked to capitalism and the market, and banks are the fulcrums around which the market moves as the lever for Chinas rapid development, he said in the Ocula interview. The 2000 Shanghai Biennale presentation was an allegory of that.

Huang Yong Ping, Bank of Sand, Sand of Bank, 2000, installation view at Gladstone Gallery, New York, 2018.

DAVID REGEN/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND GLADSTONE GALLERY

The spiky, unforgiving quality of Huangs work differentiated the artist from a number of his colleagues whose work has been more readily embraced by the market. During the 2000s, as prices for work by Chinese artists such as Yue Minjun began rising, Huang often spoke of how disinterested he was in the international market. According to a W magazine profile from 2009, Huang made Franois Pinault, one of the top collectors in France, wait years before allowing him to a buy a work on view at Pinaults Punta della Dogana museum in Venice, and the artist turned down an offer to show at Pace Gallerys then-newly opened Beijing space, citing a loyalty to Gladstone Gallery.

Huang doesnt give a damn, Kamel Mennour, Huangs Paris dealer, said in that profile. Sometimes Ill point out important clients to him, but it makes no difference. He never goes to openings or parties, never reads magazines. He wears the same pants and shoes every day. Hes just obsessively focused on his work.

Huang Yong Ping was born in 1954 in Xiamen, China. While studying at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, he developed an interest in three areas that would inform the bulk of his workthe philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zen Buddhism, and the art of Marcel Duchamp. He began by making paintings of industrial workers using spray painta boundary-pushing medium at the timethat would hint at the political leanings of his later work.

After graduating from art school, Huang returned to Xiamen, where he began working as a middle-school art teacher. Though Huang never saw the exhibition, a show of Robert Rauschenberg at the National Art Museum in Beijing radicalized many of his colleagues. Rauschenbergs fusions of art and lifethe equalization of a mattress and a canvas, for exampleoffered new ways forward for Chinese artists, and Huang took up the artists mandate starting in the mid-1980s.

Huang Yong Ping, Colosseum, 2007.

DAVID REGEN/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND GLADSTONE GALLERY, NEW YORK AND BRUSSELS

Working with his artist colleagues in the city, Huang formed a group called Xiamen Dada that staged prankish happenings. Until art is destroyed, life is never peaceful, Huang wrote in Statement on Burning, an essay that accompanied a piece in which he set fire to his paintings in front of the Cultural Palace of Xiamen. Another event held in this spirit involved Huang and his colleagues proposing an exhibition to the Fujian Art Museum, mounting it, and then, hours into its run, replacing all the works on view with found objects culled from the area surrounding the institution. (The show lasted about two hours before officials at the institution realized what the artists were up to and shuttered it.)

Huang was deeply invested in rethinking how galleries and museums ought to function. In doing so, he laid waste to longstanding notions that the art world, both in China and far beyond it, should be separate from the rest of the world, and that Western artists worked in a zone that somehow existed outside the political demands of people around the globe.

One of Huangs best and most forceful pieces is Towing Away the National Art Gallery (1988), a photo-collage in which the artist proposed a method for removing the facade of a Beijing art museum using hemp ropes. It was never realized, but the point, Huang believed, was to have merely thought of ways of overthrowing the art system. The museum is still there, unchanged, and I have never wanted to step inside it in 30 years, he told Ocula. Regarding rebellion or resistance, maybe these could be better understood in terms of Chinese phrenology: some people are born with a reverse bonea sign of rebellion or resistance.

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Huang Yong Ping, Provocateur Artist Who Pushed Chinese Art in New Directions, Has Died at 65 - - ARTnews

Las Vegas digital artist James Stanford will be donating his monumental work Budding Buddha to Art For Tibet for their 9th annual auction and exhibition in support of the Tibetan peoples nonviolent freedom struggle against occupation.

Founded in 2009, Art for Tibet will be taking place in New York on Thursday November 7 2019, and will bring together artists and activists to celebrate, commemorate, and support the Tibetan people.

Stanfords work Budding Buddha, a 3-flip backlit lenticular print is edition one of five, moving with the viewers gaze it transforms into three contrasting versions of itself. Depicting the Buddhas head the work refers to Stanfords own deep spirituality ignited in his teen years when he was introduced to Seon Buddhism and began practicing meditation. Other artists donating works to include Shepard Fairey, Cey Adams, Al Diaz and Pema Rinzin.

This years Art for Tibets Honorary Committee is made up of legendary hip-hop artist and Beastie Boys collaborator Cey Adams, French-Tibetan painter Marie-Dolma Chopel, Shepard Fairey and Columbia Professor of Indo-Tibetan Studies, Robert Thurman. The exhibition and auction will take place at the prestigious Gallery 8 in Harlem, where Tibetan artists will be showcased alongside leading contemporary artists. An online auction will take place from October 25 November 7 2019 and the live auction on November 7.

Stanford is widely known for his series Shimmering Zen, a group of digital works featuring mesmerising mandala designs based on photos of historic Las Vegas neon signage. The mosaics and patterns have an immaterial and spiritual quality evoking the artists strong connection to Zen Buddhism. Using a mix of traditional photography and digital techniques, Stanford layers photographs to create and discover patterns in familiar yet completely revitalised images. The exploration of light is key to Stanfords practice as he draws on his expertise as a painter photographer and professor of colour theory.

Dedicated to promoting arts and culture in his hometown Las Vegas, recent months have seen Stanford design a monumental site-specific mural covering the arts incubator at 705 North Las Vegas Boulevard. The mural spans over 2,000 square feet and commemorates the iconic Blue Angel statue that watched over Downtown Las Vegas for 61 years from its mid-century perch at the Blue Angel Motel.

Multimedia artist Stanford has earned an international reputation for an innovative and diverse oeuvre founded on the values of artistic experimentation and meditative practice. Working inventively in a wide range of media and genres, his subject matter ties into a long-term interest in the study and transformation of popular culture, most widely known in the abstract meditative reconfigurations through his Shimmering Zen series, a body of work based on the neon signage and lights of Las Vegas.His art is widely recognized for a sense of radiant light, shadowy space and an infinity of crystalline forms, aptly named modern mandalas.As a practicingBodhisattva teacher, the artist describes his approach and the transformation within his process: My works are part of my practice: meditations, and as such they act as guides to help the viewer gazedeeperinto who we really are. Popular culture can teach us all a lot about who we really are and show us our correct relationship to the universe.

James Stanford says:

I am honoured to be donating a work to Art For Tibet, a cause that is very close to my heart. As a practicing Buddhist I believe in equality, freedom and human rights, all things the Tibetan people are currently deprived of. I commend the Students for a Free Tibets (SFT) important work including their annual fundraisers which help them continue their fight to free Tibet with nonviolent action.

Notes to Editors:

About Art for Tibet:

Founded in 2009, Art for Tibet raises critical funds for Students for a Free Tibet (SFT), a grassroots network of youth and activists campaigning for Tibetans fundamental right to political freedom. Through education, grassroots organizing, and nonviolent direct action, SFT empowers youth as leaders in the worldwide movement for social justice.

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James Stanford donates Buddhist work to the Tibetan cause - ArtfixDaily

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Navneet Vyasan

Born toFrench-Canadian parents, Jack Kerouac excelled in sports from a very young age.Initially, never interested in literature, Kerouacs athletic pursuits won hima sports scholarship at Columbia University in the early 1940s.

At the same time, Allen Ginsberg, also won a scholarshipat Columbia University and then met Lucien Carr. Carr, a well-read academic,was popular for his views and writings, which were infamouslyanti-establishment.

This is the time when, the core members of the BeatGeneration Kerouac, Ginsberg, Carr, Herbert Huncke and William S Burroughs would go on to start a movement that would inspire generations to come. Throughtheir prose and poetry, they would advocate spiritual awakening, purification,and illumination through heightened sensory awareness. This, they argued, mightbe induced by drugs, jazz, sex, or, in the later years, Zen Buddhism. But itwas Kerouacs book titled On the Road, and his friendship with Ginsberg thatmade headlines every nowand then.

In the 1960s, as their writing gained momentum, adorationwas closely followed by denunciation. However, their works, in time, influencedthese popular trends, then engulfing the world.

The hippiemovement

I was surprised, as always, by how easy the act ofleaving was, and how good it felt. The world was suddenly rich withpossibility, wrote Kerouac in his seminal work, On The Road. Published in1957, this part travelogue part novel, took Kerouac only three weeks towrite. Written in a single, effortless flow, the book was inspired by Kerouacstravel across the rapidly changing post-war United States.

Cited by legendary artistes including, Bob Dylan, JimMorrison, and David Bowie as an influential read, Kerouacs work inspired ageneration of hippie trails. The quest for soul searching, lied in travel, andfor him, the journey he underwent before writing the book, was just a start.Unsurprisingly, American teens read the book cover-to-cover and before late, hebecame a literary icon.

In fact, the term hippie was introduced in the 1960s.Before that, the American media coined the term, beatnik, to describeAmericans, setting on a long journey inspired by Kerouacs writings. His works,acquired a global reach after hippies became prevalent around the world. The trail,required Americans to fly to Europe, which is where it would start. The finalstop, more often than not, being Southern India, the travellers used the passesthrough pre-revolution Iran, and Afghanistan, before it was invaded, finallycrossing over to Pakistan and entering India before settling in the southernstates of Goa and Kerala.

Countercultures

Arguably, nothing influenced music and literature the waycounterculture did. Constantly associated with liberation, one can see the riseof ideals of pacifism, LGBT acceptance and marijuana legalisation when onereads works like Post Office by Charles Bukowski or Fear and Loathing in LasVegas by Hunter S Thompson.

Counterculture literature grew with time when authors,notably, used their writings as a tool to critique the establishment that wasgoverning them. Risking imprisonment and sedition charges, Kerouacscontemporary, Allen Ginsberg penned his much acclaimed poem, Howl. Ginsbergregularly mentions Kerouac in his works.

What is obscenity? And to whom? he wrote in the initialpages of his book, Howl and Other Poems. Ginsberg was frustrated that therapidly growing American economy was masking the countrys military ventures.He accused the everyday white collar worker of ignoring the countrysatrocities. I saw the best minds of my generation who threw their watches offthe roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, and alarm clocksfell on their heads every day for the next decade, he wrote about how the USgovernment was fooling them by luring them with jobs, as a way to mask VietnamWars atrocities. Subsequently, he had to face sedition charges.

Religion andspirituality

In Kerouacs final days, which would also mark theconclusive years of the Beat Generation, he set out in search of spiritualityand was fascinated by Eastern religions. Ginsberg made a historic trip to Indiaand Kerouac published, The Dharma Bums, what is now considered the hippie handbook.

My karma was to be born in America where nobody has anyfun or believes in anything, especially freedom, he wrote. Raised a devoutRoman Catholic, Kerouac after being introduced to Buddhism, mentionsBodhisattva frequently in his works which followed The Dharma Bums. Moreover,this was the early 1960s, when hippies, in their Volkswagen buses, thronged thebeaches of California chanting Hare Rama, Hare Krishna.

(HT Media)

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Jack Kerouac: On the road to immortality - The Navhind Times

Izzy Gravano, Arts EditorOctober 10, 2019

In his own words, Rev. Marc Anderson is Macalesters zen grandpa. He serves as the Buddhist Chaplain in the Center for Religious and Spiritual Life (CRSL), where he facilitates Meditation @ Mac twice a week. The 30-minute sessions are open to students, faculty and community members.

Meditation @ Mac existed prior to Andersons arrival six years ago. When he first started as a volunteer Buddhist chaplain, a student organization was already holding meditation sessions. Anderson was officially hired two years later when College Chaplain and Associate Dean Rev. Kelly J. Stone started her tenure at the college. The students who had previously facilitated the meditation sessions decided to disband their organization leaving a gap in the colleges spiritual programming.

My view of meditation practice, even though I come from the Japanese Soto School of Zen Buddhism, is that I dont see Buddhism as a prerequisite, Anderson said. If students are interested in that part of it, Im available to them but Im trying to offer meditation as something thats available to everybody.

Rev. Anderson approaches meditation on a college campus differently than he might elsewhere.

Some form of contemplative space is really essential for everybody to be healthy, Anderson said. Its not just that youre less anxious and your blood pressure goes down, but it has all these other impacts that are harder for people to grasp because its because it happens differently for everyone.

Meditation is widely recommended by medical professionals and academics alike. On Macalesters campus, Disability Services sees a range of students with anxiety and stress two common reasons why someone might begin meditating.

I find that meditation is a great resource for our students to reduce anxiety, Disability Services Coordinator Josie Hurka said. It is one tool in the toolbox for a healthy life, so its nice that Macalester offers meditation here free of charge and open to everyone.

A dozen or so students regularly attend Meditation @ Mac. Anna Turner 22 sees the benefits, but like many students, cant find the time in the week to make her way to the chapel.

Ive never attended Meditation @ Mac, but Ive always wanted to. Turner said, I like that its a group atmosphere and so low stakes; hopefully I can convince my friends to come with me,

For Macalester students, Anderson cant recommend his sessions enough.

There are few things [in life] that I would guarantee, but meditation is one of them, Anderson said. Not everyone is ready for it, but Ive never met anyone whos been committed to it and not found it to be a good thing, and I cant think of anything else that I could say that about.

You just have to come in the door, he continued. And try it out.

[emailprotected]

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Meditation @ Mac: addressing anxiety in Mac community - Macalester College The Mac Weekly

The ornamental art of Bonsai are on display in the Hoop House at Hershey Gardens in the annual Bonsai: Living Art of the Susquehanna Bonsai Club exhibit of miniature trees and shrubs.

The Susquehanna Bonsai Club provides the seasonal exhibit to Hershey Gardens. Visitors are encouraged to vote for their favorite bonsai.

Bonsai refers to an ornamental tree or shrub grown in a pot and artificially prevented from reaching its normal size. This art form comes from an ancient Chinese horticultural practice, part of which was redeveloped under the influence of Japanese Zen Buddhism.

The ultimate goal of growing a bonsai is to create a miniaturized but realistic representation of nature in the form of a tree. Any tree species can be used to grow one.

The display opens Friday, Oct. 11, 2019, and runs through Saturday, Nov. 3, 2019. The exhibit is open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily, including Saturdays and Sundays, and is included in admission to Hershey Gardens.

General admission is $13.50 for visitors ages 13-61, $12.00 for seniors (ages 62 and up), and $9.50 for juniors (ages 3-12); children under age three are free. Hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily.

For more information, please visit HersheyGardens.org.

Thanks for visiting PennLive. Quality local journalism has never been more important. We need your support. Not a subscriber yet? Please consider supporting our work.

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The miniature world of bonsai on display at Hershey Gardens - PennLive

The Beat Generation included some of the most influential,controversial, and celebrated writers of the twentieth century. Jack Kerouac,Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs were among many whose experimentalwriting inspired the 1950s and 60s counterculture. In Whatcom County, literaryhistory and local history converge on Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyders time asNorth Cascades firewatchers.

Born in 1922, Jack Kerouac most famously wrote On the Road , an autobiographical novelabout his and Neal Cassadys countrywide adventures. The Dharma Bums and DesolationAngels recount Kerouacs firewatcher job from summer 1956just one yearbefore On the Roads publication.Kerouac passed away in 1969 due to alcoholism, but his influence lives on.Notably, he coined the term Beat Generation and wrote spontaneous prosenonstopsentences that flow like breath, as in jazz and meditation.

Born in 1930, Gary Snyder won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetryin 1975 for Turtle Island. Snyderspent his early life mainly in King County and Oregon which, along with ZenBuddhism, inspired his poetrys natural emphasis. He was really the first sortof poet-environmentalist, with the exception of, say, John Muir or Thoreau,says literary scholar and Western WashingtonUniversity professor Christopher Wise.

Although brief, these writers North Cascades adventureshave inspired similar excursions by many of their readers.

Gary Snyder was a firewatcher at Crater Mountainin 1952 and SourdoughMountain in 1953. He convinced fellow poet Philip Whalen to become afirewatcher, and kept a journal published in Earth House Hold (1969).

Snyder first visited Bellingham while growing up in KingCounty, and visited friends there during both firewatcher trips.

There is this legend about Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouaccoming into Bellingham and visiting Cocoanut Grove, Wise says. A 1953Earth House Hold passage says Jackshowed Snyder the bar. However, the date does not match Kerouacs trip and Conversations with Gary Snyder by DavidStephen Calonne (2017) mentions one Jack Francis as a friend of Snyders inBellingham.

Snyder made later Bellingham trips, including poetryreadings at Village Books and North Cascades Institute in 2004. Havingclimbed mountains since 1945, Snyder knew the scenery well.

When Kerouac was in Whatcom County, he had an encounterwith a culture, with an experience of nature that he had never had before,says Wise. For Snyder, I think being here was more an extension of what he wasalready familiar with in Oregon.

Kerouac and Snyder met in 1955, the year San FranciscosSix Gallery reading featured Snyders Berry Feast and Ginsbergs Howl.Snyder introduced Kerouac to Zen Buddhism and the firewatcher job while theylived at Snyders Mill Valley, California cabinthe experience behind KerouacsThe Dharma Bums.

Jack Kerouac spent 63 days at DesolationPeaks lookout station in the summer of 1956, resulting in Desolation Angels. He never spotted any fires,and had only brief radio contact with the U.S. Forest Service.

DesolationAngels (published in 1965) has three parts: Desolation inSolitude written in 1956, Desolation in the World written in 1956, andPassing Through written in 1961. The first, Kerouacs firewatching journal,describes his struggle with boredom, isolation, and a self-confrontation youdont really see in his other narratives, Wise says. The journal replacesKerouacs spontaneous prose with meditations on Hozomeen Mountain, comparing itto the Void.

For people who really admire Kerouac, it can be afrustrating novel because of the rambling nature, says Wise. But I think ithas a real heartfelt spirituality that still speaks to people today.

From Marblemount and State Route 20, Kerouac hitchhiked toSeattle through Concrete, Sedro-Woolley, and Mount Vernon. Desolation in theWorld returns to spontaneous prose as Kerouac enjoys Seattles burlesque andreunites with friends in San Francisco. TheDharma Bums (1958) describes Desolation Peak in spontaneous prose, moreoptimistic in hindsight.

Desolation Peak may have been Kerouacs last realadventure, as Passing Through recounts following trips more cynically.Visiting Tangier (a Beat cultural hub) in 1957, Kerouac felt nausea concerningexperience with the world at large and lamented On the Roads newfound fame. BigSur (1962) is Kerouacs only other novel set afterward, chronicling laterhealth struggles.

To Kerouac, Beat meant beaten down but also upbeatand beatific. This sentiment resonates with his life story and with readersfollowing the same road.

Hiking Desolation Peak takes a 10-mile overnight trip,Crater Mountain a 19-mile daytrip, and Sourdough Mountain a 10-mile daytrip.Lookout towers still stand at Desolation Peak and Sourdough Mountain.

Poetson the Peaks by John Suiter and a State Route 20 plaquenear Desolation Peak commemorate the Beats mountain adventures. Still, WhatcomCounty feels the Beats influence in other ways.

I see a lot in their writing that resonates with thisparticular county, says Wise. And some of their values, their ideals, theirexuberance, the things that they loved, the experimental nature of their workIthink theres an openness to that here.

In the North Cascades, Whatcom Countys literature enthusiasts can hike further off the beaten path.

Featured photo by Christopher Wise

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The Beat Generation in Whatcom County: Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, and the North Cascades - whatcomtalk.com

Updated October 06, 2019 11:54:26

Riley Lee will never forget the first time he heard the shakuhachi a Japanese bamboo flute on a record his brother brought home to Hawaii in the late 1960s.

"It was as if some sentient being was talking directly to me," he says.

"Back then you couldn't loop things. So I took the needle off and I wore out that little track in the LP just having to lift it up and play it again."

The track was a collaboration between jazz clarinettist Tony Scott, Shinichi Yuize, who played the koto, or Japanese board zither, and shakuhachi player Hozan Yamamoto.

As a teenager, Dr Lee had no idea that the experience would set off a chain of events that would define his life.

Or how the gaps in the music the silence would come to be as important to him as the melodies he would play.

He has come to embrace Zen Buddhism, but says silence "transcends single religions": "To understand ourselves, to be more self-aware, requires that silence."

The shakuhachi was introduced to Japan from China in the 8th century, and Zen Buddhist monks have used it in meditation over the past 400 years.

Dr Lee became the instrument's first non-Japanese grand master in 1980, and completed a PhD in the Zen repertoire of the shakuhachi tradition at the University of Sydney in 1992.

He had originally wanted to learn Chinese at school to engage with his father's culture and language. But not enough people signed up, so he decided Japanese was the "next best thing".

On a subsequent trip to Japan, Dr Lee was browsing in a shakuhachi shop, planning on bringing one home with him.

He asked the shop owner how to tell the difference between a cheap and an expensive shakuhachi.

"He could have just sold me a more expensive flute because I had the money," Dr Lee says, "but he looked at me and he said: 'Do you really want to know?'"

The answer was yes. Dr Lee was introduced to a teacher and he spent the next seven years in Japan, learning how to play the shakuhachi.

For Dr Lee, silence is what separates notes and creates melody. But he says total silence is an "impossibility" like knowing infinity, or God.

"We hear our heartbeat; I hear my tinnitus," he says.

Silence has sacred qualities in Zen Buddhism, but it is also important in many other religions.

This weekend, a conference at the Australian Catholic University is exploring notions of sacred silence in literature and the arts.

Its convenor, Michael Griffith, says silence is a way for him to access godliness, and acts as a "gateway to our own inner understanding and our own self-knowledge".

He was raised a Catholic, and now affiliates himself with the Quaker community, as well as taking his Catholicism to a new level through his commitment to the Benedictine community.

He finds himself drawn to the role of oblate a lay person who continues life outside a monastery but remains highly spiritually connected.

Stillness and silence are integral parts of his spiritual practice, and he says these qualities help him open up "to what is around us with more intensity".

Many of his students come from a background where they've either "rejected traditional religions, or they are searching for something new".

They find an "inner reality" in literature, poetry and fiction that "gives them a taste of something beyond the material, digital world that enmeshes them all".

Dr Griffith uses reading to teach the sacred quality of silence without leaning on traditional religion.

He says across religions, silence acts as a reprieve from the unreal "all the digital data, the news and the fantasies which clog our mind and our capacity to be still".

Cultivating the mindset needed to play the shakuhachi has taught Dr Lee that the best way to understand silence is to become it.

"Silence is a responsibility, or an action," he says.

"No matter how silent the room or the situation or the countryside if we're not silent within ourselves, it's even noisier than when we are distracted by outside sound."

Dr Lee sees silence as a sacred element each of us can cultivate.

"We have a responsibility to ourselves, to experience it. If only a little bit before we die, then the big silence happens."

Topics:buddhism,sacred,books-literature,catholic,meditation-and-prayer,quakers,university-and-further-education,world,music,arts-and-entertainment,sydney-2000,japan

First posted October 06, 2019 07:00:00

Continued here:
Riley Lee fell in love with the shakuhachi but it's silence that really moves him - ABC News

navneet.vyasan@htlive.com

Born to French-Canadian parents, Jack Kerouac excelled in sports from a very young age. Initially, never interested in literature, Kerouacs athletic pursuits won him a sports scholarship at Columbia University in the early 1940s.

At the same time, Allen Ginsberg, also won a scholarship at Columbia University and then met Lucien Carr. Carr, a well-read academic, was popular for his views and writings, which were infamously anti-establishment.

This is the time when, the core members of the Beat Generation Kerouac, Ginsberg, Carr, Herbert Huncke and William S Burroughs would go on to start a movement that would inspire generations to come. Through their prose and poetry, they would advocate spiritual awakening, purification, and illumination through heightened sensory awareness. This, they argued, might be induced by drugs, jazz, sex, or, in the later years, Zen Buddhism. But it was Kerouacs book titled On the Road, and his friendship with Ginsberg, that made headlines every now and then.

In the 1960s, as their writing gained momentum, adoration was closely followed by denunciation. However, their works, in time, influenced these popular trends, then engulfing the world.

The hippie movement

I was surprised, as always, by how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt. The world was suddenly rich with possibility, wrote Kerouac in his seminal work, On The Road. Published in 1957, this part travelogue part novel, took Kerouac only three weeks to write. Written in a single, effortless flow, the book was inspired by Kerouacs travel across the rapidly changing post-war United States.

Cited by legendary artistes including, Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison and David Bowie as an influential read, Kerouacs work inspired a generation of hippie trails. The quest for soul searching, lied in travel, and for him, the journey he underwent before writing the book, was just a start. Unsurprisingly, American teens read the book cover-to-cover and before late, he became a literary icon.

The manuscript of On the Road

In fact, the term hippie was introduced in the 1960s. Before that, the American media coined the term, beatnik, to describe Americans, setting on a long journey inspired by Kerouacs writings. His works, acquired a global reach after hippies became prevalent around the world. The trail, required Americans to fly to Europe, which is where it would start. The final stop, more often than not, being Southern India, the travellers used the passes through pre-revolution Iran, and Afghanistan, before it was invaded, finally crossing over to Pakistan and entering India before settling in the southern states of Goa and Kerala.

Countercultures

Arguably, nothing influenced music and literature the way counterculture did. Constantly associated with liberation, one can see the rise of ideals of pacifism, LGBT acceptance and marijuana legalisation when one reads works like Post Office by Charles Bukowski or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson.

Counterculture literature grew with time when authors, notably, used their writings as a tool to critique the establishment that was governing them. Risking imprisonment and sedition charges, Kerouacs contemporary, Allen Ginsberg penned his much acclaimed poem, Howl. Ginsberg regularly mentions Kerouac in his works.

Allen Ginsberg in Banarasin 1963(HT PHOTO)

What is obscenity? And to whom? he wrote in the initial pages of his book, Howl and Other Poems. Ginsberg was frustrated that the rapidly growing American economy was masking the countrys military ventures. He accused the everyday white collar worker of ignoring the countrys atrocities. I saw the best minds of my generation who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade, he wrote about how the US government was fooling them by luring them with jobs, as a way to mask Vietnam Wars atrocities. Subsequently, he had to face sedition charges.

Religion and spirituality

In Kerouacs final days, which would also mark the conclusive years of the Beat Generation, he set out in search of spirituality and was fascinated by Eastern religions. Ginsberg made a historic trip to India and Kerouac published, The Dharma Bums, what is now considered the hippie handbook.

My karma was to be born in America where nobody has any fun or believes in anything, especially freedom, he wrote. Raised a devout Roman Catholic, Kerouac after being introduced to Buddhism, mentions Bodhisattva frequently in his works which followed The Dharma Bums. Moreover, this was the early 1960s, when hippies, in their Volkswagen buses, thronged the beaches of California chanting Hare Rama, Hare Krishna.

First Published:Oct 11, 2019 15:42 IST

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On the road to immortality - Hindustan Times