Like these rocks that I photographed on an early spring
afternoon in '95, this page will strive to emerge from the fog of
modern-day rushed life, to present my ideas, problems and things that
I've run across.
[text from freshman year] So, I'm currently a
first-year (PC nomenclature) at Swarthmore
College, in the last few weeks of the semester as I'm first
putting this thing up. I'm thinking of majoring in philosophy, but
PolySci and Religion could also be candidates. I got interested in
philosophy due to my exposure to two awesome people. One was my
high school English teacher at Marin
Academy in sunny California. . . . One might ask why I'm out
here in the land of snow and cold, and my reasons are that 1)
Swarthmore is better than anything that a school in CA could offer
(w/ the smog in LA & the rejection letter from Stanford) in
terms of academics and that 2) I just fell in love with the
gorgeous campus and the incredibly nice people. Back to Joe . . .
Joe has recently decided to work full time on a novel and work on
his next play, "Junkyard of the Gods" (he's written "The Edge Of
The World & several books of poetry to date) full time in
Chicago b/c he's marrying Christine, who got a fellowship from
Northwestern to do her PhD in neuropsychology, and Joe's moving up
to Chicago with her. The other friend, Aaron, stayed on the West
Coast for college: he's at University of Oregon (U of O).
Apparently the Academics there leave some to be desired.
I have been practicing Aikido
for almost two years now and its philosophy of being able to
stand your ground without hurting either the person who's
attacking or getting hurt yourself agrees well with what I
agree with in other areas of life
Here at Swat we do work a lot; everyone is expected to put
a reasonable large amount of time and effort into reading
course materials, writing essays and other tasks of the
intellect. A basic tenent of Engaged
Buddhism is that one shouldn't engage in intellectual
discourse and ideation for its sake alone as to do so would not
be helping us in our daily lives as fully as possible. Instead,
Bhikku Buddhadasa and other Engaged Buddhists say, that one
should be questioning in order to find out how to live
now.
In the application of this philosophy (which makes a lot of
sense to me) to life at Swarthmore, one quicky realizes that
there are a lot of intellects on the loose, far removed from
reality. Furthur, I realized that this 'ivory tower' of
academia is upheld, in part, because most of the works that
we produce never surface in the outer world; We students
work like mad to produce papers for our classes that have (most
times) consumed quite a bit of brain power to write and they
end up on our bookshelves, in our binders, or even worse, the
trash. As a result of these thoughts and in an effort to ground
the intellectual side of my studies here, I hereby present
my body of work
(under construction)