one time only

We have a native spaciousness in which we should be aware of our mortality and its one-time-only quality for our inhabitation of places. Ichioku ichie.

I don't see how you can insist on native spaciousness, and the one-time only of our mortality, and yet also emphasize complexity. These oppose one another.

That's just my point, that the two can and must be combined. The reality we have to be present to in the moment includes its complexities.

Hegelian Zen? We need a more conceptual version of what the Buddhists call the paradox of wisdom and compassion. Complexity and encounter have to be related.

Barring catastrophes, our society is not going to simplify its systems and its increasingly complex cultural interrelations. We have to discover how to be effectively in such a culture and such places while retaining an awareness and flexibility that will help us work for their improvement. But that improvement should not consist in wholesale rejection, which will quickly be coopted into some new line of rejectionist products, as has happened with one style of music and art after another. We have to find ways to open up what seems closed, and show the closures in what seems too open, and for that we need a more complex awareness than is at first suggested by emphasis upon mortality and "be here now." Yet we also want the decisiveness and attention that come from such focus on the moment.

The issue keeps coming back to how the moment and the present and the place exist, and I keep arguing that these are what they are because they open up to their horizons and linkages. We exist in the spacious process of their happening.

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