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Spring 2012: Burning World
“Monks, all is burning,” the Buddha taught in his “Fire Sermon,” freshly translated for this Spring 2012 issue of Parabola by scholar monk Bhikkhu Bodhi. While there is no escape from the burning of impermanence and the inner and outer conditions that come with our human bodies and minds, there is a secondary fire that can be extinguished. Through every sense door pour impressions that burn us “with the fire of greed, with the fire of hatred, with the fire of delusion.”
Mother Nature drawing by Nina Paley, over photograph of sandy desert at sunset by Ramzi Hachicho.
I met Jonathan F.P. Rose in Manhattan, the week a snow storm knocked out power in much of the Northeast. Heating by woodstove and carrying water home from the local fire station for five long, cold days left me feeling a bit rough and smoky, not to mention unprepared, to be sitting in the comfortable offices of his company in a historic old building near Grand Central Station. Yet the moment I met Rose, a tall, friendly man who met me talking and moving at a confident stride, I realized that my days as a kind of suburban pioneer woman, muddling along in a harsh new world that everyone blamed on global warming and our decaying infrastructure, was the best possible situation to meet a new kind of green pioneer.
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