Rev. Danny Fisher

The 2008 Blogisattva Award winners have been announced. The Blog of the Year prize (as well as three others) went to our friend in the Buddhablogosphere, the late Michael of One Foot in Front of the Other.

I was in awe of the way Michael, who died January 15th at the age of forty-five from a rare form of cancer, shared his experience of dying so honestly and so fearlessly with us at his blog. I said this in a post that I wrote around the time of his death, but it bears repeating: I’m very sad that he’s gone. I was touched by his work–by his life. And I know I wasn’t the only one.

After Michael’s death, his brother added two posts, including this one about the jukai ceremony Michael’s sensei did for him. At the ceremony, Michael was given the name Daiku as well as the following poem:

Do not cling to
This small mind,
This bag of skin.

Open to the great sky
Where there is no birth
and there is no death.

Goodbye, Daiku…

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In other Blogisattva news, I was very happy to receive one award from my comrades in Buddhist blogging: the award for Best Single Photograph. The honored shot is the one to the right, which I snapped while I was living in Bodh Gaya, India.

Check out the list of winners and acquaint yourself with some wonderful blogs and bloggers.

This past Thursday, I went to the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale for a presentation by Robert Spellman and Joan Anderson. Robert and Joan are both professors at my graduate alma mater Naropa University. I’d never had the pleasure of actually meeting them until their talk this week, and I found them both to be lovely folks.

Their presentation was entitled “Drawing on Chaos – Buddhism & Contemporary Art Practice,” and was sponsored by a grant from the Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation, the South Asian Studies Council, the Hixon Fund, and the Department of Religious Studies at Yale.

The gist of Robert and Joan’s presentation could be summed up by a comment at Robert’s website:

As time goes by it becomes less relevant to distinguish between the investigation of mind that occurs in meditation and the investigation of perception that occurs in painting. Both require suspending fixed notions; both hold the potential for going beyond habitual mind; both develop accuracy within one’s medium and, in a larger sense, within society.

Do take a look at Robert and Joan’s artwork (just follow the hyperlinks in the first sentence). You’ll be glad you did.

Also, don’t miss Robert’s interviews with Vince Horn over at Buddhist Geeks. (Well, don’t miss Buddhist Geeks in general. It’s good stuff.)