I think there's a good case for antinatalism. Stephen Hawking has told us recently that we must colonise space to survive, not long after telling us to beware of aliens because they'll probably just do to us as the conquistadors did to the native peoples of the Americas. So . . . exactly why do we want to go on and on, to go forth and multiply in a hostile final frontier? Why?

I grew up in North Devon, by the sea, and feel a special affinity for the landscape there, despite a lack of actual ancestry.

Zen, on the other hand, is not so dogmatically sterile, though there are certainly traces and more than traces of this austerity. However, with Zen we have not only the void, but the fertile void. The ink lines in a sumi-e painting show this fertility of the void ever ready to brim over into existence.

The peculiar thing is that, in focusing only on the here and now, Buddhism seems to despise the world.

I have a bit of a struggle with some aspects of or forms of Buddhism, but Zen I find to be mainly congenial.

I'm not claiming anything like sainthood - merely a native perception.

The cultural products of America from this period [ fifties and sixties] are like a vision of paradise or something. I find it utterly intoxicating.