The Brady Archive

Robert Brady was among the founders of KJ, and has contributed to almost every issue, his voice and the magazine’s co-evolving over the years.

Since April 2002 he has maintained an almost daily net presence at Pure Land Mountain, with over 3,000 postings....

74: Bright Road
The world is a mind, where there are traces, paths, trails, highways, expressways, leading to futures of mystery our ancestors long ago heard whispers of in dreams... And we here, standing where we are in this world to which the old road has led, do we know where we are, any more than those early travelers?

73: Chair
It was a chair made to last beyond a life, like a poem or a song, the craft of it to be remembered, another form of the name of the maker, of himself and the grace of his hands to be passed on and spoken of, sung of in wood, taken good comfort in, and I realized I had in all my years on earth never been so well understood by a chair; no chair had ever told me of these things.

72: On Contentment
I've always loved the mystery in that Tao Te Ching phrase that each time I read it shimmers with the gleam of truth that cannot be pinned down, that coruscates in the mind’s eye: "There is no disaster greater than not being content."

69: The Big Rainbow
We behold full and long-term rainbows all the time out here in the countryside, as compared to the couple of minutes of barely distinguishable fragments of arc we used to see between buildings in the city sometimes, already kind of faded and archaeological, like a suddenly exposed artifact that disintegrates on contact with modern air...

68: The Land
How seldom we think of what the land truly is, what it is saying to us, what it means, what it asks of us. We used to listen; now we talk. Turn things around to the way they really are: we belong to the land, as we find now and then, when the land changes its mind.

67: “Mada Da Yo!”
Every American who comes to Japan for a length of time sufficient to observe children playing kakurenbo (hide-and-seek) is profoundly shocked. The shock is prolonged for an American who raises children here, and then grandchildren, and watches over the years as descendants play this game all unaware of their gross violation of American childhood’s eternal rules.

66: Idle Thoughts
Idleness punctuates the new idler's life, gives it organic pace and pause, imparts perspective on what once was a blur, enables snapshots, moments of assessment and redirection, the creation of a mindmap of the life's path. Thus the idler learns of life from the inside, where it's lived and where it happens, rather than from the outside, where it is chronicled by a timeline of arrivals and departures.

65: Long Knowledge
On a certain type of grass about a foot high, fine hairs held the dew in drops so small as to make them all seem a cottony vapor; patches of that grass stood out like glowing clouds of mist hovering in place just inches above the ground.

63 Beans in the Devil's Eyes
By flinging hard beans in the face of hovering misfortune, we and our descendants are showing the night our strength, shouting out to the darkness without as well as within (both home and self) that we care about the entities that reside here, that we are responsible for and will defend this place, for this household and its members are shared in our charge.

62: Where is the Wild?
"I love the wild not less than the good," said Henry, in the Higher Laws chapter of Walden, and “In wildness lies the preservation of the world.” Henry was wild about wilderness, just couldn’t stop talking about it one way or another, and who can blame him, he saw it disappearing.

61 Blogology 101
The earliest known examples of blogging, apart from the network of cave paintings – oldest evidence of the human need to blog – are probably the Sumerian clay tablets: early prototypes of the hard disk, but with data impressed by wooden stylus, in lieu of a keyboard...

59 Keys to the Kingdom
As we travel the convoluted pathways of life, asking ourselves the myriad questions that characterize intelligent inquiry, such as "Why am I holding this golf club?" or "What did the refrigerator say?" we learn that some information is more important than other information...

58 Habitat of Spirit
Imagination is not greatly encouraged by human systems of organization because it is by nature free; it is beyond established control, inimical to chains, can't be enslaved, organized or taxed, depends upon no institution. It is the source of change, pure and simple, of new ideas.

57 Village Life
...young macho guys put on old tapestries like skirts and danced in the streets and didn't even begin to laugh at each other, wore long red hair and masks and gestured crazily in the complete confidence that deep tradition affords, for tradition is a great strength, the bond of a society.

56: Going Home Again
Home had been a large gray, rambling wooden house that rattled pleasantly during earthquakes. Built in the Western style in the heart of Tokyo, it wasn’t far from the road along which the 47 ronin had carried the head of Kira on that winter morning in 1702. When I’d moved there in the early 1970s on my first trip to Japan the house was already old, somehow miraculously having survived the 1923 earthquake and the Tokyo firebombing maelstroms. I lived there on and off for five years, leaving it for the last time in 1977 and moving on.

55 Streets
Every real street began as a footpath between places very worth walking to, later widened for horse and cart and speed and then there were sidestreets, and avenues added in full-blown urban ad hocness to spell out whole cities all the way from foot to car to bus and truck and airport air streets in the world city, the streets now memorable lines in the long long story that is the city, the veins in the living urban body, source of its nourishment and character and voice, people houses machines, metaphor for going, being, neighboring, community, membrane of private/public, face of the neighborhood, streambed of commerce, the other half of home, the street is what the old folks lean out the windows or sit on the porch or the stoop and gaze upon, remembering the streets of their days, common property, the favorite memories of a former city kid are memories of the street, where all the meeting happens, all the socializing happens, all the growing happens, graffiti museum, and streets too evolve...

54 The Big Elsewhere
The place of epiphany is fecund, it is full, it is nurturing, it is joyous. In other words it is more than the mere place it appears to be, much more; it is a windblown veil, a gate to the Big Elsewhere.

53 Living Wisdom
I’ve learned a lot of things from stones, both from building with them and from butting my head against their walls, the latter when I was mostly younger and stone walls were largely metaphorical. The main thing I have learned from building stone walls is that the process of building with stone is that of the Socratic dialog, with me as the student and the stones as the teacher. Stones do the Socratic thing very well; they have infinite patience, impeccable honesty, and they know their stuff right down to the ground.

52 Sex and Flat Tires
In perhaps one of Japan’s earliest mysteries-of-the-latest-technology e-commerce posters, a kimono'd woman speaking into a wooden wall phone in a lithographed poster for a Tokyo kimono shop says “For the finest in kimonos, dial 18!!” Totally rad when it was cutting edge, much like what is totally rad now.

51 Notes from Pure Land Mountain
I spend great stretches of time alone up on the mountain with the sky on my hands, tending soil and plants and seeds and rearranging rocks the better to suit their natures vis-a-vis my need for stone walls, and stare out at the Lake and its majesty, get as involved as I humanly can in thunderstorms and whirlwinds, learning from them the many small things there are about myself, and my past, and my path, and the vortex of truth and illusion. There is no greater teacher than solitude, as anyone who makes it back from the desert knows. Not solitude in the negative standard societal 'loneliness' sense, but in the aboriginal magnificent spirit-quest uplift sense. In the city when you are alone it is a societal matter; when you are alone in the country you are alone, you realize, with everything.

50 The Big T
Let’s keep it simple. There’s Big-T Transience and there’s little-t transience. Big-T is cosmic and eternal and everywhere operative; little-t is local, temporary, artificial. Humanity’s "progressive" activities are little-t: politics, highways, careers, convenience stores, dynasties, acid rain. Big-T subsumes and drives all the little-t stuff seamlessly and invisibly without pause or notice...

49 True Destinations
Some folks still think of life in the old-fashioned way, as a river flowing to a majestic sea, or as a long open highway leading to a wondrous destination, and either metaphor can still capture in a sort of word-amber what is becoming an increasingly packaged process. I can’t help it; even though I don’t commute anymore, I still tend to get systematic. I realize now that back in my commuter days, after commuting for only a short while I subconsciously began to view life, modern life, modern urban life, ok, my modern urban life, as more like a loop line.

48 Variety and What Happened to It
Until but a few lives ago, variety was a matter of actual choice: if we couldn’t find it, we made it, out of the various materials locally available, and we made it well. Or we knew who made it. Now with fewer stars in our skies and fewer life forms on earth than ever in history, thanks largely to our rampant taste for variety at any cost, we get to choose in a new dark among millions of blackbox products made far away by strangers and machines, and what does it get us? Overstocks, remainders, fat, sick, depressed, overflowing landfills, newly discovered toxins. Can we really handle so much artificial choice, not to mention the resulting detritus?

47 Ripples – on flooding ricefields and handing down of local legend
46 The Cloud Resembles a Rabbit
45 My Part in the Downfall of Ferdinand Marcos
44 Colonization.com
43 Recognizing Okinawa
42 The Best Sellers of 1857
41 Prime Time
40 Elderly Rad
39 The Emperor's Clock
38 True Belonging
37 “Thank god for all the city folk, who leave the countryside to us” (excerpt: The Country Side of Life)
36 Signs of Darkness
35 Days of the Dead
34 The Most Different Country
33 Excerpts from the Langdon Chronicles
32 Aspirin
31On Silencelessness
30 An American Issei
29 An Interview with David Byrne
28 Talking Heads
27 Kyoto and the Roots of the Future; Bring Back the Yin-Yang Boys
26 The Cloud of God
25 Mountains of the Mind
24 First Night, New Country
23 Exploring the Upper Reaches of Shit Creek
22 How Golden Arches Got His Name; The Very First
21 Under Jurassic Skies
20 Tracks
19 A Touch of Amusement
17 City of a Thousand Springs
15 Expo 90: Rubbing Our Noses in It
14 The Chronicles of Hatman: Mind Over Mochi
13 Intelligent Buildings Flee Tokyo
12 Sen-no Rikyu Hits the Ceiling
11 The First Natural Man-Made Orange, and Other Stories
10 The Netsuke Vector
9 A Pair of Boots
8 The Noodle Victory
6 The Emperor Visits MacDonald's
5 On Noise
4 Getting Home
3 Through the New Looking-Glass
2 Of Doorknobs, Dada, & the Throwaway Marshmallow