So I'm reading Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder's letters and I came across this passage. The mention of samsara caught my eye and I thought I'd share. Let us please take this moment to reminisce tapas in Gracia...What an appropriate place and name for our lives at that moment...the cycle of birth, suffering, death, rebirth, all that blood and embrace.

love.

Gary to Ginsberg:
Listen man if you feel up to it will you write me a concise statement of your theory of beat ness and its relation to vision, poetry, and America? and to sex? I am seeing new angles to this rough Zen-discipline shot; perhaps by reducing one's life to essentials of eating (barely enough) and sleeping (barely enough) and working (hard) and subjecting you to constant psychological pressure of meditation and interviews they are, within a controlled situation, making you thoroughly beat (Rinzai is the sect of the big stick whack) and aware of what is samsara* and what one's body-self really craves, like food sex and sleep --

* Samsara: the cycle of birth, suffering, death, and rebirth