The Winter of Our Content

By Dan Hagen

Often, when I see Buddhist iconography — the half-lidded statues and paintings of Buddha and the bodhisattvas — they communicate to me a sense of stoic, settled calm and existential centeredness, immediately and on some elemental level. I can get something of the same feeling looking at a Midwestern field in summer being massaged by a breeze or the surface of a pond in spring where the water-walking insects dance on their own reflections.

I’ve had this reaction all my life, and no other religious imagery ever provided me this frisson. I put it down to some kind of unconscious affinity.