What is the geography of an inner journey, and where does it lead? How might spiritualism appear on a screen? Can a film — a moving picture — capture stillness?

These are not unanswerable Zen koans, but instead aesthetic challenges filmmaker and Buddhist Edward A. Burger encountered in his making of the 2021 film “The Mountain Path,” a  deeply personal story about his journey into the Zhongnan Mountains of China, in search of his lifelong teacher.

Along the way, Burger himself encounters a host of solitary Buddhists — monks and a nun, an old master and his disciples — who offer lessons in living and dying, doing without and looking within.

Now down from the mountain, Burger brings to our local flatlands his film for an intimate, and potentially enlightening screening.

Sponsored by the Yellow Springs Dharma Center, “The Mountain Path” will show at Little Art Theatre on Wednesday, July 8, at 7 p.m. A question-and-answer with Burger will follow.

In speaking with the News last week via Zoom from his Washington, D.C., home, Burger said the Little Art’s screening of “The Mountain Path” is a kind of homecoming — “the closing of a circle,” he said. Were it not for a fleeting connection to Antioch College, the film might have never been.

As a young man exploring academic interests in Buddhism in the late ‘90s, Burger was drawn from The College of Wooster in central Ohio to participate for a semester in a Yellow Springs-grown program. This was villager Robert Pryor’s Antioch’s Education Abroad Buddhist Studies program, which since its implementation in 1979, regularly brought college students from all over to study and stay in Bodh Gaya, India — the holy town where the Buddha is said to have attained enlightenment under the sacred Bodhi Tree.

“It turned me from someone who’s really interested in Buddhism to someone who said, ‘This is all I want to do with my life,’” Burger said. “From this program, you learned all about how to live in a new country, how to navigate Buddhist cultures and how to learn, how to explore. Robert handed his whole lifetime of experience and knowledge to us. What a transmission.”

In a separate interview at the Dharma Center, where Pryor leads all Vipassana practices, the former Antioch administrator chuckled as he recalled the academic sojourns  he led over the years.

“This kind of education was too spiritual for universities back in those days, but not for Antioch,” Pryor said. “Antioch, in its true style, gave credit for meditation. That’s not something you’d see often!”

Pryor has stayed in touch with Burger over the years since his fateful trip abroad, and clearly recalls a pivotal moment for the soon-to-be filmmaker. Burger picked up a copy of Bill Porter’s “Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Monks.”

That book lit a fire in Burger, and his own mountain path became clear: move to China, learn Mandarin and gain a deeper understanding of Chán Buddhism — the ancient Chinese progenitor school of Zen. And for more than 12 years, that’s what he did.

“Meanwhile, every chance I got, I’m going up to the mountains to study with my shifu,” Burger added, referring to who would become his lifelong teacher and, later, a central figure in his films.

After some time, some experience and some fluency later, Burger found work in Beijing working on TV crews — lending a hand or a translation on what he described as “an influx of TV and Hollywood projects that came to China in the early 2000s.” When working on a reality TV show, Burger got wise to the magic of the handheld DV camcorder.

“What a game-changer,” he said of the little digital device. “So, I wanted to make a film about my shifu in the mountains. What else would I make a film about? That was the central thing in my life at the time.”

That first movie of his? Terrible, Burger said. Nothing but talking heads and shoddy footage he had collected from 2003 and 2004.

Following some words of encouragement from fellow filmmakers and digging deep within, he went back, made it a little better, and that film eventually became his directorial debut, the 2005 “Amongst White Clouds.”

Again, time passed and Burger’s spiritual journey progressed. His filmography grew by four more works. And in 2020, he felt it was time to revisit the clouds.

“I wanted to remake it,” he said. “I went back to my box of tapes and it was totally new and fresh to me. It looked totally different because I had been studying Buddhism and Chinese for 15 additional years. So, it was like picking up a book that you had read as a child, and not recognizing it at all.”

He again went into the mountains, gathered new footage of his teacher and the hermits on the Zhongnan mountain side, and eventually, “Among White Clouds” became an entirely new film — “The Mountain Path,” in fact.

“As I understand, people from all different Buddhist traditions have watched this and have been inspired by it in some way — Theravada monks, Westerners ordained as monks have said it’s been the first time they’ve seen these kinds of traditions lived out in such intensity and sincerity,” Burger said.

Buddhist or not, Burger — and those at the Dharma Center sponsoring Wednesday’s screening — said that “The Mountain Path” can appeal to most anyone.

“Most everyone is either living or wanting to embark on their own spiritual journey,” the filmmaker said. “For those who aren’t, this could bring some inspiration to step into that. It’s a good ol’ fashioned spiritual journey film.”

Burger continued: “The film is like those old Chinese landscape paintings where, as you unroll it in your hands, you’re moving through a natural space. I mapped an inner experience, a spiritual  journey onto a physical landscape. We’re all moving through all kinds of terrain — going into dark forests, into caves, coming onto a precipice, and everything is wide open. The film traverses all that, and as you go from one place to another, you learn something new from each hermit you meet.”

Bringing moviegoers from their cinema seat into the hermits’ misty mountaintop dwellings is one thing for an artist, but Burger said bringing audiences into his subjects’ inner worlds is a different feat altogether.

“Chán has a whole lineage of arts — music, calligraphy, painting, poetry, architecture, clothes — all helping those who practice turn their gaze inward,” he said. “I try to craft my films with that in mind — to somehow re-create something that is really shapeless and formless in many ways. But there’s this grammar of experience in meditating that can interact with cinema in an interesting way.”

Watching a film, after all, is its own form of meditation, he noted. Cinema requires patience, seeing, listening, and experiencing — the same as making the work to begin with.

“As you move through these landscapes, you’re moving through your own mind,” Burger said. “But you know, really there is no mountain. There is only your mind.”

“The Mountain Path” will be screened at Little Art Theatre on Wednesday, July 8, at 7 p.m. Adult tickets are $13, senior tickets are $11 and child/student/military tickets are $9. Director Edward A. Burger will hold a Q&A following the film. For more information, go to http://www.littleart.com

This winter, local resident and artist Liz Mersky burned hundreds of her own art works.

She had considered doing it several years ago, after looking at stacks and stacks of pastel drawings and paintings and resolving that there wasn’t much sense in keeping it all just for the sake of keeping it.

“I don’t like a lot of stuff,” Mersky told the News this month. “It seemed stupid that they were in drawers and nobody was seeing them.”

Mersky compiled a stack of work intended for burning, but friends — as did, admittedly, this reporter upon hearing the tale — reacted with shock, and Mersky relented, allowing the work to continue to sit in boxes.

When the notion came around again this winter, Mersky went ahead and lit the bonfire before telling anyone.

“That was the only way it was going to happen,” she said with a chuckle.

From what remains of Mersky’s works — around 250 pieces, she estimated — came the selected pieces that make up “Into the Light,” a small retrospective exhibition opening Thursday, July 2, in the YS Senior Center Fireplace Room. Landscapes, florals and other works will be on display, with proceeds from every piece set to be donated to a local nonprofit of the buyer’s choosing.

“I want them to be as much benefit as they can be,” Mersky said, and said suggested nonprofits include the Senior Center, Tecumseh Land Trust, World House Choir, The 365 Project and “Who’s Hungry?”, though buyers may make their own selection outside of that list.

The impulse to let the art leave her hands, and for the departure itself to be useful, is a fitting frame for a retrospective by an artist whose creative life has been marked by movement: from photography to documentary video, from pastels and paint to wood.

Mersky, a photographer from around the age of 6, came to Yellow Springs from Michigan as an Antioch College student, drawn to the school’s work-study program; she graduated in 1973, amid the Antioch strike. She left the village for a short stay in California, returning after about six months, and has lived here since then. After her return, she worked in Antioch’s video department with Bob Devine, and later transitioned into filmmaking.

For about 14 years, Mersky made documentaries focused on environmental issues and community life. Her films include “Sweetwater,” about the Little Miami River; “Room 19,” filmed in a Springfield classroom serving children with significant disabilities; and 1983’s acclaimed “Labor More than Once,” which chronicled a local mother’s struggle to regain her parental rights after coming out as a lesbian.

“I thought I was gonna change the world with my documentaries back then,” she said, adding that, at the time, she worked with reel-to-reel tape and heavy editing equipment.

“I’m sitting there cranking dials and splicing,” she said. “Everything was by hand — and I love that I learned that way.”

Around 1990, Mersky said, local resident and painter Julie Carlson asked to come to Mersky’s home outside Yellow Springs to draw the surrounding landscape. As Carlson painted the wide vista, Mersky filmed her — but as she watched her friend work, she found herself wanting to step out from behind the camera.

“I thought, ‘I want to do that — I don’t want to carry around this big, heavy camera anymore,’” she said.

Mersky had never taken an art class before, but she said Carlson gave her simple advice on how to get started: “You can just draw what you see.”

“And I took off, and I just loved it,” Mersky said.

Mersky said she took Carlson’s advice very much to heart, and learned by looking — really looking, sometimes closing one eye to study how a line might move from the three-dimensional world onto a flat surface.

“I’m not trained,” she said. “I just kind of wing it.”

Within months of beginning, she said, a friend encouraged her to mount a show; her first one adorned the walls of the Winds Cafe, where she would exhibit nearly every year for a decade or so, and other shows followed elsewhere in the village and state.

In the months and years that followed her first foray into drawing and painting, Mersky experimented with landscapes, then moved into flowers, buildings, imagined scenes and abstracts. At one point, she created a series of horses, standing over the canvas with a stirring stick dipped in house paint, letting it fall in looping tendrils to outline the equine form.

“You can’t stop it,” she said. “You’re just dribbling, and whatever happens, happens.”

She was drawn to considering light in her work — at sunset, just before nightfall or in the early morning. When she woke at 3 a.m. and couldn’t sleep, she lit candles and drew the rooms around her, producing a series of half-dark interior spaces warmed by small pools of light.

The tone and shape of Mersky’s work has shifted over the years, sometimes wildly — “I like change a lot; I like to bring in the new,” she said — with her most recent venture being woodworking. She turned to shaping fallen wood into handrails for both the inside and outside of her home, as well as tables and other furniture, letting natural curves and textures dictate how the pieces end up. One favorite piece is a kind of leafless tree she formed and placed in her bathroom, the gnarled limbs of which extend over her clawfoot bathtub.

“I like the outdoors to be inside, because I want to be outdoors all the time,” she said.

These days, Mersky said, the urge to produce physical work has slowed; she put away her woodworking tools about two years ago after her beloved horse died.

“I just put everything down, and I haven’t gone back,” she said. “I don’t know where I’m going.”

She writes and journals, and said she’s continually looking for what she called a “nonaccumulative art form” that won’t leave anything behind. To that end, she’s sung with the World House Choir — what could be more nonaccumulative than making a joyful noise? — and fans of the beloved “Missa Gaia,” which the choir initially performed in 2015 and reprised in 2019, may remember that Mersky created a series of works to accompany its second performance.

“I’m a happy person when I’m creating and not so happy when I’m not,” she said. “I just really feel like I’m in service to beauty.”

The search for a creative practice that doesn’t produce more things, Mersky said, helps explain the desire this year to set some of her older work ablaze. The works she burned were not all favorites, and she didn’t think they all needed to survive into a future where they’d most likely be neither displayed nor seen.

Still, she said, though the desire to burn her work arose naturally, it didn’t come easily. Mersky said she lovingly bestows names on cars, tractors, even her chainsaw, as she imbues them with personality and tinges of her own memory.

“I have trouble letting go of things; things are not inanimate,” she said. “Objects are also alive to me.”

She said creating art has always been meditative — “The process is what seems really important, rather than the product,” she said — and when it’s time to hang pieces for a show, she no longer thinks of them, fundamentally, as hers. In that way, creating art has offered her a way to try her hand at surrender — a skill that she said, at this point in her life, has taken on a different weight.

“Believe me when I tell you, I don’t let go easily — but it’s a lesson in life, so I’m practicing,” she said. “And now that I’m 75, I feel like I really want to practice, because there’s a different outlook now for me.”

Through “Into the Light,” Mersky said, she’s also taken the opportunity to practice in another way. Unlike earlier shows, for which she often created new work after securing an exhibition date, this one looks backward. She said she’s chosen “a little bit of everything and not a lot of anything.”

The exhibition will feature some landscapes, some flowers, at least one horse. Within the small collection, she’ll present some of the flavors of the stylistic turns she’s made over the years — a tasting menu of the movement that has run through her work.

And with any luck, folks will be inspired by that movement to choose a piece — and a local nonprofit — and the piece will keep on moving.

“Into the Light” will be on display July 2–Aug. 31 in the Senior Center Fireplace Room Gallery. The exhibition may be viewed Monday–Friday, 9:30 a.m.–4 p.m., when the Fireplace Room is not in use for a class.

At its June 15 regular meeting, the Miami Township Board of Trustees approved a resolution of necessity to place a permanent 0.8-mill levy before voters in November.

The Trustees first discussed the levy publicly at their June 1 regular meeting, during which Chair Marilan Moir said the levy would generate revenue intended to establish a plan for replacing Miami Township Fire-Rescue equipment, including a new fire truck, rather than relying on the department’s current “break-fix” model.

In a press release submitted to the News last week, Trustees wrote that the levy is intended to “provide a stable, restricted funding source for fire and EMS equipment and vehicles.”

“This levy is intended to address long-term capital needs in a measured and disciplined way, separate from operating expenses,” the press release reads. “By Board resolution, funds will be limited to capital uses only, including apparatus, vehicles, equipment and related assets — with a maintenance plan to protect the public investment.”

The 0.8-mill property tax levy is expected to generate $204,136 annually; the annual cost of the levy for homeowners, if approved, will be $28 per $100,000 of a home’s appraised value.

Trustees report that their initial plans, if the levy is approved, will include financing a $1.35 million fire engine over 18 years, with estimated annual debt service of $114,497. Remaining funds of about $89,639 per year would be reserved for scheduled equipment replacement and capital needs over time.

“The [levy] proposal is not centered on a single purchase, but on establishing a predictable, transparent system to replace equipment on schedule and avoid larger, unplanned costs in the future,” the press release reads. “[MTFR] has historically received strong community support for its operations … [and] this request is narrowly focused, financially conservative and designed with accountability in mind, including restricted use and annual public reporting.”

The Board of Trustees will hold its next regular meeting Monday, July 6, beginning at 5 p.m. in the MTFR community meeting room.

Antiochiana Archivist Scott Sanders presents a monthly series of one-hour talks exploring the history of Antioch College on the second Wednesday of each month, 12:30–1:30 p.m., in the Olive Kettering Library.

The next talk is July 8 and titled “Antioch and the Civil War.”

Sanders has been with Antioch since 1994 and has stewarded the college’s historical collections for more than three decades.

The series is free and open to the public. Those who cannot attend in person may view each session live via Zoom; the meeting ID for the events is 820 8896 1530, and the passcode is 405208.

Each session will include time for audience questions and will be recorded and later posted to Antioch’s YouTube channel.

Local free-meal nonprofit “Who’s Hungry?” received a $2,500 grant from Hall Hunger Initiative on Wednesday, June 24, during the group’s biweekly community meal at MAZU restaurant.

Hall Hunger Initiative Development Director Alex Klug presented the funds to “Who’s Hungry?” co-founder Jim Zehner and longtime volunteer Robert Bolen as local residents — including one News reporter — dined on linguine with meat sauce, vegan pasta salad and rolls.

The grant will help repair electrical service in the garage of the home Zehner shared with “Who’s Hungry?” co-founder and his longtime partner, Carl Moore, who died unexpectedly in May. The nonprofit cooks meals in Zehner’s home — about 5,500 meals were served last year, according to Zehner — and stores food for the meals in refrigerators and freezers in the garage. Zehner said the appliances had previously been powered using extension cords before an electrical fault caused the garage to lose power and “Who’s Hungry?” to lose some stored food intended for regular diners. Zehner said local electrical outfit Regulator Watts quoted the cost of the repairs at nearly $4,000, but offered to complete the job for the $2,500 grant amount.

Bolen also recently raised more than $900 for “Who’s Hungry?” by creating a vegan “crunch wrap supreme” that was prepared and sold through MAZU.

Hall Hunger Initiative is a regional food-system advocacy nonprofit that works to address the root causes of hunger while supporting organizations that feed their communities. According to Klug, HHI is in the process of developing a local food aggregation program that would purchase food from Antioch College and other area farms, combine and store it centrally and redistribute it to participating restaurants, schools and other buyers.

The News will provide additional coverage on the program in a future issue.

“Who’s Hungry?” operates most Mondays and Wednesdays, from 3 p.m. until food runs out. All are welcome. To support “Who’s Hungry?” drop by during open hours or donate online at http://www.bit.ly/WhosHungryYS

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