“Only the contemplative mind has the ability to hold the reality of what is and the possibility of what could be.” -Richard Rohr Reading the headlines these days is a sure way to experience fear and despair. This is especially true about climate change and the environment. After all, what good news is there when Scott Pruitt is finally forced…
In Zen we say that everyone is already a buddha, an awakened one. But we don’t know we are until we are shaken out of our complacent habitual thoughts and see clearly that everything we encounter, including ourselves, has the same awakened nature.
We entered together, but I found the lushest dress in the store: crinoline flowers, bright blue, and floor length. We had gone to get my mom something. After medical school and a grueling residency, she was graduating. She didn’t find a dress and, in my memory, she wore a pink shirt-dress from her closet to the celebration. I, six years…
I felt on call with my poem Extinction Aria, as I wanted to create a kind of sutra for the times, a prayer, an incantation of urgency, a romp through the six realms in Buddhist philosophy. Printer and designer, David Sellers of Pied Oxen, had suggested the idea of a Tibetan stye book—with “pecha,” unbound pages. Pages bound in yellow…
Perhaps if we want to find happiness, we should design for it. We’ve met many sincere practitioners of many faiths who follow a path or practice but still feel as though their lives are not fulfilled or transformed. They have a deep division in their lives between their “ordinary” lives of work, school, and family and their “faith” lives. We…
Suzuki Roshi, the founder of the San Francisco Zen Center and one of the first ambassadors of Buddhism to the United States, had a very helpful way of describing the relief that comes from getting over yourself. He used the expression “mind waves” to describe the turmoil of the ego’s struggle with everyday life. Waves, he would always insist, are…
“Just as the physical world is comprised of integrally related particles, so too, we are integrally related to one another and to (nonhuman) creation. We live in a web of relationships. As we affect this web by our actions, so too are we affected by it. Conversion is accepting interdependence as the definition of life in the universe.” —Ilia Delio,…
For four billion years, life on this planet has been ascending to higher and higher levels of organization. First there were just bare, self-replicating strands of information; then they encased themselves in cells; then some of these cells got together and formed multicellular organisms; then some of those organisms developed complex brains, and some species of brainy organisms became highly…