I have been in a very good mood the last week or so, and there are two likely reasons, in my mind. First of all, I completed my taxes and found I owed only half of what I had set aside for them. Also, once the showers on Monday had passed through, warm weather set in, […]
‘Each moment is a fresh moment that we can enact to the best of our ability. Each moment is another birth of continuous practice. This is living being-time. This is the shared being-time between ourselves and all beings. Again, this is not abstract. It must be enacted while we wait in line at the supermarket […]
The roam on Saturday drew a nice crowd of regulars and occasionals. The weather could not have been finer; warm and with not so much wind. It was mostly too late to see the magnolias in the Botanical Garden – which had been my initial intention, scuppered by too many rainy weekends – but the […]
‘Recently a woman came to see me with a difficulty in her life, which was that she was starting an affair with her husband’s best friend. She wanted me to take a position, but my response was the only one I can imagine: “Hm. Yeah. Ah. No kidding.” And there’s always “Wow.” I keep that […]
Editing, processing and uploading the Zen Center dharma talks is one of the things I do as I create a livelihood. Sometimes I have to supply a title to the talk, so I listen through for the first five or ten minutes to find a resonant phrase that isn’t just part of the preamble. Very rarely […]
‘”It knows without touching things” [from Hongzhi’s Zazenshin]. Knowing, here, of course does not mean perception. For perception is of little measure. It does not mean understanding, for understanding is artificially constructed. Therefore, this knowing is not touching things. And not touching things is real knowing. Such knowing should not be measured as even universal knowledge. It […]
‘There’s no place you can go that is not your life. You are not currently in a dress rehearsal for a life that’s going to happen only on Friday and Saturday nights, when the curtain goes up. For that reason, I wish that we’d found a word other than “practice” for practice, because of course, […]
