When Buddha Blows a Gasket

Hi, everyone (I like writing that, as if I’m addressing multitudes of readers). I’m back. Back from four days of meditation in honor of the prodigious accomplishment of a man who lived 25 centuries ago. His name was Buddha, and his achievement was waking up to the truth

Light in Darkness

If life were a bell curve, this season of mine would be drawn as a downslope. My father, an English teacher, once said, “No one ever writes about how it feels to be nauseated.” And it’s true that although that sensation has figured prominently in my last few months,

In the Labyrinth

In his memoir Wind, Sand and Stars, Antoine de Saint-Exupery writes of a man whose plane goes down in the desert: The hardest job I had was to force myself not to think. The pain was too much, and I was up against it too hard. I had to forget

At Home in Homelessness

While many emotions act as spurs to creative expression, sadness isn’t one of them for me, and that’s been the prevailing weather lately. Which accounts for the fact that it’s been awhile since my last post. As I was explaining to friends last night, my intention for

Is It Working Yet?

I’m going to pick up a thread from my last post and my friend Jaylene’s comment on it: How do we know if our practice is “working”? Which is oddly enough the same question I have about the antibiotic I’ve been taking for the last two weeks.

Heavy Rain Events

About a week ago, after a long meditation, I started feeling as if I had the flu, a gentle, weird kind of flu, reminiscent of the giardia I experienced my first winter at the zen center. I went to the library for DVDs and found myself face-to-face with a poster

Dreaming

“I was waiting on a moment but the moment never came. All the billion other moments were just wasting all away. I must have been dreaming.” — The Flaming Lips I love this song and its title, “Ego Tripping at the Gates of Hell.” Ego tripping by arrogantly rejecting the actual

Musings

First, a disclaimer: I’m thinking now that half a margarita before dinner and writing might have been a mistake. Although a delicious one, as some mistakes are. So I’m drinking the other half with a mug of green tea, hoping they’ll balance each other out. I’ve

What Then Must We Do?

I was going to write about muses today, but I’m in a different kind of mood after driving by an assembly of stuffed animals getting rained on a few streets away. The animals are gathered next to the sidewalk because a man killed his family and himself in the

Double Standards

Just back from four days of meditation, so if the following is less coherent than usual, blame it on enlightenment 🙂 Which is described in a beautiful poem by Charles Wright as “Some dead end — no one to tell it to, / nothing to say it with.” I’ll take his word