Reverend Who?

It’s been three years and three weeks since my ordination, and I’m still figuring out what exactly I did that winter morning, and why. I had a feeling then that answering this question would take a lifetime, or what’s left of it anyway. A daughter of two

Valentines 50%

Driving home tonight I saw the sign above, which inspired this belated V Day post (the holiday that never goes away, even when you wish it would). I gave a sermon at church this past Sunday about love and other wonders. I quoted my favorite lines on the subject, from

Shoveling Snow with Buddha

I’m a bit written out at the moment because of preparing my sermon as guest minister at church this Sunday, so I’ll simply offer this poem as an emblem of life in the Northeast over the past several days; I think Billy Collins has captured it beautifully — “so

"Here We Are, Living in Paradise"

Back to so-called reality after four days of silence and slow time — four largely exhausted and distracted days, this time around. But that’s all right. Sometimes the best you can say of an experience is that you didn’t give up, and I can say that at least. And

Into Middling Silence

Things will be quiet on the blog for a while; I’m about to enter into my version of the “great silence”: four days of sitting meditation from whenever I wake up until it’s time to go to bed. I thought I’d try to explain why I do

Offerings

This Saturday marked the six-month anniversary of my move to Maine, a place I’ve been drawn to since childhood, when I came here a few times with my family. On that morning, I woke up early to prepare to give my first zen talk here. I’m amazed I’

Wasted

When I first started studying zen, a teacher asked a group, “What would you tell someone who was old and felt they’d wasted their life?” She was preparing for a trip to New York, where she felt she might be asked this question by her audience. I was thirty

Ideas of Order Revisited

“Hang on tightly; let go lightly.” That’s the motto of the protagonist of the movie Croupier, and it has a lot to recommend it. We all have visions of how we’d like things to go, and it’s worth working toward them with resolve and integrity: this effort

The Idea of Order

Living on the edge today, writing in the morning before my espresso infusion. What I have instead is the intense gold of sunrise meeting the ice feathering my storm windows, so that every one looks like stained glass. Between waking and getting up, I was thinking of a Wallace Stevens

Here We Are. Where Are We?

I’m forty-five years old. Today I made a perfect espresso by accident, progressed two phone calls closer to either getting my car fixed or not, requested a form from my doctor that will allow me to request more forms, edited commentary on 13th-century Japanese poems, and attempted to explain