Forgive me as I work out some thoughts here, out loud. Perhaps some of them may bloom. I woke in the middle of the night last night with a stark, shamelessly Zen poem in my head: No gate. No goal. No high. No way. No one. No how. Buddha beyond and here and now. At…
I have a new love. It’s called poetry. I have an old love. It’s called poetry, too. They are finally meeting one another, in the space of my mind. While cleaning out my computer several months ago, I found a rich text file that held just one poem, with no attribution or signature. I honestly…
A few days after I published my last blog post, I met a good friend for lunch. We sat in the creeping April sunshine in downtown Santa Rosa, over a shared plate of quesadillas, and talked about children, school, writing, and degrees of uncertainty. She told me she read my latest post, and that she…
The first day of this month was the 54th anniversary of the first day of lunch-counter sit-ins in the segregated South. At the very tail end of January, in the course of my volunteer book-shelving at one of the Sonoma County libraries, I came across a children’s picture book called Sit-In: How Four Friends Stood…
At my Zen center on Monday night Zen student and physicist Chris Gaffney said that some things seem “impossible,” but they happen anyway. Like the way that time slows down when a body is in motion, or when it flows more closely to the earth. There is a small clearing with an old tree on…