http://g4tv.com/lv3/44277 DS Games – E3 2010 – Guitar Hero 5 Don’t be put off by the fact that this is a talk given mostly to game designers and focuses on facebook. It’s damned good. And it’s damned Buddhist. As he, Jesse Schell, points out, “we live in a bubble of fake bullshit. And we hunger to get to anything that’s real. Even if the best we can do is a Starbucks mocha with real swiss chocolate.” It’s frightening, but painfully true.... Read more

To be. For now. Actually pretty beautiful. Sunset from the Clark Fork River… in my back yard 🙂 pretty much. Read more

The Buddha’s teachings were never meant to be ‘merely’ academic. That said, some of it is pretty heady and an academic approach can be very rewarding. In a short retreat this winter here in Montana, Anam Thubten Rinpoche told the story of studying in France and wishing to visit the city of Pisa in Italy. A friend offered to drive him and off they went. Cruising through the French and then Italian country-side, they passed many cities and after passing... Read more

This week Nate from Precious Metal and Kyle of the Reformed Buddhist announced the revival of the Blogisattva Awards. Tom Armstrong, of many blogs over the years, first conceived of the awards and has given his blessing and assistance in this new incarnation of the awards. *Full disclosure: I received 2 Blogisattvas in 2008 and one in 2006. I was also a judge in ’08 and if I remember correctly, we (judges) simply did not cast votes/points for our own... Read more

That’s “Compassion In Action,” just to make things clear. A provocative name, perhaps, but neither part was my idea. Nevertheless, I like it. This is the name of a new group starting here in Missoula; formed by myself, an environmental lawyer and Tibetan Buddhist, and a psychology grad student. I wrote about our first meeting last week. Yesterday’s talk was yet another journey through reality, all things large and small… Coincidentally, none of us had managed to invite another person,... Read more

Yea, I know. It’s Wednesday.  This weekend, Julie and I made our way up to Holland Lake/Upper Holland Lake for a two-night camping excursion. It was so good to get back into nature for a couple days; I need more of that. Though I expect that meditating in Taiwan next month will have a wonderful effect as well – not to mention four months living at Bodh Gaya in the fall. But there is probably something still very special about... Read more

This week, Nathan at Dangerous Harvests pointed me to an interesting post by an old friend, Tom Armstrong at his Sacramento Homeless Blog. To borrow heavily from Nathan’s post (see the original for more from the Buddho-blogosphere): Tom Armstrong has a fascinating post examining the languaging on homelessness in a newsletter for a branch of Loaves and Fishes in Sacramento. The newsletter opens with a quote from Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield, and then goes on to make a decidedly Christian statement about... Read more

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On of my faults is that I cannot say ‘no’. I even often seek out new projects (ooh, I should blog about that!) to fill my already over-booked bits of free time. And, as a doctoral student, there is a sense in which none of my time is free. Every moment is money ticking away, like those Iraq War counters you see, slowly ticking up the cost, never ceasing, never pausing. But today I did two things, relatively new to... Read more

The last two were for a project, “Painting with Light” over at Photography139. The rest, just good old spring in Montana’s outdoors. Read more