2012-07-12T06:43:22-07:00

Ate a nice bowl of cereal with Jan. Throwing a few last minute items into the luggage. A shower. (Maybe one more cuppa coffee) And, off for Toledo and a few days of zazen, dokusans, a meeting with the sangha, and conducting jukai for about twenty new people. But first a leisurely seven hundred, fifty mile drive… Life is good… Read more

2012-07-11T10:36:48-07:00

Today is the lull before a small storm… I’m packing for a drive out to Toledo. I decided on the drive as it gives me a day and a half each way for a little “James” time. I find me fine company, at least in small doses. But with the way things are in my life these days I don’t have that experience very much. So, drive it is… I’m going out to Toledo to participate in the Toledo Zen... Read more

2012-07-10T11:39:15-07:00

Probably the greatest struggle in my adult life has been weight. In a world where so many are hungry, I’m doubly embarrassed that this is my issue. But, whether I like it or not, it is what I get to deal with… I like the idea of blaming other people for my predicament, familial upbringing, elderly ladies at church foisting food on me, etc, etc. But, I know while there are a host of others involved in creating me, bottom... Read more

2012-07-08T08:16:52-07:00

The following is a bit edited from a note sent to someone researching approaches to creativity. I thought it might be worth posting here. In classical Buddhism, as I understand it, emptiness, shunyata, means that nothing has an essence. Everything is constructed of things interacting, none of which have essences or an essence. Half a millenia later Nagarjuna is generally credited for clarifying or re-framing this insight as the two truths. The world of form is true. The world of... Read more

2012-07-07T07:56:26-07:00

There’s an interesting story in Haaretz about how Hitler intervened to protect his former commanding officer who was Jewish. Such things don’t appear to be all that unusual. People who hate classes of people seem to have no trouble, or little, in liking and even being friends with members of that class whom they personally know. Pick your other here, Jews, people whose people come from a part of the world yours did not, gays, political opponents… you know this... Read more

2012-07-06T12:46:08-07:00

you’ve got to hand it to that old deaf guy. he heard the music of the spheres. and sometimes we can too… sometimes… sometimes… in the face of it all… the sadness of it all… the beauty of it all… the heart breaks with joy… Read more

2012-07-06T12:02:49-07:00

Lhamo Dondrub, later Jetsun Jamphel Ngawang Lobsang Yeshe Tenzin Gyatso was born on this day in 1935. Two years later he was pronounced to be the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama, and following strenuous formation was formally recognized and installed as the 14th Dalai Lama in 1950. His flight from Lhasa and the oncoming Chinese army in 1959, was world news. And with that he was thrust onto the world stage, a place the Dalai Lama will remain for the... Read more

2012-07-04T09:15:19-07:00

It is so cool that the Higgs boson, the so-called God particle appears to have been verified. Slightly more distressing is how relatively little press this is getting other than referencing that over the top god-particle thing… This is big stuff! Wonderful… Wonderful… Read more

2012-07-03T09:34:00-07:00

It appears that two weeks out from leaving New England my body is pretty firmly on West Coast time. I spent almost a week in Phoenix for the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly, Jan flew out for the weekend, followed by a drive from there up to Flagstaff and then more or less along the ruin of route 66 into California, culminating with a week in Los Angeles. Our native California, where we were both born and lived until we began... Read more

2012-07-02T11:45:26-07:00

click on picture for full image… Read more

Follow Us!



Browse Our Archives