While Aitken Roshi was the teacher of my teacher, for various reasons, not the least of which was geographic, I had little direct contact with him. We exchanged some letters early on, then an occasional email. We spoke face to face three, maybe four times, and these always in more or less social settings.  That said my most vivid memory was from a time he gave a public talk at the San Francisco Zen Center. We were sitting in the... Read more

The following is a reposting of Jason Pitzl-Waters most recent entry at his wonderful blog The Wild Hunt. Back in the mid or late 1980s I worked at Moe’s Books in Berkeley, California. As a customer there he and I spoke a couple of times about the spiritual life. Once he invited me to a small party which I attended. That’s pretty much the short and long of my association with him. No great Pagan Buddhist dialogue. That said I found... Read more

Walden; or, Life in the Woods was published on this day in 1854. Henry David Thoreau was a complex man, a failure in most usages of the word. Even his time at Walden pond is mocked by those who observe the location was underwritten by his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson and that he frequently walked home from the cabin to have dinner with his mother. And he wrote a spiritual classic. No doubt. It has been suggested he... Read more

On this day in 1876, Thomas Edison received his patent for a mimeograph machine. Reading this small factoid evoked the strong smell* of the machine process reminiscent in its associations with specific times and places of the smell (and in this case taste) of that white glue used in my childhood schools. Must be a sign of growing old… * A fellow blogger pointed out “Actually, the duplicator with the distinctive smell is the Spirit Duplicator, or Ditto. Mimeographs had... Read more

I recall how shocking it was (and, really, still is) when I first heard of decapitation being practiced as part of the war of terror. And it is a terrorist act, no doubt. Of course such things are never new. One of the truly horrific practices of our own quite recent history is lynching. On this day in 1930 Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith were lynched in Marion, Indiana… A persistent act of terror that haunts the republic to this... Read more

Life and death one thing. no doubt. sometimes silence is all we can do… and no doubt it is enough… and sometimes only songs will do… and it can be enough… Read more

Well versed in the Buddha way,I go the nonWayWithout abandoning myordinary person’s affairs. The conditioned and nameandform,all are flowers in the sky. Nameless and formeless,I leave birthanddeath. Layman Pang The following was posted today at Robert Aitken Roshi’s blog, presumably by his son Tom. “Aitken Roshi passed away today, Thursday, August 5, 2010, at around 5:30 pm at Straub hospital in Honolulu. He was 93.” Aitken Roshi was one of the pioneers of Zen come west. My principal Zen teacher’s Zen... Read more

I’ve heard that President Truman claimed he never lost a night’s sleep over his decision to drop those atomic bombs on Japan. I make to pretense of knowing what the right decision would have been, whether to drop the bombs or to mount an invasion of the home islands, a horrific choice, a horrific choice, no doubt. That said, that thought, that felt, I just cannot understand his statement… And I pray I never will… Read more

Balkan Beat Box Read more

By some calculations today in the year 70, the Romans sacked Jerusalem, destroyed the temple and banished the Jewish people from their homeland… Read more