A dear friend forwarded a link to me for Paul Levy’s Running a Hospital. It’s actually a blog I visit now and again as Paul is a serious thinker on this issues of health care. But the link was for one particular entry calling for a blog rally in support of the continued survival of the Boston Globe, one of the great regional newspapers. Here’s the text: We have all read recently about the threat of possible closure faced by... Read more

Well, this is a day of annoyances, some nasty, some merely, well, annoying… The one I’m gunna rant about is my meeting with Weight Watchers, which actually wasn’t today, but close enough… First: They’ve done me good. I’ve lost more than forty pounds with them. Bless ’em. While their claim to be a life style rather than a diet stretches my credulity (I hope not to spend my life eating no more than a half square inch cube of cheese... Read more

Raphael Sanzio was born on this day in 1483 (by some accounts) & died on this day in 1520… The man sure could paint! Read more

This morning at worship our Youth Group led the service. They did a cover of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. I wept… And thought it’s been a while, so here’s KD Lang’s cover… Old wisdom frm the mouths of youth… Read more

My friend Claudia sent me the link to this video, which is, apparently a commercial for some product. At the comments section at youtube there is some debate whether such a thing is in fact possible. I think they’re missing a bigger point. Okay, maybe the video is a bit sentimental. But again, staying there is missing, something important. In this season where various faiths celebrate Hanamatsuri or Passover or Easter or any of the nearly endless variations on Spring,... Read more

I just cut the following from a sermon I’ll be delivering in a couple of weeks. I realized while I’ve told this story before, this was a fairly succinct version and perhaps worth putting here. This all took place in the mid 1980s… After quite a detour I’d returned to Zen practice, and had built up a pretty steady discipline. What I lacked, however, was a spiritual director. And as an old Zen hand I could tell I was drifting,... Read more

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Yesterday Buddhist blogger extraordinaire, Danny Fisher posted a notice from the Vatican to the world Buddhist community on the occasion of this year’s Vesak. If you don’t know, Vesak or Hanamatsuri is nominally the celebration of Gautama Siddhartha’s birth, although it actually becomes something bigger rolling the whole story into what might be Buddhism’s biggest holiday. It is calculated differently by different Buddhist communities. The Catholic church chose a traditional Buddhist calendar calculation to extend their greetings, which this time... Read more

The City of the Angels incorporated on this day in 1850. Read more

The Welsh poet John Ormond famously sang of building cathedrals. Within that poem I believe he put his finger on something about community, authentic community and about the secret heart of spiritual community… They climbed on sketchy ladders towards God, with winch and pulley hoisted hewn rock into heaven, inhabited the sky with hammers, defied gravity, deified stone, took up God’s house to meet him, and came down to their suppersand small beer,every night slept, lay with their smelly wives,quarreled... Read more