“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” Charles Dickens Like many people I think this is one of the great sentences in English literature.... Read more

          As I understand it the date we normally assign to mark the birth of Julius Caesar is today, the 13th of July, one hundred years before our common era. A number of ways to go with this tidbit. But, I find myself thinking a little about how we and he probably pronounced Latin. Weene Weede Weeke, anyone? Read more

      Teitaro Suzuki died on this day, the 12th of July, in 1966. In Western traditions one often marks the date of a remarkable person’s death as a festival. For the Christian tradition, it’s a new birth into the heavenly realms. I rather like that. Although I think of it more as a celebration of a full life. He is best known to us as Daisetsu, his dharma name, given to him by his teacher Soen (sometime Soyen)... Read more

    The Stoics emphasized three things. The first was virtue, a way of discerning what to avoid and what to embrace in our lives. The second was wisdom, often called reason in Greek and Latin, which while including rational thought, is mainly about a larger perspective that is found not through the accumulation of knowledge but rather through careful attention to what one thinks and holds in the mind. And the third is a view of the rhythms of... Read more

      I noticed that it was today, the 9th of July, in 1969, that Gertrude Dixon, Trudy to her friends, died. With that I thought of her part in the sinking of Zen roots in North America. Who is to say when it began. Although one good starting point is 1965, when Marian Derby started recording Shunryu Suzuki’s lectures in Los Altos. She then took the tapes and started transcribing them. Consulting with the roshi (who often commented,... Read more

  Yesterday Jan and I saw “Elvis.” The theater we were in had three people in the audience, and that included Jan and me. So, if you want to see it on the big screen, I would encourage you to consider maybe taking it in this weekend. It has mixed reviews. Rotten Tomatoes gives it a 78% positive rating, while Metacritic gives it a 64 out of a 100. It kind of looks like you love it or you hate... Read more

      I read somewhere someone say “Joan of Arc visited me in a dream last night.” She can do that. But the path to that ability was hard. I noticed it was on this day, the 7th of July, in 1456 that a retrial of Joan of Arc found her innocent of the charges of heresy. It was twenty-five years after the Maid of Orleans had been tied to a stake and burned alive. Another four hundred years... Read more

    Right now, every week I visit my friend who suffered the swarm of strokes. We are past being able to talk. Instead I read the psalms to him. A couple of weeks ago it appears he had another stroke. As he’s now in hospice there is no formal diagnosis. His involvement in my visiting and reading the Psalms to him is pretty much limited to trying to repeat the last few words of each psalm. These are hard... Read more

      Last year, a foolish monk. This year, no change. Ryokan Fifty-two years ago, today, on the 5th of July 1970, I received shukke tokudo, also called unsui tokudo, ordination as a novice Soto Zen Buddhist priest in Oakland, California, from the Soto Zen priest Houn Jiyu Kennett. Also. In twelve days I will turn seventy-four. Not one of those big marker years, but valuable for noting the accumulation of years, or from another angle an opportunity to... Read more

      Today is the Fourth of July. We mark this date as the founding of our beautiful broken Republic, whose high minded ideals have been betrayed over and over and over. And yet. And yet… There was an astonishing amount of high idealism, and along with it some serious sharp dealing. Those founders dreamed a republic that proclaimed our common humanity, while keeping slaves. From the beginning we were a mixed thing. And over the many years we... Read more