I will never forget the look on our two-year old daughter’ face as she watched Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama debate. My wife and I realized that our little girl would only know an America in which every child can aspire to be President. Benjamin JealousPresident of the NAACP Read more

25 miles per gallon Created by The Car Connection Thanks Ms Kitty… Read more

These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, andAre melted into air, into thin air, And, like the baseless fabric of vision, The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,Leave not a rack behind.We are such stuffAs dreams are made on, and our little lifeIs rounded with sleep. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, 4.1 The Tempest was produced for the first... Read more

(I would have posted this for the title alone. But, this Dharma talk by the great Zen missionary Shunryu Suzuki is well worth a read…) Controlling the Monkey Mind A Lecture by Shunryu Suzuki Roshi This lecture is reprinted from the October 2001 Berkeley Zen Center Newsletter. The purpose of sesshin is to be completely one with our practice. We use two Chinese characters for “sesshin.” “Ses” means to treat something the way one treats a guest or the way... Read more

Why we vote in our republic can be complex, no doubt. Thanks, once again, Danny! Read more

Today is the four hundred ninety first anniversary of that disgruntled Augustinian friar nailing his ninety-five theses to the the door of Wittenberg’s Castle Church. Those who like to nail down dates like to mark this as the dawn of the Protestant Reformation. Having a monkey mind this immediately fired an old memory of a joke. I rummaged around the web to find a coherent version and stumbled upon this rather nice one. A mild-mannered, beige-wearing pastor comes to the... Read more

I’m pleased to see my friend and colleague, David Rynick has entered the blogosphere. He is a wise person, and a skillful Zen teacher. I suggest well worth checking in with from time to time… Read more

John Adams was born on this day in 1735. Read more

Where there are humans You’ll find flies, and Buddhas Kobayashi Issa (translated by Lucien Stryk & Takashi Ikemoto) Thank you, Erik! Read more

Mustard’s Retreat thank you, Elizabeth Read more