Driving home from work yesterday, I flipped on NPR and heard somebody saying things just like I think. Wow, I thought, this dude has to run for president of … something.  Turns out it was Bernie Sanders, independent senator from the beautiful state of Vermont. I’m moving there! Minnesota’s senators voted for the incredibly bad idea tax-break extension, giving away billions to the wealthy and pennies to the poor.  And as most of you know, unless you were in sesshin... Read more

This one, ya know.  Or maybe that’s just an almost-two-back-to-back-rohatsu-sesshin (Deep Spring in Pittsburgh and Boundless Way in Worcester) fleeting delusion.  Or maybe my brain is rattled from so much patting myself on the back. In any case, I got back in town last night and found that work is cancelled today on top of it all! “All” including 17 inches of fresh snow at the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport and some really biting cold and wind too.  So after 10... Read more

I’m shifting into Rohatsu sesshin mode, recalling that I did my first one in 1978 with Katagiri Roshi. That one busted my butt. Really. Now I love sesshin and am happy that I might have twenty-or-so more in me. After all, my dad turns 80 today and I think he might still be able to do it, especially if he got his nap right at 1pm.  So this will be my last post until December 13 or so.  If you’re... Read more

More freezing rain and then snow here in Minnesota. The above shot from the last snowfall – always a heartbeat behind the ball. Reminds me of how Katagiri Roshi loved to tell a story of driving in the Superior National Forest, coming around a corner, and suddenly being face-to-face with a moose in the road. Well, face-to-face through the windows of this old Malibu. Anyway, point was the “ground word,” the first thought. “Wow!”  First thought is also what I... Read more

Tongue in cheek on the picture. I suppose genuine interaction is possible through texting but I wonder if we really need all of these ways to talk about who is saying what to whom, our exact location on the planet at every given time, the color of the carpet in the airport, etc.  I’m not anti-technology by any means. This, after all, is my 504 blog post in 2 1/2 years!  However, I am concerned about “young people these days”... Read more

I choose the rooms  that I live in with care. The windows are small  and the walls are bare. There is only one bed  there is only one prayer. And I wait every night  for your step on the stair. – Leonard Cohen While sipping morning coffee, I read the introduction to Journeys of Simplicity: Traveling Light with Thomas Merton, Basho, Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard & Others by Philip Harnden. Thanks to Rev. Victoria Safford at the White Bear Unitarian... Read more

http://www-tc.pbs.org/video/media/swf/PBSPlayer.swf Watch the full episode. See more NOVA. Here’s a clip from PBS’s Nova on dogs and humans. There’s a particularly fascinating part at about 4:40 about how our faces are divided and the right side shows our truer emotional state. We are programmed to scan the right side of the face to get a read on another person’s state of mind – and so are dogs. They don’t do that with other dogs, just humans. There’s other good stuff... Read more

@font-face { font-family: “Times New Roman”;}@font-face { font-family: “Courier New”;}@font-face { font-family: “Wingdings”;}@font-face { font-family: “Georgia”;}@font-face { font-family: “Calibri”;}p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 10pt; line-height: 115%; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri; }table.MsoNormalTable { font-size: 10pt; font-family: “Times New Roman”; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0in; }ul { margin-bottom: 0in; } Once a year I hold out the begging bowl and do a little dance for rain. Given how tight things are for many of us and the... Read more

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(What follows is an article for the Sweetcake Enso blog check it out – great stuff there. This will also be a chapter in my “forthcoming” book, The Healing Point of Sitting Zen. Thanks to Seigen for her very helpful work on the draft and for finding the art work inserted below. Feedback welcome.) Twenty years ago I spent most of a year at Bukkokuji, a Zen monastery in Obama, Japan. The teacher, Harada Tangen (Unfathomable Mystery), was the only... Read more