As the year comes to an end, I’ve found myself reflecting on the year past and the year ahead. Late last night, I pulled Awesome Nightfall off the shelf and began reading in earnest, surprised to find similar struggles in Saigyo. “Leaving the world” (as priest ordination is called), yet still very much pulled toward the world and by it. Here’s one poem. Shaking the bell on this mountain, am I loosened from the world now? Can I shake my... Read more

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My copies arrived today just as my brother and I were struggling with translating Hashimoto Roshi’s commentary on Dogen’s “Way Mind” (“Doshin”). A very sweet moment … and just in time for some holiday gift giving.  By the way, I’ve updated the sidebar, changing the open zazen on four Thursdays in January and February to a book discussion: Keep Me In Your Heart A While Book Discussion: Thursday, January 15, 29, February 5, and 26, 6:30-8pm. We’ll do zazen and then... Read more

Cold and snow everywhere in the northern half the continent. I’m off work and relieved that I don’t have the morning commute as more than a dozen accidents have the metro on lock down. A reporter is coming out to interview me later – if he can get through the traffic, I suppose. When my son heard about the local newspaper’s interest in me he said, “Is it because you’re so weird?” Ah, children are such a blessing. My brother... Read more

Finished a one-day sitting a few hours ago. Dog Bodhi sat through dokusan in the student seat along with each student, sometimes sleeping, sometimes starring wide-eyed at me. I’m sorry (but not surprised) to announce that he seems no more enlightened now than before.  I’ve got some comments on a couple Dogen dharma discourses that are in the oven and will be served up here as soon as I find a fork to stick ’em with.  In the meantime, here’s a prose poem that... Read more

So bundled up my mother would be proud. So cold my eyes ache and icicles form on my eye lashes. What can be said that reaches through the classics of East and West? Haaaaaaaaa…. Read more

It’s pretty clear from glancing at these posts that I like old poets (with the exception of Jane Hirschfield who isn’t so old yet).  I’m also very fond of some old dead Chinese and Japanese brush-to-paper folks, but I’m saving them up for another time.  The tie that binds poets that zing me is a cold-blooded willingness to speak directly from this broken-wooden-ladle life. I suppose that’s also what inspires me about Dylan and various Country Music tunes like those... Read more

Here’s another blessing poem. This one is from Diane di Prima, quite popular with Katagiri’s students but probably not so well known outside his immediate circle. Diane really captures how it was to hang with the old boy. A pleasure. We talk of here & there gossip about the folks in San Francisco laugh a lot. I try to tell him (to tell someone) what my life is like: the hungry people, the trying  to sit zazen in motels; the... Read more

Poetry week continues with some old favorites. These aren’t overtly “dharma” poems but lovely and haunting verses by a gnarly local poet, James Wright, pictured above. Pine Island is very near where I grew up. I have lived the moment Wright describes. Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota, Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass. And the eyes of those two Indian ponies Darken with kindness. They have come gladly out of the willows To welcome my friend and... Read more

It’s dharma poetry week at the wild fox blog. Here’s one from Jane Hirschfield (who has quite a wonderful blog, “My Inner Edge,” that I’ve been enjoying tonight): Think of those Chinese monks’ tales: years of struggling in the zendo, then the clink, while sweeping up, of stone on stone . . . It’s Emily’s wisdom: Truth in Circuit lies. Or see Grant’s Common Birds and How To Know Them (New York: Scribner’s, 1901) “The approach must be by detour,... Read more