You call me animal but I am not your predator. You bear your teeth to mebut I cannot see past your smile. You are nocturnal, like all hunters of fame, yet your eyes are domesticated. Your ears are attuned to the sounds of warm-blooded noises and North America means nothing on your map. You wear your hair with feathers, […]
Film Review: “Tashi and the Monk”
An accidental baby born to a very young woman in the state of Arunachal Pradesh in India—one of the most remote and disadvantaged areas of the Himalayan region—Lobsang Phuntsok was considered to be an “uninvited guest of the universe.” Having started his life as a difficult, unruly boy, Lobsang was sent to a monastery in […]
Curiosity
Look back in wonder“my 1st picture of Earth from Mars.”80 minutes after sunset on January 31, 2014. 99 million miles away. A speck of light in a dark and lonely corner.
Out of Nothing
My love for you is gravitationally balancedbut unstable. A system of huge swirling whirlpools endlessly recycled as repulsive forces that expand with constant acceleration, like starlight created from radiation My love for you is finite and ambiguous Unbounded and forever, decreasing with time, as the universe evolves, it weakens. Simplest of all known universes, my heart for you pounds with […]
A Scene from Cumberland Bay
Before his sister could budge him out of the way, Mendon climbsdown the rabbit hole to a window in the stars where everything worth seeing is hidden inside a half-devoured pine cone.
After Meditating On My Front Porch
I again realize that mindfulness is noticingstillness, how the ink on my paper has more than one color of black and feels fluid as silk. And how the hard plastic wheelsof a stroller across the street, scraps the gravel, making soundslike crackling embers. It’s noticing the stillness of a solitary pine needle pulsing in the sighing wind. An […]
Book Review: “Mindful of Race: Transforming Racism from the Inside Out”
Feature image art from: https://www.taracousineau.com Ruth King teaches mindfulness meditation at Spirit Rock Meditation Center and at the Insight Meditation Society. She is also the founder of Mindful Race Institute, LLC, and a celebrated author. Although I have never met her, to me King is one of those Dharma teachers who seems to truly embody the […]
Nature’s Deadly Wake-Up Call!
In this new series with Bro. Ananda Kumaraseri, we’ll explore the Buddhist teachings in the context of the global COVID-19 pandemic. Bro. Kumaraseri will focus on how we can reorient our thinking to one of authentic Buddhist liberation, so that we are no longer constrained by old assumptions and biases that are hurting our chances […]
The Tao is broken, too
Murky and flimsy. Weakand empty. Dark. Dangling. Depressed. Deep hunger pangs. Dying on the vine. Ignoble onpurpose. Groundless and buriedlike emeralds or silent and boundless as jackrabbits in the grateful dead of a Western New York snowstorm in March.
After the Tear Gas
and joyful taunts of revolution, the fallof every infant sparrowis evolving as a eulogyin my heart, producing a vision of peace throughjustice, still conversant withthe knowledge of Babylon. Oh, how I know these sonsand daughters of Babylon, their language and history,on both sides, they came from sailors and farmers and weavers.