“To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to the violence of our times,” wrote the Trappist monk Thomas Merton. For weeks now, I’ve been away from [...]
Archive for the ‘Tracy Cochran’ Category
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Posted in Tracy Cochran, Uncategorized on April 22, 2009 | 6 Comments »
The Man With No Story
Posted in Tracy Cochran on December 7, 2008 | 2 Comments »
On December 2, 2008, Henry Gustav Molaison, who was 82, died in a nursing home in Connecticut. He was known to most of the world (or the part of world that cares about brain research) only as H.M. But his passage made the front page of The New York Times this past Friday, because H.M. [...]
Living Ferociously
Posted in Tracy Cochran on November 15, 2008 | 2 Comments »
On Wednesday, I waited most of the day while my husband had surgery on his spine at Beth Israel in Manhattan. I knew it would come out well. He had a brilliant surgeon, a member of the renowned Spine Institute of New York, who assured us that he had done this particular procedure about eight [...]
Merrily We Roll Along
Posted in Tracy Cochran on October 29, 2008 | 2 Comments »
In one way or another, human beings have always been involved in scientific search and spiritual search–in the search for knowledge and for meaning. I came away from my interview with the Indian-born, scientifically-trained Ravi Ravindra (in “Man and Machine”) with the impression that it is a quirk of Western culture to imagine that spirituality–which [...]
A Way To Be Wild
Posted in Tracy Cochran on October 20, 2008 | 4 Comments »
“‘I think of my territory as that which I have walked in person and know the weather at a given time of year, know a lot of the critters, and know a lot of the people,” the Zen poet Gary Snyder told reporter Dana Goodyear in a recent issue of The New Yorker. His territory [...]
What Is This?
Posted in Tracy Cochran on October 13, 2008 | 2 Comments »
“What is this?” Recently, I’ve learned that koan practice began in sixth-century China, an answer to a trend toward seeking academic answers. Stories of monks’ awakenings became a source of questions that would draw the light of inquiry back onto the self and one’s experience in this very moment. In Korean Zen a classic koan [...]
“An Unsolved Mystery Is a Thorn in the Heart”
Posted in Tracy Cochran on October 2, 2008 | 2 Comments »
The author Joyce Carol Oates uses the above statement as a prompt for students in her creative class at Princeton. Twenty people and I tried this exercise at the loft space of the New York Meditation Society last Saturday in Manhattan, and the results were amazing. We had spent the earlier part of the day [...]
Write Mindfulness
Posted in Tracy Cochran on September 26, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
“I have tried to learn in my writing a monastic lesson I could probably not have learned otherwise: to let go of my idea of myself, to take myself with more than one grain of salt,” writes Thomas Merton. He wrote elsewhere: ” seek no face, I treasure no experience, no memory. Anything I write [...]
Go Down Moses
Posted in Tracy Cochran on September 17, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
When Harriet Tubman was 13, her skull was fractured by a 2-pound lead weight in a dispute between an overseer and another slave. After this, she began having visions and conversations with God. She told people she was always talking to the Lord. In 833, a year or two before her injury, she also witnessed [...]
Making the Sign of the Cross
Posted in Tracy Cochran on September 2, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Some of us have been questioning what it means to be mechanical or not mechanical. Months ago, in the course of reporting a story for a Buddhist magazine, I took a trip up to Leverett, Massachusetts, to visit a glorious Peace Pagoda built by the monks and nuns of a little known sect of Japanese [...]
