Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

One evening this week,  I visited a loft in downtown Manhattan for an event called “Turning Back the Tide: the Sacred Dimension of Compassionate Action.”  It was the inaugural event of Buddhist Global Relief, an organization founded by Bhikkhu Bodhi.  It was beautiful hearing Ven. Bodhi express what he has called “a distinctly Buddhist sense [...]

Read Full Post »

The Truth Behind The Truth

Is there a Truth greater than any particular tradition or way? Is it possible that a kind of guide rope was/is given to us that isn’t invented by us, that precedes human beings?  I once asked this of John Daido Loori, the founder abbot of Zen Mountain Monastery.   Tall and imposing in black robes, [...]

Read Full Post »

Inhaling and Exhaling

“Give yourself permission to be yourself, and don’t be frightened by the unknown,” wrote John Daido Loori in The Zen of Creativity.    The photographer, Zen master, and founder of Zen Mountain Monastery, who died on October 9,  wrote in that book that he first had a glimpse of the spontaneity and naturalness that can shine [...]

Read Full Post »

A few months before his death, G.I. Gurdjieff  drove with a group of students from Paris to a recently opened series of interconnected caves in Lascaux in southwestern France.    His student J.G. Bennett told him about extraordinary Paleolithic paintings that had been discovered by accident in 1940, by four teenagers and a dog.    In [...]

Read Full Post »

G.I. Gurdjieff once told some of his early students in Russia to consider the origin of things.  Where did this cup, this coffee, this food on my plate come from?  How did all these things that touch me come to be made?   Years later in America, Martin Luther King Jr. offered a similar example in [...]

Read Full Post »

Wild Mind

In my last post,  I wrote of my visit to a faux New Amsterdam which was briefly set up in downtown Manhattan.   Since then, a few friends have asked me why I care about connecting with distant ancestors.  Why not just be the contemporary American that I am?   I think this periodic yearning to know [...]

Read Full Post »

New Spamsterdam

“Is this the Dutch Village?” my friend Liz asked the big New York City cop standing by a turning windmill in Bowling Green Park in Manhattan.  “This is New Amsterdam,” said the cop with deadpan irony.   We had come all the way down from Northern Westchester in the rain and gloom,  so that I could [...]

Read Full Post »

Eight years ago this morning,  I was riding a Metro North train down to Manhattan when a conductor ran through the train with the terrible and surreal news that the World Trade Center towers had collapsed and that the Pentagon had been hit.  I knew about the two planes going in when I boarded the [...]

Read Full Post »

Heroic Labors

On this Labor Day weekend, I am thinking about work and about what elevates some work to the level of the heroic, the mythic, the stuff of art, legend, and inspiration for us all.    Usually, my days are filled with work and information.  It’s not all unpleasant but there is an endless but unmemorable quality [...]

Read Full Post »

Pay Attention!

How to close the gap between what we think and what we feel?  How do we come to know our deepest aspirations and intentions in the midst of welter of large and small actions and reactions that fill an ordinary day?  A little while ago, I received a comment from someone (who was clearly familiar [...]

Read Full Post »

Older Posts »