A couple of days ago I got a voice mail from Wendy-the-Buddhist. She had a terrible head cold. Her kids were sick. She needed some novel recommendations because as she said on the phone, “I’m tired of all this Zen crap.” (One of Wendy’s best qualities is that while a dedicated Zen practitioner, she also understands that taking one’s Zen too seriously belies a fundamental misunderstanding of the principles.) So I went downstairs into my lovely hidey-hole office where the library currently resides and started looking through the fiction section (legacy of my bookseller past, my library is sorted by…
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The mini-daffodils are blooming in my side yard and yesterday I turned over the vegetable beds, planted peas. Tonight it looks like rain (or maybe snow) is on the way, but yesterday was sunny, nearly seventy degrees, and a lovely day. Things outside the garden are still a little alarming, but inside the yard there are dogs, and plants starting to green up, and tiny little spinach seedlings coming up.
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To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior…Whenever and wherever a foehn wind blows, doctors hear about headaches and nausea and allergies, about ‘nervousness,’ about ‘depression.’ … . Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem Even for Livingston, a place where the wind routinely blows so hard that they have to divert truck traffic off the interstate …
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Although it looks like the job issues are starting to settle down for the short term, I’m still not sure that this isn’t the beginning of the end for me at the Big Corporation where I’ve been working for the past few years. I never thought I’d ever have a corporate job in the first place — I mean, I was a writer and an academic and in general, ever since I gave up on New York City in my twenties, had been someone who’d chosen quality-of-life over making a living. But when I finished my PhD and was so…
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As the Dalai Lama says. And he’s someone who knows opposition when he sees it. Did the Dalai Lama squeal about how mean the Chinese were? How they overran his country and killed his people and destroyed his cultural heritage? Nope. He spoke truth to power, while continually pointing out that “the Chinese people are good people.” Frankly, these days I’m looking to those folks who have seen real tangible serious oppression. The Dalai Lama. Nelson Mandela. Vaclav Havel. So what did I do today to make positive effort for the good? I wrote letters. Yup, boring old on-the-ground letter…
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I splurged and bought Goodbye Babylon from Dust to Digital — an outfit who is, as their website says dedicated to re-issuing music from old 78’s. This five-cd set (six if you count the bonus cd of sermons) is SO fabulous — there’s everything from shape-note singing to holiness string bands to jubliee gospel quartets to just wonderful weird singing about Jesus (or as I like to think of him, Jeeee-sus). I slugged all five cds into the player and have been listening to it nonstop for about a week — I don’t know what the deal is — I…
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“Anger is one of the most difficult defilements to overcome … When I was a young monk I gave many sermons on anger and how to control it even as my own anger caused me to lose my temper repeatedly. I’m calling it ‘my’ anger, but that isn’t quite right. Anger would invade my mind and overwhelm me, and I let it do that despite the fact that inevitably made me feel miserable. When I was angry, I felt pain in my chest and burning in my stomach. My eyesight blurred, my reasoning was unclear, and ugly, harsh words came…
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Sitting. Dogs don’t get meditation. Cats, they get meditation, dogs, not so much. This morning I was on my cushion, trying to pay attention when I felt a small dog nose poke me in the back, right between my shoulderblades. So Owen poked at me a little, then went to examine the incense smoke for a moment, then tried to curl up on my crossed legs, but there wasn’t really enough room on the cushion, and he kept sliding off. Eventually, he got bored and went away. Ah, I thought. He’s learning. And tried to bring my attention back to…
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I’ve been sitting again. One of the many reasons to sit is to try to wade one’s way to the far side of the grove of trees where live the chattering monkeys that inhabit our minds, all those monkey-voices chittering at us, particularly in times of great stress and grief. I’ve been turning the Three Refuges over in my noisy head like river stones. I take refuge in the Buddha. I take refuge in the Dharma. I take refuge in the Sangha (see below). Twenty minutes a morning, on my little pillow, the Buddha, a Virgin of Guadalupe candle, a…
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When I was thinking about moving here, almost two years ago, I called my cousin Elizabeth for advice. This house, the one I bought, was on the market and they’d dropped the price into the range I was looking for. Problem was, it was April, and I couldn’t afford to move until our lease was up in August. I couldn’t afford house payments and my half of the rent. Now, Elizabeth was a realtor for many years, which is one reason I called her, but she also practices Jin Shin Jyitsu, and has become, over the years, a pretty spiritually…