Good News Variations: A Spring Writing Course 2017
Since mid-November, I’ve had exchanges with numerous people who were consumed with dread at so much bad news in the news. One afternoon, while walking in the Central West End, I was reminded of…
Category: Wisdom Traditions
From Thirty Years Ago: Thich Nhat Hanh
Many of us worry about the world situation. We don’t know when the bombs will explode. We feel that we are on the edge of time. As individuals, we feel helpless, despairing. The situation is so…
On the Street Meditation
The swami told me to make japam while I walked and to give everybody I met on a street a mental blessing. You weren’t to think of yourself with a feeling of superiority, as a…
From Thich Nhat Hanh’s First Book Published in the USA, 1967
The more American troops sent to Vietnam, the more the anti-American campaign led by the NLF becomes successful. Anger and hatred rise in the hearts of the peasants as they see their villages burned, their…
I Get by with a Little Help from My Friends
Morning Correspondence, Cafe Ventana, thanks to Katya Madges
A Little Perspective
You can plan for five hundred years, but you don’t know what will happen in the next moment. –Neem Karoli Baba, quoted in Ram Dass and Mirabai Bush, Compassion in Action: Setting Out on the Path of…
Let’s Not Wait Till We’re Dead
Over poetry, you didn’t gush. You read it. You read it with the tongue. You lived it. You felt how it moved you, changed you. How it contributed to giving your own life a form,…
Dipa Ma’s Encouragement for the Trump Era (Or Any Other)
“Everything will be solved through the dharma.” Dipa Ma
Gatha of the Week/3
When wayward thoughts are persistent I vow with all beings to imagine that even the Buddha had silly ideas sometimes. –Robert Aitken, The Dragon Who Never Sleeps:Verses for Zen Buddhist Practice
Personality
“Our social personality is a creation of the thoughts of other people.” –Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way “It’s very refreshing to shed the personality thrust on you by other people.” –Keith Johnstone, Impro