The Red Thread Songyuan asked, Why can’t clear-eyed Bodhisattvas sever the red thread? When I was in my early thirties, a ragtag group of friends and family assembled weekly in my living room to meditate. Our teacher was a recovering alcoholic and self-identified Sufi who taught us glorious chants. We’d sing and sing and sink …
Twenty years ago, in a fit of wild openness, my husband and I decided to move. Not just to another city or state, but to another country. It didn’t happen all at once, but about three years after the initial spasm, I found myself transplanted (alone; it took him two and a half years to …
Our hands imbibe like roots, so I place them on what is beautiful in this world, and I fold them in prayer and they draw from the heavens light. St. Francis of Assisi, as interpreted by Daniel Ladinsky This is not a sound bite about how to reduce anxiety. This is not a short course …
“Our fingers imbibe like roots,” begins a prayer by Francis of Assisi, “So I place them on what is beautiful in this world.” Beauty may feel like a shaky reed these days, nothing much to hang our hat on. Most of us are more inclined to attend to what’s ugly: environmental degradation, wars, famines, loss …
I remember looking up at Goat Mountain from the Kohan Garden that evening. We’d had a lightning storm about an hour earlier and now the trees were candling, just up the mountainside from our house. Close enough that if the wind kept up, we’d be evacuated before the night was out. I sprinted home and …
First you heat carbon and iron to 1450 C, then cool it rapidly. This makes the steel hard, but it shatters easily. Next you heat it to a lower temperature, say, 650 C, and cool it slowly. The end result is hard but not brittle, with springy strength. This is tempering. I thought about tempering …
She was getting out of her van by the beach, clearly unnerved by the thick smoke in the air. “Did you hear that they’re evacuating all of Yellowknife?” I blinked; I didn’t know her from Adam, but she sure needed to talk. “Yes,” I said. I felt anxious too. But I know how to listen …
I had a list a mile long, I did, of plans for July. Not only family visits, but writing space, study time, a week-end board planning meeting, a personal retreat week. My overall longing for this month was for big blocks of quiet reflection time, something that’s felt sorely lacking during the last six months. …
Last year, my revered teacher made some unconsidered remarks to a board on which I serve. Part of the problem was that she didn’t recognize the competence of the people in front of her; that stung us. Another board member pointed out her misconception, and the group went on to vote in favor of the …
When I was a kid, sacred was about church. It was the Lord’s Prayer repeated each Sunday; it was the consecration, the communion cup, the baptismal fountain, the ashes on the forehead. In Braiding Sweetgrass, the indigenous biologist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer recounts an observance enacted daily during the summer months that her family camped …
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