A Pebble in My Shoe

There’s a case in the Japanese koan¹ collection called Entangling Vines about a widow who supported the practice of a monk, setting up a hut for him on her property so that he could live there and do his holy work undisturbed. She provided him food and supplied his needs for twenty years, at which point she had an impulse to check the level of his realization: She instructed her beautiful young serving girl to linger a bit the next time she brought the monk his meal, to sit on his lap, embrace him, and see what happened. The girl did as she was told. Seated on the surprised monk’s lap with her arms around him, she asked provocatively, according the widow’s instructions, “What now?”
     The monk replied, poetically,

     An old tree grows on a cold rock in winter
     Nowhere is there any warmth

When Truths Collide

“The conflict dates from the day when one man, flying in the face of appearance, perceived that the forces of nature are no more unalterably fixed in their orbits than the stars themselves, but that their serene arrangement around us depicts the flow of a tremendous tide—the day on which a first voice rang out, crying to Mankind peacefully slumbering on the raft of Earth, ‘We are moving! We are going forward!’ . . . It is a pleasant and dramatic spectacle, that of Mankind divided to its depths into two irrevocably opposed camps—one looking toward the horizon and proclaiming with all its newfound faith, ‘We are moving,’ and the other, without shifting its position, obstinately maintaining, ‘Nothing changes. We are not moving at all.’”—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin¹

New Poetry, April 2015

How to Tell if You’re Enlightened

The sparrow’s song

Turns out to
Have been yours
All along. 

New Poetry, January 2015

Zazen

I took my seat upon the zafu:
Dhyana mudra, spine upright.
I figured pretty soon I’d get to
Shine with kensho-ish delight.

Recent Poetry, Late 2014

Morning Commute, 10/7/14

A funny thing happened
As I donned my helmet
And rain gear this morning:
My mind sped back
Thirty millennia to a
Cro-magnon ancestor
Of mine--I’ll call him Og--
Seated in his cave by the fire,
Looking out at the stars.

The Harlot Kōan

Hers is perhaps the ugliest image in Orthodox iconography. Just about any other saint, even the serious ascetics, gets to shine with ageless, transcendent beauty. But not her. She’s always presented to us as a gaunt, withered old woman, naked but for a borrowed cloak, her skin leatherized from years of exposure to the elements, and with a bad hairdo. Her expression is often almost pathetic. It’s difficult to imagine her as sexually alluring in her youth, even though that’s how the story goes, and her story is familiar to the many Eastern Orthodox Christians who encounter it annually on the fifth Sunday of Great Lent.  Her life is read aloud with the Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete at the following Thursday’s matins.  It can be an emotional experience to be confronted with the image of her radical repentance. It can also be an occasion for modern people like me to come up against elements of her tale that raise more questions than they answer. I’ll review her story for the benefit of those unfamiliar with it.

How to Edit a Book: Six Easy Steps

This document is in response to my boss's  request for me to say a few words about the process of turning a raw manuscript into a publishable trade book.  In expressing some of the things I’ve learned about this process, I must acknowledge that I owe much of that to the people who’ve been my mentors--above all, to Kendra Crossen Burroughs--but many of these observations are simply my own, based on years of experience doing this work.  If you’re a good Buddhist, you’ll know that you should test what I say against your own experience to see what elements of it are true for you or not.  If you’re a Christian, Jew, or Zoroastrian you should do exactly the same thing.