Back from retreat in Portugal, in Coimbra, where we sat in a kind of haven planted between ribbons of highway and a shopping mall. As the days passed, we didn't so much go deeper as we grew wider together. It rained and didn't, the lights went out and we sat, the lights came on and [...]
Heading to Portugal for several days of retreat. Which means there will be no sitting in Paris on Friday night at the Red Earth Centre (Nov. 27). Back to usual the following Friday (Dec. 4). Bon weekend.
Difficult to imagine a more perfect depiction of what in Zen jargon is called "shikantaza" (bearing witness to the whole of life) than the final scene of a film just seen at the Cinémathèque, Fellini's marvelous "8 1/2": Everything and everyone, hand in hand, joins a circus circle dance of life, all is/are included in [...]
What if we think of sitting, what is known as "meditation," as a kind of travel, a trip to an endlessly wondrous here and now? The French poet Yves Bonnefoy writes that because what the traveler sees is new to him, his "usual ways of perceiving, of understanding'' are upset, allowing for a free-flow in [...]
Soccer is known as "the beautiful game." Yet violent behavior is often displayed by opposing players and fans, like in Cairo recently before an Egypt-Algeria match. What is that all about? "Be a lamp unto yourself," the Buddha is said to have responded when asked what people should do after he died. This is not [...]
A weekend of studying the Heart Sutra went something like this: Boundless, we go around and around, and back and forth, with words and silence, speaking and not, we move from cushions to chairs and from chairs to cushions, we start in one place (a house) on Saturday and move to another (an office) on [...]