Brilliantly pale winter sun is stunning the day since early morning here. I breakfast, shower, dress, tend to some business with students, do laundry, make tea, fill a few notebook pages, visit the cat upstairs, catch up with news of bus crashes, elections, resignations, victories and defeats, have lunch... The sunny day goes on, meanwhile. [...]
Bernie Glassman, the great elder of our White Plum lineage and a marvelous teacher to so many of us, has suffered a serious stroke and is hospitalized in Massachusetts. His condition is not clear yet, but please keep him in your hearts and offer your support through ceremony, prayer, sitting... For a taste of Bernie, [...]
So here we are, where we always are - right, here, right now. And yet we have never, ever been here before - at this very singular moment, in this unique, distinctive place: I'm at my desk, cat on my lap, the house darkening around me as night is beginning its descent toward the end [...]
Everyone has probably heard by now that after her sold-out show in Paris last week, Madonna made an impromptu appearance at the Place de la République, singing three songs with her teenage son and a friend playing an acoustic guitar. True, it was a nice gesture, and it was also a photogenic scene, filmed in [...]
As I was eating breakfast this morning, I heard on the radio that while all the world's great and powerful leaders are gathering not far from my home outside Paris to talk about the climate crisis, Pope Francis was visiting a mosque in Bangui, in the war-ravaged Central African Republic. Everyone had warned the pope [...]
Moving right along, entering our second week after 'the night that changed everything'... Gotta love those Belgians. With Brussels at a standstill amid imminent threat and everybody asked to keep quiet about police operations, people decided to fight terrorism with... cats. Check out Belgian surrealism rising to the occasion on Twitter at #BrusselsLockdown And gotta [...]
So it's been exactly a week. A week since life as we knew it here in Paris was suddenly - in a rampage of bullets and bombs - no more. How far we've come since then. Or at least I know that I have, making my way through various stages of mourning, moment by moment, [...]
Here in Paris, after a strange and painful weekend, life now goes on today - that's the best thing that we, the living, can do for ourselves and for the dead - in this magnificent, beloved and wounded city of ours. The terrorists can shoot and kill and spew their hate, but they can never [...]
Deep sadness here in Paris, and we are shocked and shaken, too, by the horror of last night's attacks in our beloved city. My heart breaks and breaks for the suffering of the victims and their executioners, and for all of us in this fragile world spinning with greed, anger and ignorance. For now, it [...]
