Teaching – Portugal, 6 avril 2009 : Waking Up in Portugal / Man in a Tree

It's the eve of departure for seven days of retreat in Portugal. What is there to say? The day was brilliant with sun. Had lunch with a 91-year-old friend, who is leaving Paris in a few days after many years of living here. I'll miss her, thinking I may never see her again. Or maybe [...]

The partner of a longtime sangha friend died today in Amsterdam after a year of illness with cancer. A ceremony for him tonight joins all of us, each individual participant, as one. We chant, bow, burn incense, realizing here and now together what is "beyond" words and understanding. This is where we are not different [...]

This morning I cleaned the bathroom. The mirror had become smudged. I also fed the cat. In a letter written to a friend in the 1930s, Samuel Beckett expressed dismay that a poem he had written was facultatif, or optional. I am struck by the resonance this has for me, how I feel exactly that [...]

The Métro is packed with returning. The babies and small children seem particularly weary and agitated. Everyone, though, looks like they want and need something. I wonder what that might be. I wonder where they have all been, where they are all going. And me? I like this verse from Layman Pang: ''What I do [...]

Go to work early this morning, and deal with the daily news, meeting each task as it comes to me. Hours later, return home to care for my sick child, do laundry, answer mail, cook food. Am quite disappointed not to be able to attend a reading by the marvelous French poet Yves Bonnefoy tonight. [...]

I put aside the newspaper and its endless accounts of economic failure and accusations of fraud and deception, of war and oppression, of hunger and despair, kidnapping, trafficking, loss and gain, plans to save and plans to punish, refusals and denials, rejection and division, glory and infamy, victory and defeat, getting and spending, falling and [...]