Epictetus’ path to freedom attends to the aspects of life that can be controlled, while meeting with equanimity the things we can do nothing about.
What if you knew you’d be the last to touch someone? Ellen Bass draws us in to the brief moments of contact that fill our day and urges us to consider the fleeting nature of every life we meet.
In this 2019 essay featured in his new book, When You Greet Me, I Bow, Zen teacher and poet, Norman Fischer addresses the perplexing topic
BY MICHELLE NICHOLAYSEN
When I left the Seventh-day Adventists, I thought I could keep the love and forget the wrath.
BY SARAH CHAVERA EDWARDS
I never knew him in life. The man with calloused hands and almond eyes that would turn into half-moons when he laughed.
Dave Sims’ watercolor paintings are a submission to the chance of creation and a surrender to emptiness.
BY SCOTT D. VANDER PLOEG
When a popular TV show killed off its loved professor, a real-life teacher paused to consider the implications of what it means to share in the student-teacher bond.
BY KENT JACOBSON
A baseball field was a sanctuary for a small community of boys who were surrounded by angry fathers they were too young to understand.
Santideva talks about the practice of meditation as a means to reveal Awakening Mind, here particularly focusing on the discipline and skill of relationship.
In this stirring tribute to her shadow-companion and first poetic love Walt Whitman, poet Mary Oliver describes the experience of awakening to poetry as a door to the temple, a place ‘in which to feel’.
Alan Watts unpacks the imperative not to hold on to things, but to adopt a kind of psychological poverty—or simplicity— in which the mind is clear and unfettered in a way that allows it the space for true spontaneity.
Santideva talks about the practice of meditation as a means to reveal Awakening Mind, here particularly focusing on the discipline and skill of relationship.
Baso’s Very Mind is the 30th case or koan in the Mumonkan, The Gateless Barrier, a collection compiled in the 13th century by Rinzai master Wumen Huikai.
Milarepa is a much-loved figure in the Tibetan tradition, renowned for his songs that expound the teaching of the Buddha and his own dharmic worldview.
Dogen answers the questions of his students regarding monastic renunciation – how can one have faith that one’s basic needs will be met?
Samurai Yagyu Munenori uses the popular Zen image of the moon reflected in the water to explain its application in martial arts training.
Alan Watts unpacks the imperative not to hold on to things, but to adopt a kind of psychological poverty—or simplicity— in which the mind is clear and unfettered in a way that allows it the space for true spontaneity.
Alan Watts delves into one of his favorite and recurring subjects – the way in which we over-identify with the parts we play.
Alan Watts often said that in order to come to your senses, you have to get out of your mind. Watts was emphatic about self-realization and breaking through cultural and psychic barriers in order to live as a fully-fledged, fearless human being.
Among Alan Watts’ most compelling qualities was his fascination with different systems of faith and his
Zen teacher and poet Norman Fischer on where and how poetry and Zen practice meet and interact.
Author and activist Kathleen Dean Moore on what inspires her, what drives her, and her struggle to write about hope.
A conversation with Adam Mansbach about loss, grief, and the process of writing his new book, I Had a Brother Once, in the form of an epic poem.
Author and priest Liz Tichenor talks about her book The Night Lake, about dealing with loss and what the topography of grief looks like after seven years.
Religion and faith are two of the most difficult subjects to write about according to Nicholas Trandahl, author of the poem, The Chapel.
Writing can be anything, from self-discovery to incorporating pain to establishing direction, according to poet Caroline Goodwin, who featured in The Dewdrop a couple of weeks ago with her poem, Not I’ll Not, from her book, Custody of the Eyes.
Bodhidharma’s fundamental teaching was that the Buddha can only be found in the mind since its essence is mind itself.
Susan Murphy’s book, The Red Thread, addresses the guts and gore of the flesh-and-blood humans who sustain spiritual practice in the midst of desire, mortality and heartbreak.
Arthur Braverman gathers all of Kodo Sawaki’s teachings together in his impressive new book on the Zen Master.
The Zazen Yojinki, written by 14th century Japanese master Keizan Jokin, covers the fundamental aspects of zazen, the form of Zen meditation.
Zenkei Blanche Hartman discusses respect for the physical world, which starts with respect for ourselves, grounded in interconnectedness.
A death poem was composed on one’s deathbed, with the aim of encapsulating the understanding of impermanence at that moment.
There Never Was a Door was composed at Hokyoji, a Zen Practice Community in Minnesota. The passage to the abandoned shed without a door echoes
In 1993, Zen teacher Joan Halifax published a book called The Fruitful Darkness based on her anthropological engagements with Tibetan Buddhists, Mexican shamans, Native American elders and other tribal communities.
Hongzhi Zhengjue was a 12th century philosopher and Zen master in China who authored a large number of philosophical texts as well as the seminal
Ryokan loved children, and played with them so much that other adults began to question his sanity. He says, ‘Even if I were able to say something/how could I explain?’ His wholehearted immersion in playful activity is the essence of Ryokan’s very particular Zen expression.
Shunryu Suzuki always admitted his own difficulty with the English language, but also addressed the deeper problem of human communication, namely that ‘when we say something, our subjective intention or situation is always involved.’
17th century Zen master Bankei on the Unborn, the unconditioned mind that comes up spontaneously and is fundamental to every person, without exception.
Thomas Merton underscores the danger of over-identifying with notions and abstractions rather than with the flesh and bones reality of our own lives.
The myth of losing a pelt speaks deeply to being divested of time, resources and creative energy in the service of psychic support of others.
I Had a Brother Once is an elegiac and honest account of the devastation of suicide, the senselessness of grief, and the imperatives and difficulties of narrative when a loved one’s life is on the page.
Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh on how we can become intimate and compassionate with our own anger and even transform it into love.
Shunryu Suzuki on our inability to accept the truth that we and everything around us are in a state of constant flux.
Rilke stresses the importance of work in relationship and cautions against the youthful fancy that romance is the domain of play and pleasure.
With her book, Earth’s Wild Music, Kathleen Dean Moore asks, what can we do in the midst of so much extinction? What is our moral imperative?
The Empty Mirror is Janwillem van de Wettering’s memoir of his time at a Japanese Zen monastery where he stayed for over a year in the late 1950s.
Charlie Mackesy’s short graphic novel follows a young boy who connects with a wise horse and a mole, and a more reticent fox.
Simone de Beauvoir on women in art and why there was never a female Van Gogh.
The Buddha’s abandonment of his wife is a thorny subject in a tradition that has generally promoted equality.
Friedrich Nietzsche suggests that the key to happiness is knowing when to remember and when to forget.
Cuong Lu’s new book is a communication of companionship and compassion, addressed to people in states of deep suffering.
Epictetus’ path to freedom attends to the aspects of life that can be controlled, while meeting with equanimity the things we can do nothing about.
What if you knew you’d be the last to touch someone? Ellen Bass draws us in to the brief moments of contact that fill our day and urges us to consider the fleeting nature of every life we meet.
Zen teacher and poet Norman Fischer on where and how poetry and Zen practice meet and interact.
In this 2019 essay featured in his new book, When You Greet Me, I Bow, Zen teacher and poet, Norman Fischer addresses the perplexing topic of mind, and the Buddhist
Ellen Skilton’s poem offers poignant words that touch on a universal feeling experienced by humanity in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic – the sacredness of human interaction.
Sometimes described as England’s greatest cult book, The Peregrine is a beautiful, lyrical expression of one man’s fascination with this hunting bird that he came to know intimately on a daily basis for over a decade.
BY SCOTT D. VANDER PLOEG
When a popular TV show killed off its loved professor, a real-life teacher paused to consider the implications of what it means to share in the student-teacher bond.
Santideva talks about the practice of meditation as a means to reveal Awakening Mind, here particularly focusing on the discipline and skill of relationship.
Laura Scahffer’s haunting and lovely poem delves into the challenges of place and setting, flipping the theme of a bucolic idyll on its head.
Billy Collins runs with the folkloric notion that the dead are watching us and pushes the image all the way to a reverie of the departed ‘rowing themselves slowly through eternity’ in glass-bottomed boats.
M. Christine Benner Dixon’s poem is an intimate portrait of her father, remembered from childhood.
In this stirring tribute to her shadow-companion and first poetic love Walt Whitman, poet Mary Oliver describes the experience of awakening to poetry as a door to the temple, a place ‘in which to feel’.
Walt Whitman’s O Me! O Life! is a rousing remonstrance of a self-centered life of faithless, foolish, vain, mean struggle that asks the question, where does the good lie in the midst of this endeavor?
Alan Watts unpacks the imperative not to hold on to things, but to adopt a kind of psychological poverty—or simplicity— in which the mind is clear and unfettered in a way that allows it the space for true spontaneity.
For Wendy Blaxland, That Wind is a poetic response to what happens in her immediate natural world.
Annie Dillard celebrates humanity by taking the widest view of its activities, hopes, dreams and values. She then asks, what would we really do with this new, expanded perspective?
BY KENT JACOBSON
A baseball field was a sanctuary for a small community of boys who were surrounded by angry fathers they were too young to understand.
Robert Frost’s sad and somber poem reads like a reminiscence told by a survivor of a period of bleakness so deep that it was something to be hidden
Baso’s Very Mind is the 30th case or koan in the Mumonkan, The Gateless Barrier, a collection compiled in the 13th century by Rinzai master Wumen Huikai.
Reflecting on the days between a heart attack and a bypass, the scene outside the hospital on a cold March day struck Lenora Steele as the starkest moment.
