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Archive for the 'Buddhism' Category

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Leaving Paradise

Sunday, April 29th, 2007

A good friend who has daughters aged 30 and 23 is visiting for the weekend. She sits with me in my concern that my daughter doesn’t seem ready to take control of her life yet. This daughter, my fourth and last child, is 21 but dropped out of college and is working for a minimum-wage employer that never gives her more than 30 hours a week of work. She has not, so far, been able to find any other kind of job. Just this week, wrapping up my World Lit class, I taught the conclusion to Milton’s Paradise Lost and asked my room full of 24 college students, “When do you think it’s time for a person to leave home, get their own apartment, let their parents move on in their lives?” Their answers were revealing. [read on]

Posted in Buddhism, Manko, Where to plant myself | 4 Comments »

Honeysuckle and Soto Zen

Monday, April 23rd, 2007

I’m back to myself! This morning I can move again without pain. I resumed my morning meditation and my walk in the park, where great mounds of honeysuckle are blooming extravagantly, promising summer. The fragrance makes me drunk with joy, as it’s very much this moment , but it also holds me in a kind of rapture going right back to my early childhood in North Carolina, where I first learned that sweetness.

My internet connection was down for two days, which gave me an unexpected computer fast, and that coincided with my whole physical system being “down.” For two days after my collision with the parking lot, every part of my body was a wreck. I took frequent naps, gulped Tylenol, and limped along behind Duke at regular intervals, both hands on the leash handle, till his human companion came home Sunday night. [read on]

Posted in Buddhism, Texas | 1 Comment »

Mary Rose Meets Thay

Monday, April 16th, 2007

Continuing my reading of Mary Rose O’Reilley’s The Barn at the End of the World, it seems to me that the radiant core of the book is this meeting she had with “Thay,” Thich Nhat Hanh, the head teacher at Plum Village, and the author of several books that have shaped me, including Being Peace . [read on]

Posted in Books and Movies, Buddhism, What does it mean?, Where to plant myself | 1 Comment »

Buddhist communities

Sunday, April 15th, 2007

I always have a stack of books by my bed, and I am often reading several at once, though sometimes a book sits in the stack so long that it gets moved aside, ends up on a shelf, and languishes there for a year or two. So it was with Mary Rose O’Reilley’s The Barn at the End of the World. Somehow I gravitated to it once again last night and remembered why I’d been drawn to it in the first place. The author has a sharp sense of humor, the courage to create a life for herself unlike anyone else’s, and she threw herself over a cliff that has always fascinated me: she moved to Thay Nhat Hanh’s Plum Village, in France, and wrote (uproariously) about how that went for her. [read on]

Posted in Books and Movies, Buddhism, Where to plant myself | 4 Comments »

The Promise of Joy

Sunday, December 17th, 2006

As I drove to the park for my walk this morning, Handel’s “For Unto Us a Child Is Born” came on the radio, and suddenly I was twenty-eight, pregnant with Seth, and full of joy. Throughout that pregnancy I played the Messiah, danced to it, hummed it, and grinned. The baby I was carrying had excellent genes, and our life was going to be one surprise after another. The joy of that music is the joy of possibility. Sitting in the parking lot on this warm Texas morning in December, it came to me clearly that I have spent most of my sixty-one years living in joy, expecting something wonderful. Expectation is not necessarily, as some Buddhist texts warn, the seed of disappointment or suffering. It is its own fulfillment. Anticipation fills life with wonder, hope, a vibrating YES that is not (for me) ever diminished by fulfillment. When the anticipated event arrives, it is what it is, never what I thought it would be. Sometimes it’s better; sometimes it carries a hidden load of pain. But nothing can erase the joy of anticipation. Those times in my life when I have been joyfully expecting some event, change, or beginning (pregnant, about to move to a new place, on the brink of a new project, packing my boxes and giving away my possessions, half my body already over another cliff-edge)–those times I was IN JOY. I was not living in the future but living in joy, in anticipation of possibility. The promise of joy is joy itself. [read on]

Posted in Buddhism, Seth, What does it mean? | 1 Comment »

Octogenarians, Intellect, and Buddhism

Tuesday, December 5th, 2006

It was an extraordinary weekend. Joe, the father of my friend Kate (aka Pho Nguyen, the nun who is SuCo Dieu Thien’s student) was in town for his annual visit with his daughter, staying at the meditation center. He was freed momentarily from Kate’s mom, who stayed in Michigan because she won’t countenance her daughter’s Buddhism, and clearly he was feeling frisky. He called me early Sunday to say he’d been up since 4:30 and had about all he could take of Vietnamese ritual for one day, was walking to mass at the nearest Roman Catholic church, and hoped I would pick him up there and see what else we could do with the day. I love this guy. He’s 80, a medical doctor with a great sense of humor and a sharp mind, and he and I have had several meetings and fifty or so emails about Buddhism, his daughter, and SuCo Dieu Thien. I picked him up at the Catholic church and we went to the Unitarian Universalist church, to hear my friend John’s mother Mary talk about daring and unconventional women in the genealogy of Jesus to a group of non-Christian skeptics. Mary is approaching 80, is a graduate of the Univ of Chicago, and has the kind of articulate intelligence I usually only encounter in great books, so I wasn’t going to miss this! Naturally, Joe was gob-smacked by Mary, so several of us went out for a Tex-Mex lunch and watched Joe flatter and flirt with Mary, who parried his attentions with grace and a certain blushing pleasure. The intellectual play between them gave new meaning to gallantry. After that, I took Joe back to the meditation center, where SuCo was waiting for the two of us with a lesson that has left me walking a-tilt, considering once again that maybe she IS a teacher of great wisdom. [read on]

Posted in Buddhism, What does it mean? | No Comments »

Another Buddhist encounter

Saturday, November 18th, 2006

Thanks to friend & fellow traveler Lari for another response to my Buddhist Doubt. Lari sent me this:

Nothing
Is easier to claim
Than Something.
She who claims Zen travels light.

Another young woman is ordaining tomorrow as a nun in SuCo Thich Dieu Thien’s order. To celebrate the occasion, a thirty-something English-speaking Vietnamese monk from Michigan has arrived. He, like SuCo, feels his way of teaching is “much faster” and “more useful” than that of Thich Nhat Hanh and “Mindfulness,” which, they say, “only takes you half the way.”

The Michigan-monk lived at the center for several months while I was practicing there in 2005. He sent me, via Kate, an invitation to come to the center for tea and conversation. I figured I was strong enough to handle whatever he wanted to dish out, so I went. When I arrived, he and SuCo were seated at a picnic table visible from the front entryway, so I walked over and joined them. [read on]

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Buddhism, Doubt, and Community

Saturday, November 11th, 2006

Yesterday I went to visit my friend Pho Nguyen (formerly Kate), a Buddhist nun who ordained and lives at the Vietnamese Buddhist center where I studied for a year. Our conversation led me to new clarity about my “issues” with Buddhism. That’s what this blog entry is going to be about, so if the topic doesn’t interest you, feel free to stop now. [read on]

Posted in Buddhism, Where to plant myself | 1 Comment »

The Fruitful Darkness

Thursday, October 19th, 2006

One of the four places I’m exploring as the site of the rest of my life is Upaya Zen Center, in Santa Fe, NM, where Joan Halifax is the abbot. I wanted to know more about her, her beliefs, her values–so I ordered a copy of her book, The Fruitful Darkness: A Journey through Buddhist Practice and Tribal Wisdom. She’s an anthropologist, she worked with Joseph Campbell for a time, and she’s the ex-wife of Stan Grof, the breath-man, with whom she wrote a book. She spent years studying shamanism; at a point fairly early on, she stopped being an anthropologist and became a student: in west Africa, in Mexico, in the southwestern USA, in Asia. Then her charmed life took her to some of the great Buddhist teachers: Thay Nhat Hanh, His Holiness the Dalai Lama himself, and some powerful Korean and Japanese teachers. She’s an eclectic learner, like me, and reading her book makes me feel better about my own wanderings, my own thinly-spread and widely-encompassing quest. She’s also a skilled writer whose prose reads like poetry. [read on]

Posted in Books and Movies, Buddhism, Where to plant myself | 1 Comment »

Rich with possibilities

Wednesday, October 11th, 2006

I have now received warm, welcoming, encouraging emails from HKF and Sravasti, and I also got info from the Chamber of Commerce in Spokane (60 miles south of Sravasti), which slighly allays my fears about the winters at Sravasti. Maybe the winters are less long and severe than those in Massachusetts. On paper it seems so. Every time I pick up a book, an essay, or a dharma talk by Thubten Chodron, who has built Sravasti from a vision to a solid place on the earth, I am drawn to the teacher and the teaching like hummingbirds are drawn to the blossoms in the hanging baskets on my balcony. Then I play one of Bo Lozoff’s tapes, and I lean back and smile with his easy, laughing wisdom. Then I think about Joan Halifax and her wonderful work for prisoners, for the planet, and for the dying, and I think Upaya, in Santa Fe, is a great place to toss my small energy into the mix. The least logical place, because the only thing I know they do is gardening, and I am no gardener, is Green Gulch, but I can’t get its beauty out of my heart. Is it not astonishing that there are four such places, that all of them might take me as part of their community, and that the world is completely lit with possibility! Oh brave world, that has such people in it. [read on]

Posted in Books and Movies, Buddhism, Manko, Seth, Where to plant myself | 1 Comment »

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