BootsnAll Travel Network
Add this blog to: MyYahoo, Google, Bloglines, RSS


Archive for the 'Where to plant myself' Category

« Previous Page
Next Entries »
« Home

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 »

Doubting Everything

Monday, April 9th, 2007

The woman who has taken Basho says he’s not eating, he growls at her cat, he’s terrified of her dog. If she sits on the couch in the room where he hides, he will come out and sit near her; but he doesn’t trust her, runs if she moves toward him. Perhaps he just needs time to adjust, but I feel horrible for thrusting this difficulty on a being who only ever gave me joy and who was perfectly happy with life as it was. And I miss him. There are horrors taking place in the world, and by comparison with the results of global warming and what’s going on in Darfur, Myanmar, or Iraq, this is trivial. But every loss calls up every other loss. I live again the losses of my children, friends, lovers, animals, oceans, and places I have left behind in the quest. I take this moment, and Dave’s wise comment, to call into question everything in my life. [read on]

Posted in Manko, What does it mean?, Where to plant myself | 1 Comment »

An Authentic Life

Wednesday, February 14th, 2007

I begin by noting that Karen Armstrong moves me with her clear thinking, her rigorous scholarship, and her fine writing. Her book, Buddha, is a fascinating examination of the mythical foundations of Buddhism. Last night I started reading The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness, and in the preface she explains that she joined a Roman Catholic convent and embarked on a seven-year attempt to become a nun because she wanted to “live more authentically than seemed possible in the world I knew” (xi). That grabbed me so powerfully I had to put the book down. What is an authentic life? That question is driving my intention to quit teaching in ten months and move to a Buddhist center. It is a familiar question–it’s the question that has driven most of my life-wrecking decisions: to bear and adopt children alone, to leave lovers, to pursue college degrees, to leave Smith College, to emigrate to South Africa, to leave Africa, to explore Portugal, to start this blog. . . . [read on]

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

Dreams, Omens, Birds, and San Francisco

Saturday, December 2nd, 2006

Last night, very weary, as I often am on Friday, I watched part of a DVD of the David Attenborough series, “The Life of Birds,” thought about how hard most birds work to feed themselves (nonsense the expression “free as a bird”), felt great compassion for the birds–working almost without rest every day of their lives. At 9 p.m. I gave in to my own exhaustion and huddled under the goose down for an early winter sleep. I woke suddenly from a dream that I met a mirror image of myself on a sunny path through the Marin hills by the Pacific and said to her, “This place has it all!” Awake, momentarily confused by the goosedown and the shadows in my Texas bedroom, I didn’t know where I was. I saw the clock: 1:59 a.m. Then the music started in my head: “If you’re going to San Francisco, you better wear some flowers in your hair….” So maybe it’s going to work out for me to live at Green Gulch. [read on]

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

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 »

« Previous Page
Next Entries »