Earth Dreams: Zen Buddhism and the Soul of the World

Greetings Friends, I have a deep love and appreciation for the wonderment and creativity of this life. It’s un-pin-down-able, slippery, un-define-able—like a water color painting that continuously repaints itself. One story from the Zen tradition that has always helped me stay awake to amazement and in courtship with the great mystery is the Zen Mirror of Tokeiji. A partial-telling of which can be...

Hello Good Friends, It’s late summer and I can feel the seasonal shift. Here in the northern states the Earth is darkening earlier and staying dark later, its cooler too. The humidity has dropped and the insects have grown quieter in my central ohio village. The tomatoes, peaches, corn, and zucchini are in abundance, the pawpaws are ripening and chicken-of-the-woods are blazing orange on fallen lo...

Greetings Friends, I am returning from 10 days of monastic practice at my former home, Great Vow Zen Monastery. While I was there I had the opportunity to celebrate my teacher Chozen Bays Roshi’s 80th birthday, to practice and lead the annual outdoor sesshin that we call Grasses, Trees and the Great Earth Sesshin and to facilitate a precepts ceremony. I love monastic practice. I love merging with...

Being Flower On Monday night during meditation we sat together as a community of flowers. Sun flower, daisy, rose, violet, marigold, milkweed, celosia, echinacea, blue vervain, poppy, queen anne’s lace, crocosmia, zinnia. We were studying the koan Case 19 from the Hidden Lamp, Flowers in the Buddha Hall. The nuns of Tokeiji were famous for their beautiful elaborate flower decorations on Buddha’s B...

This life is mysterious. I often marvel at how there is so much more that we don’t know then that we do. Walk into a forest or a city. Even if I knew every being in the forest by name. Will I ever be able to comprehend the relationships between them? The relationships between the cells in my own body? Even the mystery of what a tree is, this tree—the sycamore standing right here, at the entrance t...

Greetings Friends, Here we are in the heart of summer. I am writing this a week after the passing of beloved eco-dharma elder Joanna Macy. We are also in the middle of our summer read of The Hidden Lamp: 25 Centuries of Awakened Women . The koan story that we explored this week was Case 13: Chen’s Mountain Flowers and the commentary happens to be written by Joanna Macy. So I want to take the time...

Greetings Friends, As we move through our Summer Read of The Hidden Lamp: Stories from 25 Centuries of Awakened Women this week we focused on Case 10: Asan’s Rooster. The koan is one of devotion, deep listening and awakening to our true undivided nature. Here’s the case. Asan was a lay woman who studied Zen with Master Tetsumon and was unremitting in her devotion to practice. One day during her mo...

Greetings Friends, I am just getting back from our Interdependence Sesshin— five-days of residential silent retreat practice in the hills of West Virginia with the Mud Lotus Sangha . It was moving for me to practice sesshin in a new environment with many people who it was their first longer retreat. Sesshin is healing, no matter what the theme, it transforms us to sit and live in silence together,...

Greetings Friends, We began the Summer Read of The Hidden Lamp: 25 Centuries of Awakened Women with the first koan—The Old Woman of Wutai, a story about the spiritual path, pilgrimage and life direction that features crone wisdom. If you are interested in joining the summer read, more information and reading schedule can be found here. In this email I would like to share the koan and some reflecti...

Happy Summer Solstice! I feel deep gratitude to be on this path of friendship, communion and inquiry with you. The path of dharma is a path of truth, of getting closer to the actuality of our lives— to the heart of what is right here. In this journey of the heart there are so many encounters, so many opportunities for reflection, so many relationships, learnings, emotions, sensations. Fear is a na...

I have been reflecting on the nature of practice-awakening. In the Buddhist tradition this refers to the process (both sudden and gradual) of realizing our fundamental wellbeing. This is a transformational practice. This is a healing practice. And it is mysterious. It doesn’t happen in the way that we expect. Insights happen, and then are forgotten. Love is awakened and then seemingly covered over...

One can, the other cannot Both are free A god mask, a demon mask The failure is wonderful indeed —Mumon’s poem If I reflect back on my life, it is possible to see a series of failures, mistakes, broken dreams and incomplete projects. Relationships that I probably should have left before they ended, others that I probably shouldn’t have even pursued, still others that I could have worked harder to...

I have been contemplating being stuck. You know that feeling that something else should be happening. Something more, or different, or better. The sense that whatever is happening is somehow wrong, or bad, or amiss in some way. The sense of being stuck can even manifest as an over-identification with the hope for growth or healing in a particular area of life. I want to share a koan from the mumon...

Greetings Friends, I am returning from a 10-day stay at my former home—Great Vow Zen Monastery. While I was there I had the opportunity to co-lead a sesshin (weeklong silent meditation retreat). The sesshin’s theme was The Light of the Ancestors. Yunmen said to the assembly of practitioners, “Everyone has a light. When you look for it, its dark, dark, hidden. What is this light that everyone has?”...

Are you dreaming? How is your experience, like a dream? In one sense, the words you are reading, the sounds you are hearing, the thoughts racing through your mind and the ones seeming to linger in the background, the worries, and any other emotion that you might be experiencing, including experience itself— all are un-pin-down-able, you can not grasp them, you can not even find a single unchanging...

Dream as Analogy for Reality This world is psychoactive. So much so that we don’t even realize how are fundamental beliefs and unquestioned assumptions shape our sense of who we are and what the world is. One of those assumptions is the referent to this simple, and often thought/spoken phrase I am . Its innocuous, we think it constantly. I am hungry, I am tired, I am sad, I am lonely, I am scared,...

What is real? What is true? These questions are fundamental to the spiritual path, to the path of awakening. There is much confusion in our world right now. Blatant lies or mis-truths are being thrown around about immigrants rights, dei, trans and queer people, how the economy works, science, climate change, you name it… The question of what is real in a spiritual sense invites us to look into the...

Hello Friends, Happy April 1st! Here we are, its Aries Season, it’s Spring, Mercury and Venus have both been retrograde for a while now (which can give a certain feeling of friction or underworld journey to our days), there is much happening in our geo-political world that I (we) wish wasn’t happening. And still the magnolias are blooming, the songbirds are back, tulips are pushing through the mul...

Book of Serenity #30: Dasui's Aeonic Fire A monk asked Dasui: When the fire at the end of an aeon rages through and the whole universe is destroyed, is this destroyed or not? Dasui said: Destroyed. The monk said: Then it goes along with that? Dasui said: It goes along with that. A monk asked Longji: When the fire ending the aeon rages through and the whole universe is destroyed, is this destroyed...

Greetings friends~ As we be together in this political moment, I wanted to offer some of the dharma teachings and practices that I have been leaning into. One of which is sharing poetry, so first a poem. For When People Ask by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer I want a word that means okay and not okay, more than that: a word that means devastated and stunned with joy. I want the word that says I feel it...

As we began 2025, I returned to the teachings of the Heart of Great Perfection Wisdom Sutra. In times of chaos, something in me turns toward what is most true. The Heart Sutra is one such text that invites this kind of turning. Moving through the Heart Sutra we arrive at a set of stanzas that read as a series of negations. Therefore, given emptiness, there is no form, no sensation, no perception,...

Greetings Friends, I remember when I first entered a space dedicated to dharma practice, after sitting in the zendo that first night my body felt like I was home. Which was strange because the building and atmosphere was so foreign to me, the spicey smell of incense, the monotone chanting, the long black robes that the monks wore, being told to sit still and face a wall. None of these things were...

Greetings Friends, As we begin this new year, I want to spend sometime with the Heart of Great Perfect Wisdom Sutra . This chant is one that is chanted across Mahayana Buddhist traditions, within our own Zen school, it is chanted daily in most monasteries and regularly in many practice communities. It’s a pithy teaching that cuts to the heart of our practice. And it starts with the Bodhisattva of...

A monk asked Hongzhi, “What about the ones who have gone?” Hongzhi said, “White clouds rise to the top of the valleys, blue peaks lean into the empty sky.” The monk asked, “What about the ones who return?” Hongzhi said, “Heads covered in white hair, they leave the cliffs and valleys. In the dead of night they descend through the clouds to the market stalls.” “What about the ones who neither come n...

When we enter the path of practice, two paths open up simultaneously—first we have the path of what we think we are doing. This is the practice method, the conceptual framework, the spoken vow that we turn towards, that we make effort at, that we can talk about more or less. The other path is the path of what is actually happening. It is darker, more mysterious, often below the level of consciousn...