Spring Pond Peeper Practice
Imagine it is twilight – imagine the northern woods – early spring. It is noisy with reawakening, even at bedtime. Perhaps there is a flock of northbound geese flapping and honking their way toward a lake to put down in. Or, maybe it is afternoon rush hour – imagine a major metropolis – bursting with […]
Lunar Musings
We were so fortunate that weekend to be visiting the twins, now three years old and full of pep. It was past their bedtime and still they were racing around together outside, first to one side of the house, then around the back where we were sitting, then round the other side. On one pass, […]
Finding our Way to Here
On the map, there are many locations. One of them is, “I want to be a saint.” Another is, “I want to recognize my true self.” There are countless others, like, “The world is illusion,” or, “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.” Between the various locations, there are little commuter pathways by which we can […]
Ponderings
And so the teachings go: “I am not my body” (or the soft version, “I am not just my body”); “I am not my mind”; “I am not my emotions”; and so forth. And yet we brush our teeth; we attend to our thoughts, a small few of which may or may not be useful; […]
Live Like a Casserole
Somewhere in the flurry of nondual concepts, there is this notion of no doer, or as Casteneda’s Don Juan says, not doing. It’s not quite the same as not doing the laundry and winding up without clean clothes…or leaving a sink full of dirty dishes. Both of these are doings. It’s not a question of doing nothing, because […]
Overtaken by Silence
Sometimes we are overtaken by silence. However, it may not feel like that. It may feel like indolence, or it may feel like lack of motivation, or it may feel like a hiatus, a lapse. To a well-meaning friend, it might even look like something is the matter. But wait. These are privileged moments, moments […]
Mexican Generals
We were hiking down Ward Canyon, up in the mountains way away from anywhere. There is no particular trail so we were just meandering down the creek, taking in the Arizona monsoon green, the erosion damage, the wildflowers and whatnot. And the three of us were bantering back and forth about the Mexican Generals crossing […]
Making Sense of it All
Sometimes we’ve just got to wonder about how the world got into such a mess; or alternatively, how did I get into such a mess? Or even, upon great good fortune, how did I get so lucky? And there can be all this see-sawing back and forth between “Oh, no,” and “Oh, wow.” Mostly, I […]
Everything We Need is Provided
Joan loved to chant. In the last months and weeks, even the last days, of her embodied existence, we chanted every single day. Sometimes I was quick enough with the recorder to capture those precious, spontaneous moments of what she described as “joy expressing itself as sound.” Below you will find a 2-minute recording of […]
On Forgetting and Remembering
Curious by nature, I ask a lot of questions. During the years of my apprenticeship with Joan, she was infinitely patient with my indefatigable pursuit of truth, only on the rarest of occasions insisting that the “shop was closed” and even then with a wink and a smile which reassured me that it would reopen […]