Rusty Ring

"The entire evolution of science would suggest that the best grammar for thinking about the world is that of change, not of ...

(Kids love treehouses, but the treehouse years are few and fleeting, and as the demographics of a neighbourhood age and change, thos...

Where it swelled near its confluence with the Willapa River, Wilson Creek bore incongruous signs of heavy industry: breastworks of peel...

This morning a brother in my Twitter sangha posted the following five paragraphs from the Pali canon ( Dutiyaassutavāsutta, SN 12.62 ). ...

"I am become Time, the destroyer of worlds." Krishna, in the Bhagavad Gita (A variant Hindu translation of the Oppenheime...

Insight from a sangha-mate on Mastodon (appropriately enough): One of the most important ideas to sit with – amid the convulsion ...

Forget your perfect offering There's a crack, a crack in everything That's how the light gets in Leonard Cohen, Zen hermit m...

After 20 years of this I know that practice is not like mending a roof and now the roof doesn't leak. It's more like patching...

As a meditation on the unreliable nature of impermanence, I offer this week an incomprehensive list of dubious fads I assumed wo...

… is something I don't like. Yeah, I know; Zen is all about acceptance of the immutable, ubiquitous, unresting nature of the u...

Events this week have me thinking about my favourite Zen teaching story. (I say that about all of them, though my very favourites a...

If you'd told me when I was 22 that the day would come when I would cherish my ex-girlfriends, I would have called you mad. As a y...

"This is not mine, this is not I, this is not myself.” the Buddha (Photo courtesy of Max Pixel and a generous photographer...

Last week a reader posted a provocative question under Everything Doesn't Happen For a Reason : "If one is not seeking to avo...

(The following is a passage from Rough Around the Edges , a manuscript I began 20 years ago. Though my Zen practice was still about si...

Kobayashi Issa is my all-time favourite poet. Regular readers will find this tediously typical, for though he's one of Japan's ...

(On the beach in front of an old log dump, closed since the early 80s. Remains of an ancient automobile.)

(Deer bones found on the forest floor.)

This toney giant suburb was recently thrown (and is still being thrown) up here on our remote North Coast beach. The houses in the pict...

To commemorate this New Year's Day 2015 I offer a meditation on the passage of time. My brother's poetry here is so powerful...