Rusty Ring

"It's not that the wind is blowing. It's what the wind is blowing." My friend Brent. [Who informs me now that he ...

“Not responding is a response - we are equally responsible for what we don’t do.” Jonathan Safran Foer (Photo courtesy of Greg Ro...

"Whenever I'm about to do something, I think, 'Would an idiot do that?', and if they would, I do not do that thing....

For some years I've enjoyed sporadic correspondence with a fellow Zenner in England. After a few less-than-uplifting experiences with...

"Life is cause and effect. And you certainly are no stranger to the cause." So says the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come, ...

In the early days of my monastic practice, a Franciscan friend shared a bit of his acquired wisdom with me: "You should only eve...

We're catching a lot of reality these days. First a plague swept the planet, laying waste to technocratic pretentions of invuln...

So I'm reading Adam Savage 's Every Tool's a Hammer , an elaborated meditation on "making", that thing that mak...

An old friend last week posted a link to The Cruelty of Call-Out Culture: How Not To Do Social Change , David Brook's timely and inc...

Some years ago I heard a story from the Bhagavad-Gita, in which a great warrior is called to battle, only to find himself facing his m...

Throw up a brick. Christians will try to pray it away, but it will still come down. A Buddhist can decide he's no longer a brick-throw...

Once, when I was in Grade 2, my teacher had all of us save our milk carton from lunch. Afterward we folded it into a flower pot, filled i...

A traveller paused in a forest clearing beside a stream, where a dervish sat meditating. Sipping from his waterskin, he saw the dervis...

Like most Western Zenners, I come to this practice from a life of emotional trauma. More than once, I've stood at that point where y...

Three things you must always say when they are true, and must never say when they are not true: I'm sorry. I love you. You can c...

"No man can walk out on his own story." The Spirit of Clint Eastwood... I mean, the West. (Photo of real-life Rango courte...

...and in the end   the love you take   is equal to the love   you make. Lennon-McCartney (Last line of the last song on the last alb...

(See also Suicide: The Cure .) A former student of mine recently committed suicide. He was a truly exceptional young man, still in his c...

"Time wounds all heels." Groucho Marx (Photo courtesy of Mykl Roventine and Wikimedia Commons.)

Karma is only a bitch if you are.