Category: spirituality
- Ancient and TwistedUntangling Karma: Intimate Zen Stories on Healing Trauma by Judith Ragir. Monkfish. 251 pp. $18.99 Untangling Karma is not quite a dharma book and not quite a memoir, but has elements of both. Judith Ragir is a longtime Zen practitioner—some forty years—who has looked back at her life of practice and seen what it has done ...Read more
- More Than PostureThe Posture of Meditation: A Practical Manual for Meditators of All Traditions. Second Edition By Will Johnson. Shambhala. 161 pp. $15.95. ***** It’s hard to believe that any activity as fundamentally simple as zazen—all you do is sit there and breathe—could become complicated, but the human mind (my human mind, anyway) can complicate anything. Though I’ve ...Read more
- Where Zen BeganChina Root: Taoism, Ch’an, and Original Zen by David Hinton. Shambhala. 176 pp. $17.95. ***** This is a fascinating and important book. David Hinton is a long time—thirty-five years—translator of Chinese poetry and other texts. He has translated most of the great Chinese classics, including the Tao Te Ching, I Ching, Chuang Tzu, The Analects, Mencius, ...Read more
- Healing Our WoundsRobert Bly (1926-2021) In 1988, the North Carolina Independent asked me to attend and write about a Robert Bly Day for Men, the first such event to take place in the Triangle. I’m not much of one for workshops and other public events, so I probably wouldn’t have gone otherwise, but in many ways that day ...Read more
- It’s an Art (Says the Old Fart)The Science of Enlightenment: How Meditation Works by Shinzen Young. Sounds True. 265 pp. $13.89. ***** As Shinzen Young himself says in one of the later chapters, Zen teachers are known for under-explaining meditation, vipassana teachers for over-explaining. It’s as if vipassana teachers want to tell you everything that might possibly happen, so you never have ...Read more
- The Wild Man and the SchoolmarmAppreciate Your Life: The Essence of Zen Practice by Taizan Maezumi Roshi. Shambhala. 160pp. $19.59. ***** Ordinary Wonder: Zen Life and Practice by Charlotte Joko Beck. Shambhala. 240 pp. $17.95. ***** Dharma books wander into my life at exactly the right moment. Years ago, I picked up Taizan Maezumi’s Appreciate Your Life and, except for the title ...Read more
- I Bow BackWhen You Greet Me I Bow: Notes and Reflections from a Life in Zen by Norman Fischer. Shambhala. 336 pp. $16.97. ***** I haven’t read all his books, but for my money this is Norman Fischer’s best, reflections on a wide range of topics from a man who has spent fifty years living and teaching the ...Read more
- Give Us a GrinThe Guide by R. K. Narayan. Penguin Classics 196pp. $16.00. **** If you have some time on your hands these days—maybe you’re recently retired, or lost your job during the pandemic—have you thought of becoming a teacher of Advaita Vedanta, or Kashmir Shavism? I realize you’re supposed to be enlightened to do that, but is that ...Read more
- There’s Not Enough!It’s a State of Mind How’s your supply of toilet paper these days? I always found it weird that, when faced with a mysterious pandemic of epic proportions, the first thing most Americans thought of was wiping their butts. Maybe they were just buying paper towels to wipe down surfaces (which we recently discovered, after doing ...Read more
- Ode to SwimmingGet Back to Where You Once Belonged Yesterday I swam for the first time in over a year. Since 1985—that’s 35 years—I’d gone swimming at the Y three times a week. I’d been a jogger before that, but the North Carolina heat and my aching joints made me turn to swimming at the age of 37. I’d ...Read more
- Not a Matter of BeliefConfessions of a Buddhist Atheist by Stephen Bachelor. Random House. 320 pp. $14.99 Some years ago, when I was trying to get my head around Christianity, I read various works by C.S. Lewis, including Mere Christianity. Lewis is widely regarded as an effective proselytizer for the religion, offering not a passionate but a reasonable approach to ...Read more
- I Like IkeThe Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer Volume II: A Friend of Kafka to Passions. Library of America. 856 pp. ***** Back in the days when Isaac Bashevis Singer’s stories appeared in the New Yorker, I never missed one. It was a thrill to read the work of a man who wrote so vividly, who seemed ...Read more
- Things Will Never Be That Way AgainSound of Metal a film by Darius Marder. With Riz Ahmed, Olivia Cook, Paul Raci, Lauren Ridloff. ***** I almost stopped watching Sound of Metal during the first five minutes. I’m not a fan of heavy metal and didn’t want to spend two hours listening to what I heard in those early minutes. I didn’t need ...Read more
- That’s Not the ChoiceReflections on The Friend In Sigrid Nunez’ superb novel The Friend, the narrator is thinking back on a friend who has just died, and mentions that he was a committed atheist. “Between religion and knowledge, he said, a person must choose knowledge.” I almost jumped out of my chair as I read that. That’s not the ...Read more
- What Is Liberation?Great Demon Kings: A Memoir of Poetry, Sex, Art, Death, and Enlightenment by John Giono. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 368 pp. $25.49. **** For the two years I lived in Cambridge—1991-93, while my wife was in Divinity School—I was in bookstore heaven. It seems strange to say nowadays, when bookstores barely exist. There was the Harvard ...Read more
- How He Thought of MeMy First Shrink Every time I ever went to a therapist, I went because I was in physical pain. The first time, because the whole idea was so foreign to me, it took me months to finally pull the trigger. I also felt reluctant because I was afraid of what he’d say. I was afraid he’d ...Read more
- What Healing IsFor My 72nd Birthday The morning my father died we had barely gotten back from the hospital when there was a knock at the door and my mother opened it to Mrs. Shriver, a neighbor from across the street. She was an older woman, with a ruddy, deeply lined face, kept herself busy with outdoor sports, ...Read more
- He Published HimselfLorenzo Milam 1933-2020 Forty years ago, The Sun magazine was not the polished publication it is today. It was printed on what I believe is called stock, rather than the slick paper the magazine currently uses. It didn’t have a vast staff—often the Editor was it—and didn’t pay its writers much, if at all. Each issue ...Read more
- Sitting with Louis IIThe Other Side One of the problems with my earlier piece about talking and sitting zazen with my autistic brother in law is that I sound so kind, compassionate, magnanimous, and patient. A true Bodhisattva. Actually, I’m no better than anyone else, but it isn’t too surprising that I sound that way. I wrote the piece, ...Read more
- Sitting with LouisNotes During a Pandemic We came to stay at our Asheville cabin during the pandemic in order to take care of my wife’s brother Louis, who has a house on the same property. He’s 68 years old and autistic, diagnosed just a few years ago. His job was bringing in shopping carts at the local supermarket, ...Read more
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All Shook UpWhat's in a Song? IIWriting for his LifeWhat’s in a Song?Mixed Feelings
View Other Essays by Topic
aging (127)American literature (226)art (123)Buddhism (171)Christianity (132)creative process (262)death and dying (144)meditation (125)movies (167)music (42)race (110)religion (196)sex (187)spirituality (174)the art of narrative (266)Uncategorized (21)world literature (23)