November 22, 2018 I am aware that I am sitting in a house on Wappo land, in the Mayacamas Mountains. I am sitting on land that is owned collectively, in a house that is owned collectively, as part of one small effort to live an alternative to the steamrolling system called private property and industrial…
On the morning of election day last week my eight-year-old was lying on the sofa with a blanket over his head. “What’s integrity?” we heard him say, in a muffled sort of way. I took a deep breath and said, “Wow.” Then breathed some more. “Integrity,” I said, “is when a person is making choices…
Last night I googled “how to go help rebuild Barbuda” and got not much besides the Prime Minister asking people to be tourists in Antigua, Robert DeNiro pouring money in so that he can build a resort, and an appalling opinion piece out of Jamaica (with lots of healthy comments) stating that Barbuda should take…
Something shifted in me during or after the press conference yesterday, or during a stormy night, or when I cried in the bathroom this morning about the way Trump bullied that orthodox Jewish reporter, with whom I surely disagree on many issues but who deserves respect and dignity like us all, or on the way…
This post is an adaptation of a talk I gave at the Santa Rosa Creek Zen Center on May 11, 2015. I. There’s an old, well-known haiku by the poet Basho that goes like this: Even in Kyoto— hearing the cuckoo cry, I long for Kyoto. In koan practice with the Pacific Zen Institute,…
A poem for Flood Wall Street and the People’s Climate March September 21-22, 2014 Today I’m staying in my pajamas because I can. I’m curling back in bed with my computer and checking Facebook, not one time, not two times, but eighteen times while my children are at school. I might bake cookies.…
When the archives of your life are disturbed you uncover some interesting things. Layers of yourself, that you buried for one reason or another. Some you meant to return to; some you were determined to remember; some you very clearly meant to forget. I have been working my way through a fifteen-year-old file cabinet, clearing…