Lately, we’ve found ourselves saying an unusual mantra when we hit difficult situations. It affords an instant, very interesting shift of view, as do the lovely flower mandalas we stumbled upon about the same time.
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Lately, we’ve found ourselves saying an unusual mantra when we hit difficult situations. It affords an instant, very interesting shift of view, as do the lovely flower mandalas we stumbled upon about the same time.
Read MoreA digital walkabout took us a 1992 edition of Tricycle, the great Buddhist magazine, where Laurie Anderson interviews Cage, then 80 years old. Here are some catalytic bits:
Read MoreThere are twenty-one post-it notes in my copy of Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists: each an illuminating and useful tool. Here is a favorite.
Read MoreWe were stunned at how perfect these words from Pema Chodron are in this very unsettling time and how much they teach on a purely personal level.
Read MoreWhen I was a kid, the legendary carciaturist Al Hirschfeld gave my father this drawing of a French gastronome savoring escargots in a Paris bistro. Nobody had to tell this guy about Mindful Eating. He’s a model for for it.
Read MoreThe other day we came across the shorn trunk of huge tree that had been taken down by the Parks Department. We looked close and tried to count the rings but got lost in the swirls and changes in its three-foot span. It is one of those everyday losses that reminded us of others, and of the Elizabeth Bishop poem “One Art”*, in which the antidote to loss lies hidden.
Read MoreThe past few mornings, our reading has been Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews with the poet Allen Ginsberg. Most of the interviews are very long, except one It asked a single question about how to balance working for obvious fortune and the creative life, concerns that resonate with just about everyone we know. Ginsberg’s answer totally blew us away. (We recommend…
Read MoreAt the height of a recent crisis a few months ago, our friend Chris Eldredge send me this note: I’ve been reading Jack Kornfield’s “A Path with Heart: A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life” and saw this. I thought it might interest you. ( I changed a bit of the wording where…
Read MoreIn this quiet, yet curiously fast-moving 7-minute video portrait, Chudrun explains what led her away from a life of celebrity, drugs and materialism at the host of BBC’s Top Gear to one of reflection, compassion and ritual as a Buddhist nun. Her leap onto what might seem an opposite path and the willingness to change is at the very heart of improvising.
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