Why leave the palace?
As the story goes, Shakyamuni Buddha was a prince in northern India. Before his birth, it was prophesied that he was destined to become one of two things: a gre...
Author: Fig Tree
On the “broad and generous spirit…”
In my last post, I ended with Darlene Cohen on the benefits of facing our pain, rather than distracting from it or trying to push it away: …you begin to feel ge...
On entering the pain
This year I am participating in a yearlong workshop at the Village Zendo called The Path of Awakening, focusing on Zen responses to the Others we create accordi...
On obedience, attention, and freedom
It’s snowing, a lot, everywhere, so this morning I was reading Meister Eckhart, the thirteenth-century German mystic (obviously). In the first installment...
Applying the compassionate infrastructure (New Year’s reboot)
And we’re back. When I first started this blog in September I had pretty grand designs for what and how I was going to write here. Looking back, I think m...
On Columbus and a New World
So I woke up thinking about the New World, because it’s Columbus Day. The big irony is that his New World was nothing new, that he didn’t discover a...
On the power to create mathematics
This post continues where “the power to create” left off. I’m going to expand on what it means to rely on the phrase “the power to creat...
A meditation on the first day of school
This is a honkadori that I love, based on a story in the Lotus Sutra in which a character doesn’t realize that he’s a bodhisattva, a Buddhist saint ...
On the power to create
“What is teaching?” A Haiku by Bill Maroon We meet awkwardly I invite you to walk I find you dancing From Teaching and the Religious Imagination by ...
On prepping for the first day of school
This week and next, I start at my new job at a progressive school in Manhattan, teaching middle and high school math. This is my fourth school setting, right on...