What does it mean to retire? For a long time, it meant collecting a pension.   I was introduced to retirement by New York State. I was only 57, but the State was into cutting costs and offering early retirement to senior staff could save money. The offer came at a fortuitous time for me. Morri was only a year and half then, and I figured I had another twenty years to work before she graduated from college. The State mental health system wasn’t the same place it had been when

Last week when I was working on my Thanksgiving blog, I was reminded of how wonderful thank-you practice can be. It brought me back to my grand jury experience, my first and probably my last time on a grand jury: I think I’ve aged out of jury duty. I picked up this thank-you practice from my fellow jurors. We were on duty, as I recall, three days a week for a month. Although there was also a lot of downtime between cases for charter school paperwork, we heard case after case,

What’s my problem with Thanksgiving? It’s not that I’m cynical although I smile when I think about Macy’s inventing the holiday to kick off the Christmas shopping season. And it’s not that I’m against saying thanks. I always loved the idea of the Pilgrims thanking the indigenous folks for helping them through their first winter at Plymouth. As far as I’m concerned, Thanksgiving would have been a better choice for Indigenous People’s Day. “Thank you” can be a great practice, a

We put a name on something, and we imagine that we know what we’re talking about. “What’s the Label?” was Bernie ’s Ox Curriculum probe as Jishu led us into the fourth skandha. The skandhas, you’ll recall, are the stuff – sometimes translated as “aggregates” or “conditions” – from which, according to Buddhist psychology, we construct our experience. In the Heart Sutra , the fourth skandha is “reaction.” What’s the label that we put on the moment? What do I call this? “Writin

Do we all need companions to share our journey? I certainly do. My writing life is lonely. I don’t have many friends with whom to talk about my writing practice.. Mostly Morri, but she’s busy, and this year she’s at Boston University in their creative writing masters. She has plenty of sangha there.   I find my sangha, my companions on the way, in books. These days it’s Rick Rubin . My friend Ed Wiseman, a wonderful filmmaker, gave me the book. I’m on my third read-through. S

As a Zen teacher, I have little tolerance for student philosophizing. Perhaps it’s because I’m a recovering wannabe philosopher. My dad looked up to intellectuals and was an intellectual himself, the real McCoy, the working-class intellectual. Philosophers were the crème de la crème of intellectuals. In college, I minored in philosophy. I might have majored in philosophy if it wasn’t for my meeting with department chair, Martin Eshelman.   Eshelman was excited that I was cons

As a Zen teacher, I have little tolerance for student philosophizing. I tell them, “It’s not that I have anything against philosophy, it’s just a different practice than Zen.” To study with me is to study Zen, and as Dogen said – not his exact words – to study Zen is to study the self.   I have a warm spot in my heart for Diane Shainberg. She died much too early. It was Diane who sent me to Bernie . I met her when she spoke about spirituality and psychotherapy to our Staten I

“We’re growing old together.” Dee prefers her parents’ happy line, “We’re buckaroos.” I like that too, but I marvel at how long we’ve been together. And still there is the surprise of novelty. One of us is sharing a childhood memory and the other is awed. “I can’t believe I’ve never heard that story before.”   Time has slowed. Each day is precious. “How long will it last?” We worry about each other’s health, take care of each other, get each other out for walks and doctors’ a

In my days of formal koan study, when I was traveling early mornings before work to meet with Roshi Bob  in Jersey City, koan study followed a prescribed order. We began with The Gateless Gate  and worked our way from first koan to last, one after the other. We did the next three koan books in the same way, very orderly, very systematically, from first koan to last. It never occurred to question the order of things. It was just the way it was done. “Hyakujo and the Fox” was t

We’ve arrived. Tomorrow is Bernie ’s memorial day, and we’ve been remembering some of his social entrepreneurship teachings. We built an amazing network of schools inspired by Bernie’s Greyston practice, although our school network didn’t outwardly look like Bernie’s Greyston. They had different motive energies – Bernie’s was homelessness; mine was the stigma and discrimination faced by people living with mental illnesses – and they took different organizational forms.   My l

Remembering Bernie , I’m remembering the learning that he inspired. This is the third in this year’s memorial reflections.   Maybe the big step is from a single bottom line to the “double bottom line.” It loosens us up to realize that there’s more than one way to measure success, more than one measure that to take into account. Bernie loosened me. Having opened to the importance of profit, opening to the third bottom line was undoubtedly easier. Still, it was hard. As we wrot

This is the second installment in this year’s Bernie memorial series. Remembering Bernie, the lessons of social entrepreneurship are so fresh. Approaching “the double bottom line,” profit and social benefit, most business people struggle with “doing good for others.” My journey took me in the opposite direction. Profit, the traditional first bottom line of business, was hardly on my radar until we were about to open our first school. That was the moment when a friendly autho

We are less than two weeks from Bernie ’s memorial. It will be seven years that he’s gone, a long time and no time at all. Planning for this year’s remembering, we’ve been talking about Bernie the Social Entrepreneur and looking at some of the old videos. Old lessons have come back to me.   By the time, I met him, Bernie was already quite the social entrepreneur, embracing business as a vehicle for doing good for others. The Greyston Bakery was a flourishing enterprise – they

It’s my Hamlet koan, found of all places, in two books resting on my shelf. We find our koans, those apparent paradoxes to which we return again and again as we work to free ourselves from our conditioning, in the strangest places. I found many of my koans, plowing through the 300-odd in four hallowed collections with Roshi Bob . I found some in lines of liturgy which is not surprising. Others I found in unexpected places. Here’s one I found by putting together two book title

We talked last time about the practice of creating art. Today, we get to the related but distinct practice of putting it out there,...

One practice is creating art. Another practice is putting it out there. They’re both hard for me. Let’s talk about creating art first....

Earlier this week, I made a case for a 6 th  Buddha family. Remember? Bernie and Jishu showed me a way of using the Buddha families as...

The Five Buddha Families were one of Bernie ’s touchstones, one of the Vajrayana teachings he was happy to incorporate into his Zen. He...

Bernie , who was then living in California, sent me to Bob  to do Koan study when our attempt via email failed. Koan study was a...

At our recent lunch, Bob  shared a memory from one of Bernie’s Year-Beginning Zen gatherings, a sesshin at Litchfield. I was there, I...

This is the fourth in our series of meanderings from space through place to legacy. It has been thirty years since Bernie gave me my...

This is the third part of our meandering from space through place to legacy. Last time, we played with the demon of place. Today we have...

This is the second of a four-part meandering from space through place to legacy. Michel was right. Part of what we do as Zen teachers is...

I am interrupting our meanderings from space through place to legacy for some important news. At least, it’s important to me.   I’ve been...

This is the first in a series of four meandering reflections. We begin today with the idea of holding a space and then passing from space...

What does it mean to be a Zen teacher? I am a rock in the surf. I love the image. I imagine a rock in the surf off the New England coast....

Kyudo Roshi  taught me zazen. I’d sort of learned to sit on my own, enough to sit the 30-minute period required by the Soho Zendo for...

I’d been debating with myself. The Labor Day blog: to do it or not to do it? Is anybody going to be reading on a holiday weekend? Walking...

Although we were only a few years apart in age and had both grown up in left-leaning, Jewish families and although Bernie’s language...

Sangha is the community of practitioners, originally the monastics and lay people who surrounded Shakyamuni Buddha. Early on, I began...

At the big, Santa Barbara Zen Peacemaker gathering in1999, Bernie asked each of us to choose a persona, an alter ego, which we’d use in...

Shakyamuni Buddha apparently liked the story of the blindmen and the elephant and used it often. The story is part of the folk knowledge...

If we’re worriers, we worry about everything. We come to Zen practice looking for the peace of no worries, and we bring our worrying...

I’m rewriting my first novel. Do you see the humor? For a while in my preteens, George Gobel was my favorite TV comedian. George used to...

I worry that Zen in America is getting very rigid, very mechanical. Reading Merton’s introduction to his Zhuang Zhou book , I was wowed...

There is stopping, but there is no ending. I’m a householder. I have other things to do in my life than meditate. So, when my thirty...

I never expected to come back to intermittent fasting. I got on it for the first time late in 2018 when Pankaj sent me to his...

Much is made these days of being intentional, setting goals, keeping your eye on the ball, knowing where you’re going. The Zen life is a...

Are you anxious? What you say to yourself is even more important than what others say to you, more important than what you say to others....

Pay attention. Words can cause suffering.   How this contrasts with the playground wisdom of my elementary school teachers: “Sticks and...

Bernie introduced me to aimless meandering on my first street retreat, and I’ve blogged about it before . On the street, there was time...

For years, I lived with insomnia, not every night, but often enough. I had a theory, picked up in analysis: Dreams are our way of...

Maybe I got the idea first from Andrew Weil . He called it a “news fast.” He was describing an aspect of my sesshin experience. One of...

Bernie had a way of creating conflicts with family obligations. Maybe that was something he inherited from Maezumi Roshi : Zen before...

Beginning Zen students are often told to silence the mind. It’s a misleading instruction. As Bernie used to say, “The brain secretes...

Compassion was never my strong suit. During my Jukai ceremony in which I publicly took refuge in the Three Treasures of the Buddha,...

The American psychologist, Abraham Maslow, famous for his “hierarchy of needs,” placed safety near the top of his pyramid. We’re all...

It’s the beginning of summer, the fateful moment when the days begin getting shorter. I exaggerate my dread. But I can’t believe this...

Matthew was working on the rhinoceros fan, had been struggling with it for weeks. I wasn’t much help. It’s one of those koans in the...

Yesterday was Father’s Day. I’m thinking about my dad. My Zen practice is rooted in my childhood, and, as far as I can see, there was no...