Dharma art

I wish to urge students of the dharma who may have forsaken their creative impulse in favor of practice to realize there is no conflict between creativity and meditation. Creativity can be understood, in essence, to be the practice of our own nature and that nature’s expression. You may find your way in to the [...]

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The spirit of bodhicitta

…Although your achievement of the omniscient state may not be beneficial to all living beings, it will definitely bring a lot of practical benefit to certain living beings. Therefore, it is very important that you work for your own achievement of the completely enlightened state. Because there might be living beings who depend very much [...]

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Well, duh

I consider myself a fairly sophisticated if amateur thinker on theological/religious issues. My gentle readers all know that I have tried and practiced multiple paths of the spirit, sometimes more than one at a time. But I *just* figured out something so obvious that once it hit me, it was like Homer Simpson suddenly attaining [...]

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Neato cool article–

–on Halloween and Teh Spooky from the Tibetan Buddhist perspective: Gathering of Ghosts and Demons. It talks about female practitioner Machig Labdron and the practice of chod, offering one’s body as food for the demons and ghosts.

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Dewdrops on a lotus leaf

How is my karma related to the brush and inkstone?
Over and over I write and write.
The only one who really knows the reason
Is the Great Hero Buddha.
The wind has settled, the blossoms have fallen;
Birds sing, the mountains grow dark–
This is the wondrous power of Buddhism.
My legacy–
What will it be?
Flowers in spring,
The cuckoo in summer,
And the [...]

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The holiness of beauty

Today is our neighborhood’s annual community yard sale, situated in the park that divides the main street into north and south (or, more precisely, northwest and southeast).  My husband went out around nine a.m. to get a cup of coffee and browse the offerings; he came back around ten-thirty with a buttered bagel for me [...]

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A pause on the road

I may try to ignore it, but I feel the energies shifting around me.  It hasn’t really been summer for weeks.  We had three weeks of our worst heat and humidity at the beginning of August, after a comparatively mild summer; when it broke, driven away by tropical storms drifting up the Atlantic coast, I [...]

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RIP, Dr. George Tiller

If I should become pregnant, I would have an abortion. I had my share of parenthood helping to raise my stepdaughter; that’s as much motherhood as I need, want, and can handle. I don’t think abortion is ever a Good Thing, but sometimes it is the Only Right Thing, and therefore it should be legal, [...]

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Names, teachers, images, and the Work

I was baptized Methodist and confirmed Episcopalian.  I discovered paganism when The Spiral Dance was published and waffled back and forth between Christian and pagan for the better part of twenty years, until I began practicing a form of Hermetic magic that pointed me to Buddhism, and I took refuge.

I am an Anglican, a Druid, a witch, [...]

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The view from the hermit shack

There is a large chessboard laid out on the floor in the central court of the library where I work. The chess pieces are three or four feet high.  Two men are playing a game, while a couple of others stand watching.  I think this is for National Library Week.
I keep reading on our local weather [...]

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