Crossing Nebraska

  Have you ever been walking in the woods, looking around at the trees and the sun filtering through them, perhaps admiring the subtle changes in flora that the varying light and moisture and soil conditions have given rise to, when suddenly you realize that you can’t make out the trail anymore? You peer intently at the forest floor up ahead, but the trail seems to have completely disappeared. You turn around and you’re met with the same! Where did the trail go? You’re heart begins to beat faster. You’re lost!   In a way, I hope that you’ve had such an experience. For one thing, it gives us a much needed lesson in watching for such things in the future. Mostly, though, it teaches us something primal about ourselves. How do we respond when we’re suddenly immersed in “wilderness”? Do we become fearful? Is it exhilarating? Do we have confidence in our ability to find our way, or do we find ourselves on the verge of panic? I’ve spent a fair amount of time up in the mountains...

   Kannon is the Japanese name for Avalokiteshvara, the Boddhisattva of Compassion. No doubt you’ve seen a representation of him or her (depictions of both genders exist). Perhaps she has a dozen heads. Perhaps he has an eye in the palm of each of a multitude of hands. These physical attributes are intended to depict a willingness and ability to help alleviate the suffering of the world. In fact, Avalokiteshvara is a Sanskrit name variously translated as “Lord Who Looks Down” or “He Who Hears the Cries of the World” (Schuhmacher & Woerner, 1994). Avalokiteshvara at the St. Louis Art Museum Kannon is also the title of one of the fascicles in Dogen Zenji’s Shobogenzo . In it Dogen speaks of the awesome and mysterious abilities of this revered being, and of our difficulty in understanding and expressing how these abilities might be used. In fact, we can learn a great deal about Avalokiteshvara, Zen, and the nature of knowledge itself by wading into this dense work. In addi...

This post is adapted from one I wrote some years ago entitled Tending Horses as the World Warms . I wrote that one in response to the continued denial of climate change by so many in the United States, denial that keeps us from taking action to mitigate impending disaster even as massive climate change-related events threaten lives and property all over the world like never before. Since then we’ve witnessed widespread recalcitrant denial in the face of a deadly pandemic, denial that's made our nation’s suffering and death even worse. It seems that, to our detriment, we just can’t seem to agree on some very fundamental aspects of the reality in which we live. We become attached to the stories we tell ourselves about the way the world is, and we have a difficult time letting them go. Until we’re forced to, that is.    Why do we have this tendency to stay lost in our stories even when they no longer fit the reality in which we live? Is it because we have so much psychic energy...