Crossing Nebraska

One of the highlights of my work is that it allows me to meet people from all over the world right here in my hometown. A few days a month I help out with an organization that provides assistance to immigrants and refugees who are new to the St. Louis area. I try not to pry or ask unnecessary questions, but often enough I become privy to stories of great pain and hardship. Youths from Sudan and Somalia, women from war-torn Congo, victims of Bhutanese and Bosnian ethnic cleansing, endangered translators from Iraq and Afghanistan – I feel honored and privileged to be a part of their lives. Hopefully I’m able to provide some measure of hope and healing to them after having experienced far too much of the darkness of this troubled and chaotic world. The other day I was speaking with a young man whose entire family still remains back in one of the cities most devastated by the Syrian civil war. He fled there without many of the documents that all of us here in the U.S. woul...

Some years ago, I was challenged to explain climate change in fewer than 200 words. As both a writer and lover of all life on this earth I found the challenge intriguing. Here’s what I came up with: Plants “breathe in” carbon dioxide and “breathe out” oxygen. The carbon becomes part of the plant’s new growth and the oxygen benefits animal life as well. Over the course of millions of years, the accumulation of dead vegetation became the coal, oil, and natural gas fields that now fuel our modern lifestyle. Burning these “fossil fuels” takes oxygen out of today’s atmosphere and puts carbon dioxide back in. In just one hundred years we have largely reversed a natural process that was millions of years in the making. Carbon dioxide is a “ greenhouse gas ”. It traps heat in the atmosphere and causes the earth’s average temperature to rise. This warming has taken place so quickly that it is disrupting weather patterns and making storms and droughts more severe. It is changing regional clim...

Compassion and gratitude are well-known fruits of spiritual practice – arising spontaneously as a result of our increasing awareness of the nature of our existence, its fleetingness, and the mystery of life itself. But compassion and gratitude are also like partners in a dance – with awareness of the compassion that has been shown to us inspiring gratitude, and gratitude for the sufficiency that we are blessed with inspiring us to act with greater compassion in the world. At times this dance of compassion and gratitude is engaged in with such grace that it is difficult to determine where one ends and the other begins. At other times, however, toes are stepped on or one of the partners trips and falls.   For example, have you ever been in a situation in which someone wants to show their gratitude to the group by bringing in a box of donuts or something only to find that everyone is either counting their calories or watching their cholesterol or boycotting ABC Donuts for not s...

By now all of us Buddhists have weathered well over a month of what is commonly referred to as “the holiday season.” It starts with the dominant culture storming out of the gate the moment the Halloween decorations come down and gathers momentum as Thanksgiving approaches. By Black Friday the sprint has begun. Whatever pace each individual can muster is then maintained by whatever means necessary until everyone collectively collapses into a physically and emotionally exhausted and overindulged pile of debt-burdened human wreckage on New Year’s Day! Jizo statue How are you holding up so far? Have you gone stir-crazy yet from hearing Christmas carols nearly everywhere you go? Is the ubiquity of wasteful and distasteful lawn art finally wearing you down? Has workplace pressure to pony up for an offering of useless crap for the “white elephant” gift exchange put your principles of simplicity to the test? And how many times have you lamented to friends and family the ...

The election season is a tough one for us Buddhists here in the United States – especially when it involves the presidency. Talk about putting our practice to the test! Is there any better time to see how well we can abide in equanimity, or how sincerely we take the practice of loving-kindness? Is there any better time to test the limits of our compassion? You’ve seen the ads. You’ve heard the quotes. Indeed, it’s a tough season – and one that we’d just as soon not have to contend with!     We Buddhists tend to shy away from conflict – generally speaking, anyway.   We much prefer staying focused on living peaceful daily lives – diligently attending to the spiritual path laid out before us – over getting involved with any of the “messiness” of conflict. So maybe the toughest thing about all of this election season nonsense is how it draws us into such unwanted conflict and forces us to deal with all of the “messiness” of life – thereby nudging us toward the se...

Where does the time go? It’s been all year long so far that I’ve been exploring the Brahma-viharas , the “Four Sublime Abodes” of compassion, equanimity, sympathetic joy, and loving-kindness (Sangharakshita, 1980, p. 141), and their respective “near enemies” of pity, indifference, comparison, and attachment (Kornfield, 1993, p. 190). Nonetheless, I think we’re ready to bring this series to a close. If you’ve had the opportunity to read the previous posts exploring attachment (all four of them!) you’ll know that it’s quite the near enemy of loving-kindness , the usual English translation equivalent of the Sanskrit word, metta , which is referred to by Rahula (1959) as the extension of “unlimited, universal love and good-will… to all living beings without any kind of discrimination, ‘just as a mother loves her only child’” (p. 75). The Buddha Calms An Enraged Elephant With Loving-Kindness Clearly, the universal and non-discriminatory nature of metta as spoken of here reveal...