Crossing Nebraska

Surely this spring will not be remembered as just any other spring. For just as the crocuses are teasing us with tender blossoms and their promise of new life, so it is that hardship and even death lurk just over the horizon. A global pandemic has already taken some of us, and it will take an unknown number more. Surely all can see that life will not be the same for quite some time, if ever. How strange it is to lose that which we’ve taken so for granted! I now look back with fondness at the simple joy of sitting in a coffee shop on a weekend morning. And I lament that we were too busy to take my wife out for a nice meal on her birthday this past weekend, the last weekend we could have done so before the restaurants were ordered closed. I also just happened to visit the library earlier this week to renew my card, only to be told that they’d be closing the following day. How strange it is to say goodbye to one thing after another that all seemed so commonplace as to hardly be wort...

Please forgive me for straying so far from the usual rhythm of my posts. It’s been a busy spring so far! Yes, there’s been the usual pruning, transplanting, brush removal and garden preparation. Unfortunately, though, I’ve also had to cut down a forty foot tall bald cypress tree whose roots had breached the sewer line, causing it to clog and begin to buckle. It was difficult work, and solemn, too – both for the fact that it was dangerous for me, and for the fact that I was ending the life of something just as it was beginning to bud again.       Cutting short the life of anything is not something that I relish doing. I hope the tree forgives me, likewise the animals and humans that enjoyed its beauty, shade, and shelter. I’ve managed to forgive myself, I think, both for cutting the tree down now and for not being mindful enough regarding my choice of where to plant it in the first place. We can never count on being forgiven, though – at least we Buddhi...

This post is the second of two exploring Uji , that fascicle of Dogen’s Shobogenzo known to many as Being-Time . 'Being-Time' - Part 1 introduced Dogen’s primary thesis, that we are time, by thinking of “it” from an all-encompassing, cosmological perspective and then scaling back down to that of our human experience. This follow-up post will examine some of the examples Dogen uses to convey the nature of this reality that we are time. The following passage is a great place to start: [Being-time] is the actualization of being. Heavenly beings like gods and celestials are being-time. All the things in the water and on land are being-time. The world of life and death and everything in them is being-time; it continually exists, actualizing itself in your present experience. Everything exists in the present within yourself. Continuous existence is not like the rain blown by the wind east and west. Continuous existence is the entire world acting through itself. Consider ...