Crossing Nebraska

Regular readers might recall that my partner is a Christian minister. As such, we often find ourselves discussing whatever Bible passages she might be reflecting on for an upcoming sermon. This past week the lectionary included a reading from the Gospel according to Luke. When she asked me what I thought of it, I immediately saw its abundant potential for initiating Buddhist/Christian dialogue. The passage is Luke 12:32-38. I’ll quote it in its entirety before reflecting upon it further: 32  “Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. 33  Sell your possessions, and give alms. Make purses for yourselves that do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. 34  For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. 35  “Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit; 36  be like those who are waiting for their master to return from the wedding banquet, so t...

About a year ago I did a couple of posts focusing on the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi – Can Wabi-Sabi Save the World? & Envisioning a Wabi-Sabi World . I’ll leave it to the interested reader to check those out further, but what is salient to this present post is the meaning of the word wabi . English words frequently associated with wabi are: quietness, solitude, simplicity, and poverty (Iwamoto, 2008; Munsterberg, 1957; Suzuki, 1959). I bring this up in this current context because my experience of this Live Below the Line challenge has, in fact, been very wabi . It has fostered introspection, contemplation, and a deep spiritual appreciation of something that we normally take for granted – the food that we eat.       I wonder, however, if perhaps my previous two posts might have seemed to veer towards the romantic – making extreme poverty seem like a blessed nudge toward deeper spiritual understanding rather than the dire hardship that it is. Indee...

We’re awash in stuff, very little of which is actually necessary for the enjoyment of life. Simply consider how the size of the average home has increased over the years, without a corresponding increase in our happiness, and yet we still find the need for off-site storage in which to house whatever won’t fit in our basements, attics, and garages. It would be nice if the only downside of this glut of stuff was that it clutters up our lives, but that’s not the case at all. The massive amounts of fossil fuel used to manufacture, ship, maintain, and ultimately dispose of all of this stuff has the earth’s atmosphere so laden with carbon dioxide that global climate change now jeopardizes our very survival and that of all living beings. Weathered front porch Where do we go from here? Your response to this question will depend on your worldview, your faith in the advancement of technology, and your assessment of the magnitude of the problem. Some people are still in denial regarding the reali...

Illustration by Ed Young Can what save the world? Wabi-sabi. You know…, that Japanese aesthetic sense kind of thing. Actually, I don’t believe I’d ever even heard of wabi-sabi until a couple of years ago when I was introduced to the concept by a children’s story about a cat named Wabi Sabi who was trying like the dickens to figure out the meaning of his name. Of course, the premise of the story relates precisely to the fact that the wabi-sabi aesthetic is quite difficult to define. We just sort of know it when we see it – as soon as we know what we’re looking for, that is! Ah, but are we going to let the difficulty of defining a concept stand in the way of us utilizing it to save the world? For the children, for the kittens, for Wabi Sabi’s sake we must try! Let’s begin with a few recent definitions put forth by various authors: “Wabi-sabi is the quintessential Japanese aesthetic. It is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. It is a beauty of things mod...