Monkey Mind

In the Christian calendar, at least some forms of it, the 6th of January, is the Feast of the Epiphany, or Three King's Day.

I suggest idleness, mixed up, sure, but at heart pure idleness, is a treasure at the center of all things.

I find Easter is a full body response to the invitation to not turn away from any part, until even death is just a part of the mystery.

While I never met James Hillman, since university, I’ve read a lot of his work. And I consider him one of my important guides.

The more armor we lay down, the more capable we are of letting these times open us, humble us, and help us become wiser and more brave.

At Patheos Buddhist, James Ford writes his blog Monkey Mind.

We are meaning-making creatures, so those stories arise endlessly, but we don't have to be ruled by them. We tend to want the stories to all stop so we can be free from them, but that isn't what Zen offers us. That freedom, freedom from, is conditional, so it is very fragile. Zen offers us something much more useful and profound: freedom in. Freedom right here, in the midst of all of our stories, wants, and heartaches. Studying the Dharma can be a powerful way to experience that freedom, just remember that the Dharma isn't in the text, it's in you.

The audience for this book spans the communities most defined by the current liminal moment in Western religion. The rapidly growing spiritual but not religious population that has left institutional faith but has not abandoned the hunger for depth, meaning, and practice, former Christians and Jews who are drawn to contemplative and meditative traditions but want a rigorous and honest introduction rather than a superficial one, secular mindfulness practitioners who sense that their practice is pointing toward something larger and want to understand what that might be, university students in religious studies and philosophy encountering Zen for the first time, and the broader intellectual readership drawn to writers who take the post-religious transition seriously without either celebrating or lamenting it are all natural readers for this work.

Today is the Fourth of July. The 250th anniversary of the founding of what would become the American Republic.

(This article is by my friend Ken Ireland. Ken is an old Zen hand. A few years back one of his teachers suggested he begin formally training for authorization as a teacher, but declined the offer.