The Turquoise Dragon

Remembering Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche (1940-1987)

He was a short man with glasses and a penetrating smile, and a high, almost falsetto voice. He was enamored of Oxford English and taught elocution, after his own comical fashion. (Elocution lessons were given at one o’clock in the morning, before an audience of 400 laughing spectators.)

Harvest Moon

Portrait Of A Nursing Home

We all die, and most of us grow old, and for a certain inevitable number of us age brings its sisters: dependence, frailty, and a gut-wrenching perishability. Age is the last place and time most of us will inhabit, and the fact that age seems so foreign to most of us, as though cleft from the known world, is one of life’s sly tricks.

The Guru

Excerpted From Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism

People always come to the study of spirituality with some ideas already fixed in their minds of what it is they are going to get and how to deal with the person from whom they think they will get it. The very notion that we will get something from a guru — happiness, peace of mind, wisdom, whatever it is we seek — is one of the most difficult preconceptions of all.

The Short And Happy Life Of Spaghetti Johnson

He knew understanding was coming to him, like the answer to a riddle which has broken its anchor line in the unconscious and is floating up toward consciousness, becoming more illuminated by the light of consciousness.

What Will Be

I should have known Brian would leave me. I should have felt his restlessness and uncertainty. Instead, I woke up four Mondays ago with only a tattered note for a companion. I was abandoned, surprised, and angry. What good were my powers if I couldn’t predict my own life?

Selected Poems