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Zen Mud

I’d planned to arrive in Japan with practically no social resources. I had some money, and my pack was heavy, but I hadn’t bothered to learn Japanese. I wanted to see what would happen. I arrived shaggy, hot, dizzy, and alone.

Trains, Planes, And Godhead

When I was in my teens and early twenties, I’d sometimes run out to meet the Burlington Northern trains as they made their slow progress through the Colorado town of Fort Collins.

Sunbeams

“Which foolish man was it who said love was simple?” she murmured. “Ah, yes, it was Rodolphe. But which Rodolphe?”

Leon Garfield

Sunbeams

Sometime in your life, hope that you might see one starved man, the look on his face when the bread finally arrives. Hope that you might have baked it or bought it or even kneaded it yourself. For that look on his face, for your meeting his eyes across a piece of bread, you might be willing to lose a lot, or suffer a lot, or die a little, even.

Daniel Berrigan

The Prayer Of The Body II

Compassionate Self-Care

A string of conflicted and limiting constructs, beliefs, and ideas has so dominated our awareness that it seems as if those ideas are real and nothing else exists. If we can dislodge and dismantle those disguised thought patterns, we can return our attention to the beauty and innocence of our life here.

The Prayer Of The Body

The Work Of Stephen R. Schwartz

By persistently asking where a feeling is being experienced, he helps distinguish between what is actually occurring in the body and the conditioning, the descriptions, the self-defeating ideas carried by the mind.

Every Grain Of Sand

The real teaching of the mandala has turned out to be not in its execution but in its . . . execution, its demise, and in how its creators responded to its death.

My Savior Jesus

Not Jesus on the cross / but Jesus the boy / by himself, shivering, gazing into the water, / his hand cupping his scrotum, / the puzzling extra organ / attached outside his body. / I could believe in this Jesus.

Sunbeams

Rather than earn money, it was Thoreau’s idea to reduce his wants so that he would not need to buy anything. As he went around town preaching this ingenious idea, the shopkeepers of Concord hoped he would drop dead.

Richard Armour

Sunbeams

Why 300,000 varieties of beetles? The great English geneticist J.B.S. Haldane was once cornered by a distinguished theologian who asked him what inferences one could draw, from a study of the created world, as to the nature of its Creator. Haldane answered, “An inordinate fondness for beetles.”

David Quammen