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Spirituality
The Feeding
Some leeches have two jaws. Others have three. Some have teeth on their tongues. There are protective leeches who hover over their eggs, and leeches who carry their newborns in pouches like tiny kangaroos.
June 2026
The Good End of Pleasant Street
When our landlords came by to introduce themselves, they stood beside a shelf of our books on how to avoid suffering: “Develop a mind that clings to nothing,” said the Buddhist Diamond Sutra; Be Here Now, read the spine of a Ram Dass book. Dan was a general contractor and wore a flat cap and a half grin. Or a sneer. I wasn’t sure which.
June 2026
Practice Losing Everything
I challenged my students to interrogate their own religious inheritance, and I spoke frequently of the “ethics of faith.” I asked whether they’d arrived at faith through honest inquiry or by suppressing their doubts.
April 2026
Selected Poems
It all reminds me of that moment when you take off your sunglasses / after a long drive and realize it’s earlier / and lighter out than you had accounted for.
March 2026The Danish
Then I felt a small admiration for the Man With The Danish, who hoped to give away excess food rather than throw it in the trash. Maybe I should have accepted the Danish, although I didn’t want it. By turning it down resentfully, I might have discouraged him from ever offering food to a stranger again. But there’s no time to think when someone thrusts a sudden dessert in your face.
January 2026
The Body Eats
I want to keep eating. I want life. More life. I want to turn from the simple facts of my existence to consider bigger mysteries, to fret about what might be, to remember what is no more. I want to imagine something other than this food in front of me, already a commodity on some assembly line, moving away from me.
January 2026
Tassajara
The abbot declared your beloved pit bull had Buddha nature, / so you carried her sixty muscled pounds to the mountain // monastery, where we sat sesshin and she ate wool socks, / a box of chocolates, and eight pages of Robert Aitken.
January 2026The Patron Saint of Suburban Foxes
. . . Her own orange, though, deepens / in shadow to red, like condensed autumn, and makes her almost invisible / against the brick she edges past / on her burnt-matchstick legs
December 2025
Silent Disco
“We’re here to have fun,” she says. “Be the full expression of yourselves! You can go anywhere or stay right here—wherever the music moves you.”
October 2025
The Cat Who Woke Me Up
The hierarchy that places humans above cats has broken down. I know, in a way I once didn’t, that cats and dogs and birds and bees and every living creature are conscious in a way that’s too hard for most of us to acknowledge. We’re all a bunch of narcissists who imagine that no life-form is quite as appealing as this one we call human. We’re unable to share the stage unless the animals are the supporting players.
October 2025
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