Quest Blog
Day Six
2014-05-26 DAY SIX
Read MoreThe Trouble with Donald Sterling
2014-05-01 The trouble with Donald Sterling is that he’s an…well, for the sake of public consumption, let’s just say that he’s a jerk. A racist jerk who said appalling things. I hope his girlfriend dumps him. But the question is what his jerkiness means to those of us who have the good fortune not to…
Read MoreCarrots, Sticks, Paddles, and Autopilot
2014-05-01 Buddhist wisdom says there are three ways we naturally approach anything—desire, aversion, or indifference. For the sake of convenience, I call them, “yum!” “eeeeewwww” and “zzzzzz.” I see a slice of cheese cake. “Yum!” I love cheese cake. So, I desire the slice of cheese cake. I grab it. Five hundred calories down my…
Read MoreWonder
2014-05-05 Tonight I am thinking of how preciously fragile and how fragilely precious life is and how we (even those of us who know this from experience) walk down the street on a spring day with buds and birds and bright green leaves against a blue sky like it is not a miracle that our…
Read MoreGive me the heart
2014-05-06 I have spent the past few days saturated in extraordinary music, delicious food, dear friends – and almost completely off of the grid, just checking in from time to time with the office and the work phone to keep disasters to a minimum. Today I return to the world of administration and e-mail, deadlines…
Read MoreSalvation Hits the Couch
2014-05-08 Buddhism had been known in the United States since the mid-Nineteenth Century, but really came into its own with the return of Pacific War vets who had spent some time in Japan. (The creation of Red China insured that Chinese Buddhism would not be generally available to the Western World for some time.) One…
Read MoreThose Who Came Before Us
2014-05-13 Life is busy as ever, one thing hurtling on into the next, and we are juggling so many different to-do lists at once. In the midst of that whirlwind, I experienced Mother’s Day this year as an opportunity to reflect, ever-so-momentarily, on lineage and the mystery of the past. I enjoyed seeing all the…
Read MorePulling Weeds
2014-04-09 I don’t know about where you are, but here in California we have hit the peak of Weed Season. A few days of long-awaited rain, a couple of days of sun, and the hills begin to turn gloriously green. So does my gravel driveway, and whole swaths of my yard where you are supposed…
Read MoreLet’s Agree to Agree on Subjectivity
2014-04-10 There ain’t no answer. There ain’t gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. That’s the answer. ~Gertrude Stein In last week’s post I looked at one way to smooth the waters between theists and non-theists, Pragmatism. Pragmatists say, if it works for you, it’s true. Now, I know that’s a…
Read MoreDecision Season
2014-04-15 “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, / And sorry I could not travel both / And be one traveler, long I stood / And looked down one as far as I could / To where it bent in the undergrowth….” It’s that time of year. Perhaps it is related to the blossoming of…
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