Tag Archives: pema chodron
If I knew you were comin’
Buddhist teachings are reliably wise, sometimes cryptic and occasionally delightful. The latter category includes a practice I recently encountered that suggests my new year is going to include a lot of … cake. “Feeding the ghosts,” as described by the venerable Pema Chodron in Start Where You Are, is one of those counterintuitive practices typical of […]
The stories we tell
I sometimes find myself unable to sleep at night. Not right when I go to bed, but long after, at 2 or 3 a.m., those hours during which “alone” has a kind of sharp resonance banished by daylight. I may be completely comfortable. There may be a cool breeze blowing in my bedroom windows, carrying […]
If I knew you were comin’
Buddhist teachings are reliably wise, sometimes cryptic and occasionally delightful. The latter category includes a practice I recently encountered that suggests my new year is going to include a lot of … cake. “Feeding the ghosts,” as described by the venerable Pema Chodron in Start Where You Are, is one of those counterintuitive practices typical of […]
Surviving our dumbness
I have been marveling at my potted Norfolk pine, which I relocate outdoors from my sunroom each summer. I was forgetful this year, and placed it on my unshaded deck without remembering that it needs a gentle transition to the sizzling Colorado sun. Before I realized my error nearly two days later — a plodding […]
Dismount
I had one of those conversations with my best friend yesterday, the kind that turn south and end in stony silence on her side and frustration on mine. My friend eats a lot of eggs, always throwing out the yolks, which she dislikes, rather than feeding them to her dog or finding some other use […]
Remember
Your worries tie knots in my thoughts; my broken heart beats ragged in your chest. I have felt your anger, you have felt my grief. In Colorado or Timbuktu, Paris or Brussels, we are strangers and not, bound to one another by a thousand kinds of suffering and one mysterious love.
Beautiful
I have never used a blog post to publicize a YouTube video, and with more than 7.5 million views, the video below scarcely needs my help. That said, it’s impossible for too many people — especially Westerners — to see this short film by Chicago high school student Shea Glover. And if you’ve already seen it, it won’t […]
The stories we tell
I sometimes find myself unable to sleep at night. Not right when I go to bed, but long after, at 2 or 3 a.m., those hours during which “alone” has a kind of sharp resonance banished by daylight. I may be completely comfortable. There may be a cool breeze blowing in my bedroom windows, carrying […]
The most important thing
Last week, I hiked the Incline — a lung-busting, leg-burning mountain staircase — and felt, well, pretty much like barfing. Not that unusual, granted; the Incline is tough under the best of conditions, and the morning was already too warm. It’s, true, too, that my Philosophy of Hard Effort is to push until I butt briefly against the toss-your-cookies threshold, dial back a notch […]
Becoming Tigger
This morning, during my usual run through the Garden of the Gods — a glorious, other-worldly landscape a scant half-mile from my doorstep — I slowed just long enough to wave at the snowy summit of Pikes Peak. I waved at a mountain. I was — well — glad to see it, though I see it […]
Meditatio Ephemera 