I haven’t posted anything about the Covid-19 pandemic other than one brief update at its onset. Now that our lockdown has spanned a full year, I should probably document how it’s been.

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So we have a global health crisis on our hands. The COVID-19 virus has eluded even our harshest attempts at containment, and there’s no prospect of either a preventative or treatment, other than for associated diagnoses such as pneumonia.

With an unknown number of infectious but asymptomatic carriers wandering around, Inna and I have taken the ( Read more... )

After sixteen years of vipassana meditation practice, I’ve heard a sizable swath of the dhamma. So it’s not very often that I run into something new: an idea that provides an exciting ah-ha satori moment of discovery, which happened so often when the teachings were new to me. So it’s a precious surprise when I find a new nugget of wisdom.

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Inna wanted to go to the 2017 Meetin national celebration in Seattle in September, and it made sense to piggyback that with a detour up to Victoria BC to visit my brother, since-after my mother’s death-he’s unlikely to be coming east any longer.

The logistics were enough of a nightmare that we actually needed a travel agent’s services. Inna and ( Read more... )

Renewing another connection with my past lives, a couple weeks ago I made an appearance at one of the annual DargonZine Summits.

DargonZine is the amateur writing zine I founded and ran from 1984-1989 (then called FSFnet) and 1994-2006. In continuous publication for thirty-two years, it’s by far the longest-running electronic magazine on the ( Read more... )

Think you’re gonna find Buddhism in Steeler Nation? I didn’t. When I moved to Pittsburgh, I didn’t expect to find many meditation centers; certainly not the diversity and convenience that I had enjoyed back in Boston.

I easily found Pittsburgh Shambhala, but Tibetan Buddhism is radically different than the Theravada Buddhism that speaks to me, and ( Read more... )

Because they only last 45 minutes, summers in New England can get pretty busy. Take the past couple weeks, for example. Here’s a day-by-day account of the past 14 days…
17 Wed After a regular day at work, I received a call from someone ( Read more... )

It wasn’t a New Years resolution, but when I came home from the IMS New Years meditation retreat, I launched a major social initiative, making an effort to reach out and establish meaningful connections with people and putting an end to a lengthy period of self-imposed isolation.

As you’d expect from an off-the chart Myers-Briggs ‘J’, I’ve ( Read more... )

I find my relationship to anger has changed pretty radically, thanks to an insight that you might not think is all that remarkable.

Perhaps it seems consequential to me because of the way I used to relate to anger. After surviving the usual angst-filled years of adolescence, as a young adult I pretty much exiled anger from my emotional repertoire. ( Read more... )

As I step away from some of my older hobbies, it looks like kyūdō-the Japanese martial art of archery-might be a new activity that arises to take their place.

People who know me will realize that when I commit to an interest, I ( Read more... )