May featured two interesting events on strangely divergent ends of the spiritual spectrum.

( Read more... )

This year’s birthday wasn’t the greatest piece of work I’ve ever experienced. Woke up with a sore throat that presaged the cold I’d deal with for the following weeks. Made the usual pilgrimage to Foxwoods (where I lost for the first time in three years) and visit to Purgatory Chasm, which was cold and grey but pleasant enough, then a big ( Read more... )

Another year, another CIMC “sandwich retreat”. Here’s a report from my third annual nine-day urban “integration retreat”. If you’re absolutely bored out of your skull, here are links to the 2008 and 2007 retreats.

Saturday I arrived early and was offered my choice of yogi jobsHooray! I picked the same thing as last year: end-of-day cleanup, which ( Read more... )

So I just attended my first Buddhist retreat. Here’s a report. It’s long. Perhaps that’s a testament to how much I got out of it.

As retreats go, it was kind of different. Most are “residential retreats”, meaning you go live somewhere for the week or month or whatever, and you stay there the whole time. CIMC is a non-residential, urban center, so ( Read more... )