It’s been a week since I headed up the highway for my appointment with the Pacific at last Saturday’s Asilomar Plunge retreat. When I load up my flimsy suitcase; my papers, pens, electric plugs and machinery; my box of books; my well-traveled doubts and fears; when I load up the heavy cargo I say to myself: I’m too old for this.
And then I meet a room of half-made friends and kind strangers, none of us knowing quite how every twist and turn and bend has led us there, and we sit together in open silence and close confidence, setting aside the load, the questions, the judgments that distract and divide; when I end up emptied, with nothing more to carry home I say to myself: There is no other way to live.
I’ll never know the good, if any, that comes. What comes is not always good – not for everyone, every time. But for a shining moment, before the next wave arrives, I can leave a footprint. We all leave footprints.
In that spirit, here’s a direction for you to follow. There’s a giveaway of Hand Wash Cold this weekend at Angela DiGiovanni’s blog. I hope you’ll visit and take the gift that’s been left behind.
With love from Rilke to Rodin:
We never need to make our lives more difficult than they are, but of course we do. Then one day life itself rises up with an irrevocable force and we suddenly find that there is nothing we can do. Here is a message I received from Rose in Amsterdam not long ago. Since then, I’ve been 
Comparing our kids to one another is the most juvenile thing we grown ups can do. But amid all the recent 
My teacher Maezumi Roshi used the word so-called a lot. He used it before every word that really wasn’t what it stood for. (That’s every word.) It’s such an efficient way to point out the source of our confusion: confusing the way things really are with the mental artifice of words and concepts.
It was in February, a week before Maezumi Roshi’s birthday, only his 64th. I’d thought that I would leave him a little something behind before I raced back home, a poem or a line inscribed when inspiration arrived. Nothing arrived, and I hurriedly copied a story from a book I carried with me, a book of stories by William Maxwell called 
Sometimes I get a little pushback on the topic of Buddhism, particularly the subject of suffering. People say something like, “Gosh, all that talk about suffering! Aren’t you guys a bit over the top with all the suffering? That’s so negative.”
Some of the most profound truths come from the simplest minds and mouths.
Across this country, we are falling, falling, and there is only the sad shame of our undisguised limp.
