Blog

Last night the moon was brilliant and huge over my little back yard. I have a lavishly planted garden with a large elderberry bush in the center. Last year she yielded pounds of purple/black berries which a friend and I ...
Read More

As we set intentions for the new year, it can be a time for reflection as well. 2020 was surely one of the most challenging and distressing years for many of us. A global pandemic with loss of jobs and ...
Read More

The strangest of times. We are 'sheltering in place', only leaving our homes to buy food and medicine. We are allowed to walk outside while keeping a distance from our fellow humans. We live on Zoom calls and Face Time ...
Read More

This morning, my dog sitter dropped off Felix after he spent the day and night  with him. My dog sitter is a 60 something gay man who lets Felix get on the couch and sleep on his bed. Felix always ...
Read More

As we approach the nadir of the winter solstice, our days in the Northwest are overcast, rainy and gray. It's dark by 4 in the afternoon. Trees are bare of leaves, the garden plants are hoarding their nutrients underground. My ...
Read More

Recently, I attended a silent retreat with nuns from California. During the retreat they educated us about the dilemma of bhikkhuni ordination, which has been denied them by the Vipassana forest elders in Thailand. An Ajahn in Australia ordained them ...
Read More

When I got the news that my brother was dead, I was in my midwifery clinic. Another brother called to tell me and when I asked how, he responded, 'suicide'. All the years we had watched him falter and fall ...
Read More

When we sit down to meditate, we have an opportunity to observe what is actually going in our bodies. As the mind begins to quiet down, we can start to see that we are uncomfortable. Our hips ache. A knee ...
Read More

This New Year, I traveled to the Big Bear Retreat Center in SoCal. It's a meditation center 7000 feet up in the mountains about 2 hours outside Los Angeles. I was there to cook with my friend Jessica, a master ...
Read More

Our lives are busy. We run from one activity to another. Traffic is  clogged, our workmates are sometimes a great challenge, the world around us seems to be falling apart. The daily news cycle brings worrisome news of disasters and ...
Read More