May 2016 – Julie A. Nelson

When the responsibilities seem like too much…

Part 2 of a reflection on birth, death, and the Linji Lu

messy desk

Master Linji said, “Once there is right view, birth and death can no longer touch you……You should … achieve the state of having nothing to do…” At some moments, it is the responsibilities that come with birth that seem overwhelming to me. I was born a human, and feel a responsibility to do something worthwhile with that. What Linji describes sure doesn’t sound like my life! I live by to-do lists, crossing out work and personal tasks as they get accomplished. I feel myself racing ahead, as if log-rolling, trying to get somewhere. I’m doing and doing to keep that log spinning forward, and myself upright. Continue reading “When the responsibilities seem like too much…”

Stopping the Mind

Part 1 of a reflection on birth, death, and the Linji Lu

“Once there is right view, birth and death can no longer touch you. At that point, whether you stay or go, you do so as a free person…You should stop the mind that is always wandering around, running to the neighbor’s house to study Zen…[and] achieve the state of having nothing to do…”

–from the Linji Lu (The Record of Master Linji) Parts 3 and 11, translated by Thich Nhat Hanh in Nothing to Do, Nowhere to Go.

The phrase “being free from birth and death” crops up in many Zen teachings. I first took “birth” and “death” as referring to the bookends of a human lifespan. I tended to associate “being free” from them with metaphysical doctrines that tell us that the cycle of being born and dying is a bad thing. Drawing from Hindu metaphysics, some interpretations of Buddhism tell us that the goal of spiritual practice is to extinguish such reincarnation.

That never felt right to me. Continue reading “Stopping the Mind”

Buddhism, Climate Change, and Economics: Video

On February 18, 2016, I had the honor to be invited to speak, along with Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi, at a colloquium on “Buddhist Responses to Climate Change” at Harvard Divinity School. This is the video of the event. My talk was titled “Beyond ‘Small is Beautiful’: Buddhism and the Economics of Climate Change.”

Neither young nor old

…some reflections on transitions and transience

dandelions small

When I was young, I thought of age as something “out there” somewhere. I had my healthy, active, young self, with all the things it could do. And I knew that some day, if I were lucky enough to live so long, I would have an old self, with a different set of possible activities. I pictured her with snow-white hair, sitting in a chair. That didn’t seem so bad.

But what I hadn’t foreseen was the nickel-and-diming process of loss that marks the transition between being young and being old. This was for some reason a surprise. Continue reading “Neither young nor old”

Love and Resentment

I wish that, as a child, someone had told me that it’s OK to feel love and resentment at the same time.

Mom and me 1985 for web — Mom and me in 1985

I was a child caregiver, my mother having developed rheumatoid arthritis when she was in her twenties. I can barely remember her driving our old red-and-white station wagon. My older siblings can remember her riding a bicycle. Continue reading “Love and Resentment”

Feminine and Strong

“Muliebrity”: An important word to add to your vocabulary.


Source: The Daily Mail

Muliebrity. I bet that’s a word you don’t know.

Our minds like to put things in easy categories, and gender is, for most of us, a very handy way of defining these categories. We tend to perceive “strong” as going in the “masculine” pile. A word like “soft,” on the other hand, goes in the “feminine” one. Continue reading “Feminine and Strong”