Why is a veggie burger better than nirvana?
Did you hear about the Buddhist coroner who got fired? In the space for “cause of death” on the certificates she had to fill out, she kept writing in “birth.”
I’ve been musing lately about the relationship between Zen practice and humor. Continue reading “Wise. Cracks.”
To stop the economy’s advance towards greed and destruction, we need new metaphors and images that inspire a radically different alternative.
What do you see in your mind’s eye when you hear the word ‘care’? If you search for images on Google you’ll get lots of pictures of white mothers snuggling with their babies. You’ll also see photos of a female caregiver’s hands intertwined with those of an elderly person, and images that show two hands holding a young plant that symbolizes Earth.
If you Google ‘economics’ instead, you’ll get lots of pictures of piles of cash, or representations of math and data. Continue reading “Husbandry: a feminist reclamation of men’s responsibility to care”
We get to choose between being self-interested, on the one hand, or putting the needs of others first, on the other, right? Or maybe not.
I grew up, as a Lutheran preacher’s kid, hearing a lot of negative things about self-interest, selfishness, and self-centeredness. And I heard a lot of positive things about putting others ahead of oneself, altruism, and even self-sacrifice. When I got older and went to college, I was exposed to a different view. Continue reading “Self-Interest and Other-Interest”
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”
…some reflections on transitions and transience
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”
I wish that, as a child, someone had told me that it’s OK to feel love and resentment at the same time.
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”
“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”
So here’s a riddle for you: A man and his son are in a car accident…
So here’s a riddle for you:
A man and his son are in a car accident. The man is killed instantly, and his son is rushed to the local hospital. The emergency room personnel see that the boy will need to be operated on, and call for the surgeon. But, looking at the boy, the surgeon says, “I can’t operate. That’s my son!” How can this be? Continue reading “Surgeon and ?”
How is a cupcake like a gorilla?
Credit: Getty Images
We humans like to think in tidy, distinct categories. Things are different, or they are the same. If they are different, we put them in different piles. If the same, we lump them into the same pile. Life is easy.
Or maybe life isn’t easy. Life can be tough, when we have problems in our relationships. Life can be tough, when we think of big issues like the economy, or climate change. Continue reading “Mixing It Up: Introduction”
Thoughts on economics, ethics, gender, climate, language, Zen, and a few other things…
Dear friends,
I’ve just started a blog that has the tagline, “Thoughts on economics, ethics, gender, climate, language, Zen, and a few other things…” What in the world could those things have in common?? Continue reading “Why this blog?”
Julie A. Nelson 