Author: Michael Stevens

What We Fail to See

Carol Rim in the Painted Hills unit of John Day Fossil Beds National Monument is one of our pilgrimage places. We travel there annually and hike the trail as spring wildflowers begin to show...

Scale House

A scale house is a shelter for an outside scale apparatus that weighs and/or measures various things for a railroad, farm, or other freight business. More common in ages past, one can still see...

When Pain Hurts

I have experienced my share of surgeries, mostly of the orthopedic variety. Every time I was rolled into a surgical center and allowed the doctors to cut me open, I felt like I was...

Liturgy of Randomness

The varied thrush(Ixoreus naevius) is a very striking robin-sized bird. Its colorful plumage is orange, blue-gray, and black, with an obvious ‘necklace’ of dark gray to black encircling its neck. It inhabits western areas...

Delusion Blooms As Wisdom

Bless my mind to turn toward the dharma. Bless my dharma practice to follow the path. Bless my path to be free of delusion. Bless me that all delusion be transformed into wisdom. The...

Ceasing to Normalize Toxicity

In the First Noble Truth, the truth of suffering, Buddha taught the core issue from which all our dissatisfaction arises is the suffering of conditioned awareness. This is the kind of suffering we rarely...

Sustaining Practice

One of the ways we honor our spiritual tradition is in how we sustain our practice over time. If we are sincerely interested in awakening to the truth mirrored to us by our lineage...

Natural Shape-Shifting

A dear sangha member passed away recently. He simply faded away with ease and demonstrated the face of death to remind us of the tenuous nature of existence. Everyone will wear this face at...

Remembering the Natural Mind

I am writing this on new year’s day according to the Tibetan lunar calendar. It is called Losar and is celebrated for fifteen days during which all activities are thought to be multiplied by...

Esoteric to Practical

Sometimes what we call Buddhism seems so esoteric that we wonder about practical application. From an absolute point of view, we absolutely know how to apply the teachings. We simply love. We listen to...