Category: Dharma Journal

I am waiting in the checkout line at Costco which is some of my best meditation and reflection time. I have an opportunity to view a sea of facial expressions and body language rippling...

TMI—the abbreviation for ‘“too much information” is an apt descriptor for the affliction many experience in studying Vajrayana Buddhism. This tradition seems so complex with all the three of these, the four of those,...

Many years ago I wrote a book entitled, An Idiot and His Companions. It was compilation of essays about people and experiences that had a profound influence on my life. The book never saw...

As we have explored many times, the bardos are those “in between” moments of awareness. Traditionally there are six bardos: birth, this life, the dying process, the space between death and rebirth, sleep/dreams, and...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...