Sangha friends, Kath Mitchell, Mark Schrader and Chani Grieve are facilitating a heart-felt Wangapeka community exploration of ethics called,"Refraining from Harm, Supporting All Life". They have invited a number of us older yogis of life and living to participate by way of pre-recorded zoom conversations or presentations. As I contemplated these themes in the context … Continue reading What We Love
Please click here to download or read a fully formatted PDF version. It's been raining all week. A weather system of blocking highs and small intense lows is funnelling hot humid equatorial air down to Aotearoa, and so we sit on our damp, misty deck, having breakfast, listening to a morning chorus of invisible birds, … Continue reading What To Do When It All Seems Too Much
My Dear FriendsSitting here at Orgyen, cancer and covid within and around me; a natural retreat – a blessing. I find myself contemplating life and death and dharma in an expansive field of memories; reviewing and reflecting. Some thoughts have emerged which I would like to share with you in the form of a poem. … Continue reading This Wild and Wonderful Truth
In the beginningless, endless holomoving, – process congealing as form, and form resolving as process – mystery emerged, sperming and egging fused, thus, he-to-be, or should we say, be-to-he, and she; mother-ness and son-ness entwined, found themselves dancing their living ways unfolding into they knew not what or where. Later, he took clues from otherness … Continue reading This Dancing of Living
Dear Friends I am writing from a place I never seriously imagined before these Covid-19 times. The normalisation of social distancing, lock-down, unrequested retreat, and a prolonged plunge – an eternal diving – deep into the unknowing and unknowable not-knowingness of everything taken for granted; this interweaving of worlds, revealed ever more starkly as fragile, … Continue reading A Sheaf of Poems
This post is dedicated to the Australian fire fighters, medical responders, comforters, supporters and helpers – bodhisattvas of all kinds – who are courageously rising to the occasion, regardless of risk, to help and succour beings in need. I realise that many of you are far too engaged with immediate necessities to find these mere … Continue reading Fire and Living Dharma
Every human choice bows like a slave in submission to the absolute's creative will, yet this does not deprive us of freedom, or of taking responsibility for what we choose. ~ Rumi ~ (Translated by Coleman Barks in, "The Soul of Rumi.") Hearing the news of the Christchurch mosque shootings, I sit stunned with sadness … Continue reading We Are In This Together
Profound teaching (dharma) is revealed in the fullness of our living. At Orgyen Hermitage, we have shelves of books from various schools and traditions. Each of them grew from a view of the world. Each of them conveys a particular angle or breadth of understanding. Many of them seem to be saying very similar things. … Continue reading Primordial Middle Way
A philosophy of contemplative science can easily become a dense entanglement of language and concepts whereas a poetry of contemplative science can invite fresh ways of seeing. In this prose/verse I try to illumine some of my thinking about cognition and knowing. May the timbre of these thoughts quicken the edges and membranes we share. … Continue reading Edges, Membranes and Mystery
Science developed from the human compulsion to explain things, either to another or to oneself. Perhaps this could be seen as the early stirrings of wisdom, prājña – an inherent inquisitiveness and curiosity of one's own mind (one's own field of knowing) that is both precise and playful at the same time. The compulsion to … Continue reading Dancing Stillness and The Poetry of Science
Green Dharma Treasury 