God Beauty Perfection Love :: Synonyms
To a practitioner of Tendai (Buddhism), everything is wonderful. ~ Saiko
It’s tempting to make a big thing of this, tie it into other spiritual work, but it’s just a simple technique for overcoming insomnia I’ve shared with dozens of people. No drugs. No warm milk. No visits to a sleep clinic. There are side benefits, and it’s based on an […]
I was digging into Stephen Mitchell‘s The Second Book of the Dao one day back in January (over a lovely Red Snapper Soup @ Granville Island) when a passage in the second chapter inspired the following poem. Before and After Before sorrow, longing Before longing, anger Before anger, pain Before […]
Yesterday the people of The United States of America marked Memorial Day. It’s a day of baseball, hot dogs and apple pie, of families and communities gathering to celebrate the arrival of summer. It’s a day of flags and bunting and red, white & blue and national pride, and a […]
Mmmmm… a day of cloudy wet so a retreat into a tub of hot water with salsa & tortilla chips and a good book about one of my favourite subjects, Stephen Mitchell’s The Second Book of the Tao (Dao, Tao, same thing, same pronunciation: Dao). Hmmmm… the liner notes of […]
My first mistake today was climbing into the bathtub and picking up the May 31st, 2010 edition of Canada’s weekly news magazine, Macleans, rather than the copy of Stephen Mitchell’s The Second Book of the Tao, in which I’d thought to have a nice, long spiritual soak along with the […]
The year 2000 was an extraordinary one. It was the year I wrote and produced my play, Prisoners, which in itself marked several milestones on my spiritual path. And there was this girl. A dark beauty who rekindled my passion for music. Gomez was just one of the bands we […]
I can’t remember when I first encountered The Dao de Jing (also Tao te Ching, pronounced the same), which surprises me since it quickly grew to become my favourite written text. It’s brief (just 81 chapters of verse, a page or so each) yet richly nuanced. I’ve read all or […]
April is my month of the extraordinary. In April 1991, I took the first job I was offered after having been unceremoniously fired by my previous employer. A year later, I’d had enough of the computing industry and was poised to quit that job…when Microsoft bought the company I was […]
The following is a comment storm that blew out of a seemingly innocent status message I posted on Facebook. It got a few of us thinking, and I think the thinking in it, on all sides, is interesting. Note that the quote, by Stephen Edwards, is not taken from the […]
The Vinegar tasters is among my favourite allegories and provides an excellent introduction to the three philosophies that dominated China through thousands of years: Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism. For me, the most important of these is Taoism, a gentle, soulful and luminous philosophy. I’m going to be lazy and let […]