Wendy Johnson

Whatever you have to say, leave the roots on, let themdangleAnd the dirtjust to make clearWhere they come from. —Charles Olsen Winter rain, falling for ten thousand years. I celebrate Groundhog Day on my hands and…

On the summer solstice of this year my youngest sister, Debbie, was diagnosed with breast cancer, revealed in a routine mammogram. The mother of two young sons, ages six and seven, she wasted no time in…

I dreamed that dream again, the scary one that comes down like a silent raptor in the late watches of the summer night, around the August full moon. I wake up in a cold sweat, pinned…

Spring washes over the garden; a torrent of sea-green buds swell with rainwater. Song sparrows and orange-crowned warblers begin their dawn chorus well before zazen, reminding cross-legged sitters in the ten directions that it is time…

In the winter garden we have been pruning the Old Roses for a solid month, caught in a thicket of crossed canes and swollen buds. We planted this garden almost twenty years ago, and today I…

In the Green Gulch glasshouse we are nursing a decidedly ailing Bodhi tree that pines in every cell of its being for Mother India. Our Bodhi tree, Ficus religiosa, or the sacred fig tree, is a…