Much as I love to grow rosy-cheeked apples and long stripes of pale green butter lettuce, I equally welcome the presence of poisonous weeds and flowers in the garden. No paradise is complete without the murmur…

One day a week my Zen Center work includes leaving the well-ordered calm of our windbell meditation garden and heading east to Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, where I work with a rowdy, rotating population…

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…

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…