Featured Contributors

Artist and activist Mayumi Oda has dedicated her work to feminism, environmental activism, and spirituality. Oda’s art has been seen in over fifty international solo shows and shown in New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, and the Library of Congress. In her Buddhist paintings, she emphasizes femininity, sometimes portraying male deities as female (“There were few female Buddhas so I thought I had to create [them].”) Oda also cofounded Inochi, a grassroots organization working for demilitarization and safe energy. Now in her eighties, Oda continues to produce heartfelt work. Her autobiography, Sarasvati’s Gift, was published in 2020. Check out a portfolio of Oda’s Tara paintings here.

DANIEL GOLEMAN

Daniel Goleman is a psychologist, writer, and lecturer whose best-selling book Emotional Intelligence has been translated into 40 languages. He started his career as a science journalist, working for Psychology Today and the New York Times. As Emotional Intelligence became hugely successful, he began to lecture and promote social and emotional learning full-time and in 1993 cofounded CASEL (the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning). He spends a significant amount of his free time at meditation retreats or traveling with his family. For Tricycle’s 30th anniversary, Goleman interviewed His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama.

FREDERICKA FOSTER

Fredericka Foster is an American painter, photographer, and activist. Since 2000 her work has focused on water, the subject of five solo shows at the Fischbach Gallery in New York City. In 2011, she was guest curator of an acclaimed exhibition, The Value of Water, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York.

Recently she founded Think About Water, a collective of artists and water activists who held their first online exhibition in 2021. A member of the Jewel Heart sangha and co-founder of the Artist and Buddhist Contemplatives Project, Foster sees an intimate connection between her practice and art. This issue features a conversation between Foster and composer Philip Glass.

STEPHEN MITCHELL

Stephen Mitchell earned degrees at Amherst College, Sorbonne Université, and Yale University, but says he has been subsequently “de-educated through intensive Zen training.” He has translated over a dozen classics, including the Tao Te Ching, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Odyssey, and poems by Rainer Maria Rilke and Pablo Neruda. When asked in an interview by Scott London how his Zen training prepared him for the rigors of literary translation, Mitchell said only that before Zen training a book-length translation took him 17 years; after Zen training, it took him just four months. In this issue, he tells a Zen story about “dharma combat.”