From the Department of Spring

This is the most beautiful spring of my life. The flowers are bursting, the air is redolent and clean, and it is so quiet I hear birds far overhead and bees buzzing in the garden. And, in the same moment, I feel dissonance. Hey wait a minute, isn’t there a...

From the Department of the Willow-Heart

My dharma name in the Hollow Bones Rinzai Zen Order is Yoshin, which means “willow-heart.” I first heard the word many years ago when I started studying jujitsu, since the name of our school is Yoshin Jitsu Kai: the school of the techniques of the willow-heart. It...