The past couple years, I’ve spent a lot of time in doctors’ offices and hospitals. Mostly that was with my mother, who died earlier this year after a long series of illnesses.   But I’ve also had some issues with my own stomach/digestion--likely the result of my own aging and the stress of helping care for my mother, grieving her death, and managing the estate.   I am sure many of you have been through similar challenges and I know that, as Buddhism teaches, life is full of challenges like this. A central teaching of Buddhism is that sickness, old age, and death are inevitable in human life and they are hard! Photo: A bowl of noodles is a great comfort food on a stressful day The way modern American medical care is provided, along with the stresses of COVID, have made the last couple years a challenging time to get great medical care. Everyone is busy and many interactions are mediated by computers, limiting human interaction.   Over the past year my family and I fille...

One way that we express our gratitude is by placing our hands together in "gassho" as seen here in this picture taken in 1959 when our beautiful gingko tree was planted by the Gomonshu, the leader of our Jodo Shinshu Buddhist tradition.  Last month we celebrated Eitaikyo, a Japanese Buddhist tradition which expresses our appreciation for those who have gone before us.   This month we celebrate Thanksgiving, a very A merican tra dition which also focuses on gratitude. These two very different occasions are reminders of the value of gratitude across time and culture.   In the spirit of these two holidays, I wanted to share an activity that works with people of all ages and from all religious backgrounds. It just takes a few minutes and it can be a good conversation starter. It involves thinking about and/or discussing these 4 questions that you can reflect on quietly or can be a topic of conversation at your holiday gatherings.   1) Who were all the people—...

  The first thing that comes to mind for the month of October is Halloween, along with costumes, candy, and masks. It’s fun to walk along the store aisles stocked with Halloween costumes and candy and think about how you’d like to disguise yourself. However, my attention is always on the candy since I’m not much for getting into costume. I say that I don’t like to dress up in costume, but I can say that I have a number of masks that I wear. I’m sure that all of us have occasion to wear a mask or two. The masks I’m talking about are ones that we use in our everyday lives to present various faces to those around us.  Before retirement, I had a teacher mask. That’s the one that my students saw in the classroom.  It was important to remove that mask when I returned home so I wasn’t being a teacher with my spouse. I guess my teacher mask does come in handy during a golf round, though. I talk to my golf ball, saying, “Go, go, go!” or “Sit, sit!” If the ball behaves, th...

  "Persons of the Pure Land tradition attain birth in the Pure Land by becoming their own foolish selves."     --Honen Shonin, as quoted by Shinran Shonin in " Lamp for the Later Ages ." It’s hay season here in Southwest Idaho and Northeast Oregon.   As I drive around the countryside, I see hay bales in 3 shapes/sizes.  First, there’s a smaller rectangular kind, that weighs about 55 pounds—this is the kind a grew up with, the kind that I can actually lift up and stack on my own . Then there’s a larger rectangular shape that needs a machine to lift: And, finally, there are enormous circular bales that weigh about 1000 pounds each! Seeing these bales as I drive around Idaho reminds me of an incident that happened a few years ago at the Monastery of St. Gertrude, a community of Catholic nuns just outside Cottonwood, ID.    The nuns own land, including a tree farm, a small orchard, garden plots, and farm land that they lease out to a neighboring farmer. ...