There’s this old Zen chestnut where the monk asks, why does the Bodhisattva of Compassion have so many eyes? The master replies: it is like a hand reaching for a pillow in the night. I love that image, of compassion or generosity as an autonomic nervous response, as natural as breathing. Every cell like an …
Sweat lodge
Ben is stoking the fire for Chief Reuben’s sweat lodge, on the Tsleil Waututh reservation on the Burrard Inlet. He places another log onto the big fire over the grandfather stones and I ask him, so…how intense is this sweat, usually…like, on a scale of 1 to 10? In the gap between my question and his …
I have no pictures of my mother
I remember my mother as a small solidly built woman with eyes like angry blue marbles. I see her sitting at the kitchen table, smoking Matinée Lights and drinking cold coffee. I can’t remember ever having had a real conversation with her. We hardly knew each other except as adversaries.
Listen to the belly
The belly knows. I wake in the night with that hissing and sizzling in my gut. That is my intuition talking. It is not to be silenced and it won’t let me sleep. There have been times my belly said go forward, or stand still, or run away. It has said, jump on that approaching …
The case for cougars
What’s the deal about women being with younger men? Why does it freak people out, what is the big taboo? I got to ruminating about this in the shower this morning, while still groggy from another night punctuated by hot flashes (which, I am reassured, will ease off within two to five years. Good to …