Radiance Of The Dark

October 2008 | Cerro Gordo Temple | Santa Fe, NM When I was a child I was deeply affected by /*A Pilgrim’s Progress*/, a Christian story of the spiritual journey rich in images of the emotional landscape like the Slough of Despond. I’ve always wanted to tease out of the koans a similar landscape of pilgrimage, and here are two talks that were an early run at that. We begin in the Red Dust, an ancient Chinese name for the world of our ordinary lives, take off for a sojourn Deep in the Mountains, and return eventually to Sitting by the Charcoal Fire. For some of us, life in the Red Dust presents questions the Red Dust can’t answer, so we look for gates that open into wild and solitary mountain paths. Eventually, though, we return, transformed, to a Red Dust world transformed by our transformation. The raging conflagration of the Buddha’s Fire Sermon has become the steady, warming glow of the Charcoal Fire, a good place to unthaw our toes and listen to stories.

October 2008 | Cerro Gordo Temple | Santa Fe, NM When I was a child I was deeply affected by /*A Pilgrim’s Progress*/, a Christian story of the spiritual journey rich in images of the emotional landscape like the Slough of Despond. I’ve always wanted to tease out of the koans a similar landscape of pilgrimage, and here are two talks that were an early run at that. We begin in the Red Dust, an ancient Chinese name for the world of our ordinary lives, take off for a sojourn Deep in the Mountains, and return eventually to Sitting by the Charcoal Fire. For some of us, life in the Red Dust presents questions the Red Dust can’t answer, so we look for gates that open into wild and solitary mountain paths. Eventually, though, we return, transformed, to a Red Dust world transformed by our transformation. The raging conflagration of the Buddha’s Fire Sermon has become the steady, warming glow of the Charcoal Fire, a good place to unthaw our toes and listen to stories.

March 26, 2008 | Cerro Gordo Temple | Santa Fe, NM Every moment has a luminous tab in it somewhere, which we can pull to immediately become intimate with it. We have koans for the moments when that isn’t obvious — portable luminous tabs to bring to any moment.

April 2005 | Springs Mountain Sangha | Black Forest, CO Snowed in in a convent in the Black Forest of northern Colorado, we told the Celtic wisdom tale of Janet and Tamlin, about how you have to not only be fetchable, but also willing to seek and fight for awakening — to hold through the changes to make it yr own, so the world can use it to bring back the spring subjects: Zhao Zhou, spring, Pablo Neruda, The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, Mark Bittner, Carterhaugh