This Time Get It Right
- Insights Into Practices
- What I’m Reading
- 3-Month Practice Period – Starting January 8th (This week.)
- A Poem: Hafiz
I just returned from Tassajara Zen Mountain Center where I was co-leading a retreat for wild land firefighters. Witnessing their openness, strength, and willingness to practice with heart and depth was inspiring. It reinforced the importance of providing support for those who protect our lands and communities.
It feels a bit strange to return to life outside of the intensity of being with firefighters and for the calendar to say that it is 2025. I sometimes describe one portion of my life as putting things on my calendar. When I first write them on my calendar, they represent the future.
Yet I’ve noticed that at some point these events happen. While they are happening, I call them “now.” For a brief moment, the events become the present. How strange. How interesting. When things are happening, it’s now. Now. Now. Now.
Then afterward, all the trainings, meetings, travel, celebrations, dinners, birthdays, weddings, memorials, whatever—they move from the future, like a bubble bursting, things slip away, that particular now ends, and it’s another moment another day, another now. How strange. Then, something happens, and I refer to these events as the past.
What isn’t on my calendar? Everything that happens around and in between these events. Every surprise and all of life’s endless transitions—growing up and growing older, getting married, having children, starting companies, leaving companies, losses, and deaths. And feelings. So many feelings: joy, grief, loneliness, boredom, love.
Practices
During the Tassajara Firefighter Retreat we were working with the practice of slogans – as ways to remember to be present, open, and connected – right in the midst of the challenges and busyness of our lives. Two of my favorite slogans are:
1) Living With Ease In a Crazy World
The world feels particularly crazy after being at Tassajara for a week, with no news from the outside world. I’m appreciating the moments of quiet, and some time of letting go of accomplishing anything.
Explore finding ease by stepping outside of our crazy world, and experiment with some ease and equanimity right in the midst of the storm. I’m reminded of a Brush Dance greeting card I published many years ago: “Freedom isn’t absence from the storm, but peace within the storm.”
2) This Time Get It Right
This is the practice of intention and aspiration, to learn from past mistakes, to adjust and try something different. I think this slogan is meant to be humorous. It was always “right” after all. And, this time will be different…
Both of these practices seem useful and important as a New Year unfolds. I believe that it was Einstein who said that past, present, and future don’t actually exist but are a “stubbornly persistent illusion.”
What I”m Reading
The Essential Enneagram by David Daniels and Virginia Price – An accessible guide to the Enneagram, a powerful personality system that identifies nine distinct types. It offers practical tools for self-discovery, growth, and healthy relationships.
Appreciating Your Life: A 3-Month Zen Practice Period: Begins this week.
January 8th – April 2nd, 2025
Online
A 3-month Practice Period is a great way to begin or deepen your mindfulness and meditation practice and cultivate ways for integrating mindfulness practice with your work and all parts of your life.
Online meetings are Wednesdays from 6:00 – 7:30 p.m. PT. We will begin each session with 30 minutes of lightly guided meditation, followed by a short talk, as well as small group and large group discussions.
The theme for the Practice Period is Appreciating Your Life. This is the underlying theme of meditation practice and Zen practice – seeing and feeling everything, the good, bad, ugly, beautiful – as gift and an opportunity to learn, grow, and engage. It’s the practice of feeling deeply, opening our hearts and minds, with a mindset of appreciation, and of being of benefit, through our ability to see more clearly, to accept what is, and work effectively with change and for change.
Our primary reading for the practice period is Branching Streams Flow In The Darkness, Zen Talks on a poem called the Sandokai, or the Harmony of Difference and Equality. This is an excellent primer on the non-dual teaching is Zen practice and how to apply them to your wellbeing, relationships, work, and social and environmental responsibility.
Being part of a community that meets weekly is a powerful way to find more clarity and connection as we begin a New Year. Each week we will meditate together for 30 minutes. Then, I’ll give a short talk, unpacking ideas and practices from Branch Stream Flow In The Darkness. We will have a variety of small group and large group discussions, to practice and deepen the tools and themes discussed. Each week you will leave with an actionable insight, or a practice, and a suggested reading.
Weekly sessions will be recorded and made available in case you miss any sessions or want to revisit them.
I hope you will join me. (Register here.)
A Poem
With that Moon Language, translated by Daniel Ladinsky
Admit something:
Everyone you see, you say to them, “Love me.”
Of course you do not do this out loud, otherwise
Someone would call the cops.
Still, though, think about this, this great pull in us to connect.
Why not become the one who lives with a
Full moon in each eye that is always saying,
With that sweet moon language, what every other eye in
This world is dying to hear?
-Hafiz-
Warmest regards,
Marc