Month: September 2020

 December 2, 2012  Karen Horney, the brilliant post-Freudian psychoanalyst, had an expression that informed much of her work, her contribution to the still-evolving process of retreat from the Freudian religion. Her term for one common source of the psychological distress she encountered in patients was “neurotic claim.” I guess my only complaint with it would…

 March 5, 2012  Amid tough and painful times we must seek consolation — handholds of inspiration on the cliff beside the abyss. Too many in our culture turn to false and artificial means of consolation. Consumption, for example. It was once the name of a fatal disease now known as tuberculosis; it is now the name of…

 November 1, 2013  We are addicted to hard, rigid, stony memorials. Yet the 2,000+ year old silk and bamboo on which the poems attributed to Lao Tzu were recorded survive today and are perfectly legible, while the carved scribbles memorializing the legacy of George Fry at the close of his 66 yrs. and 3.5 days — they…

 July 1, 2012  The contrast between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges reminds me of an old Zen story, which I heard from Clarke Strand, one of my teachers in Zen. One weekend many years ago, a Zen temple in upstate New York had organized a public reception to raise awareness and attract interest. Near the…

 March 18, 2013  Impoverishment is relative. That is to say, relativistic in the sense that Einstein intended it. Neither space nor time is a separate dimension of any reality; they can only exist cooperatively as a continuum of experience and meaning. I may be thrown out of my apartment or I may endure another month…

 May 4, 2015  A long time ago my father told me what his father told him, that there was once a Lakota holy man, called Drinks Water, who dreamed what was to be; and this was long before the coming of the Wasichus [white men]. He dreamed that the four-leggeds were going back into the…

 February 1, 2012  Freedom is not something you get; it is something you reveal. Thus, since freedom is what you have and what you are already, it cannot really be taken away from you. Oppression, either from without (government, authority, etc.) or from within you (guilt, fear, complacency) can make it seem that your freedom…

 March 23, 2015  An old Zen master once said, “he who sleeps on the floor never falls out of bed.” I feel the same message in this as in Lao Tzu’s recommendation that you “keep your home close to the earth”: make Nature your confidante and collaborator, instead of attempting to subdue, conquer, or poison…

 March 8, 2014  I got a job, and therein, as they say, lies a tale. I was taking a short walk around downtown Albany, getting the lay of the land around my new environment, the place where I’ll be spending a third of my daily life’s hours, when I saw a branch of the bank…

 October 15, 2012  You might say that my neighbor around the block has a somewhat cynical view of the electoral choice facing voters in a few weeks. Or you could say this is a creative approach to our last Halloween, should the Mayans have the final word this year. So perhaps a few last words…