In going through Valley Insight‘s archived newsletter essays, I see with new eyes: very often my practice has been inspired by experiences in the natural world. The piece I selected for this month is from August 2014. It came right after the one we published in last month’s newsletter, the essay that wove itself around…

I was listening to an interview with Buddhist teacher and environmental activist Joanna Macy recently, with an AirPod in one ear––while walking the Greenway in Lebanon. This trail is a lovely place––a woodsy path that follows the route of what once was a railroad, it traces the backyards and open fields of the city. It…

“For here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.” –– Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Archaic Torso of Apollo” The insight in the last two lines of this poem is meant to wake us up. When he was a young man, Rilke became the personal secretary for the French…

As you will see elsewhere in the newsletter, this month Valley Insight will again join Buddhist sanghas around the world to celebrate Vesak, which marks the Buddha’s birth, enlightenment, and death––all on one day. This threesome, of course, holds a metaphor for one of the primary understandings pointed out to us in his teachings––anicca, or…

The essay of mine re-issued below was originally published in The Valley Insight Newsletter of March 2019. In September of the same year, it was accepted for publication in the international journal Mindfulness, with the stipulation that it be taken off the Valley Insight website archives for a year. We are now again free to…

“We don’t see the world as it is. We see the world as we are.  We must learn to be the world as it is.” – Anais Nin Most of us have heard the Buddhist teaching about the finger pointing to the moon. In it, we are reminded not to confuse the finger with the…