Zen Moments

“Reach out! Take a chance! Get hurt maybe. But play as well as you can…” MAUDE: Like a puff, Harold? HAROLD: Well, I really don’t smoke. MAUDE: It’s all right. It’s organic. HAROLD: I sure am picking up on vices. MAUDE: Vice? Virtue? It’s best not to be too moral. You cheat yourself out of [...]

“Because, you understand, they are sisters…” The Ladies have been trying lately. Trying to make me crazy by the end of summer vacation, I am convinced. They get along for brief periods of time – usually involving some sort mess and mayhem – which intersperse the fighting. Fighting over space on the couch, over which [...]

“The natural state of the human mind is calm and clear…” I was in my mid-fifties when I met my soul mate. It’s not that I never wanted to get married, the problem was that I never met anyone I wanted to marry or if I did, she didn’t want to marry me. Anyway, I [...]

“Why hadn’t he asked me to marry him?” The time and the place were perfect. We’d been together for just over a year. We were deeply in love. We were sitting in a fabulous restaurant after a magical evening listening to the Prague String Quartet. (Bach – my favourite.)  We’d had a box (!) in [...]

“I discovered why the universe wanted me to be a teacher… the day I broke my toe…” Well to be fair, it was a few days after I broke my toe. And I’ve always suspected that what the universe wants is really what I want. So perhaps it would be better to say: I discovered [...]

“Having a child … can be an adventure all on its own…” When I realized that my life experiences are simply different and wonderful in their own way, I stopped feeling inferior due to wonderful stories of travel and adventure I hear from my childless friends. Having a child when you’re a still a child [...]

“I love him for every single bizarre behaviour he throws my way…” I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before – but my three year old son, Oliver is weird. This is at least partly due to something called SPD (sensory processing disorder) that causes him to engage in activities that “feed” his need for [...]

“Not-knowing is not easy, it’s not comfortable…” “And what do you do?” Back when I was 21, I was unemployed. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, and I hated that question. “I’m unemployed” was the truth, but I would cringe each time I gave that answer. In those days maybe there was more [...]

“As heartbroken as I felt, my world had become richer for loving.” I was in Southern India at an Ashram at the foot of a sacred mountain. During my time there I would go from the mountain to the place I was staying. There were many people living on the streets and many animals, as [...]

“We must be the change we wish to see in the world” – Ghandi This is a short summary of a powerful, inspirational video which documents the moving transformation of a group of teenagers as they follow Challenge Day’s “Be the Change” program. “The Be the Change movement inspires people to notice what’s happening in [...]