Member Profile

I grew up on a family farm in Racine County, Wisconsin with two younger sisters. We attended a Catholic parish school for the academic environment and a Jewish temple for our spiritual education. We also whirled with the Sufis, sang bhajans with followers of Sai Baba, and, later, encountered Tibetan Buddhism as a family. This pluralistic approach to spirituality was a fundamental teaching for me on the emptiness of forms and the universality of the path. My parents and sisters have helped me along in my iconoclastic yet reverent approach to life by sharing many experiences of great love. Discovering Zen helped me “adult” and find the principles with which to bring an ethical order to the creative chaos. I connected with Zen practice so deeply in part because of the blazing warmth and wisdom of Robert and June. Every meeting sets fire to my delusion of isolation. Now, 13 years later, having moved to Cambridge, MA then come back to Oak Park, I am grounded by the presence of the Center, the sangha, and the deep accuracy of the dharma, particularly the Four Noble Truths. I feel incredibly lucky to be studying wholeheartedly and with commitment at ZLMC. In 2019, I had the good fortune to participate in a Zen Peacemakers Street Retreat with Roshi Genro, Sensei, June, and others. I wanted to go on this retreat because the whole idea frightened me a lot. The retreat spoke intimately to my greatest fear... of losing my comfortable life and falling out of society.... and perhaps because it engaged that deep fear, the retreat turned out to be one of the most profound learning experiences I'd ever had. One of my biggest obstacles to Zen practice is that I live too much in my head. I read. I forget what I read. I worry. I write. This Bearing Witness Retreat pushed me out into the world to have direct experiences with people on the street and with the wind, the sun, and a wise circle of friends braving trust in the innate generosity of Chicago. I have a powerful respect for the resourcefulness, strength, and ordinariness (the just like you and me-ness) of people who live on the street. It is now 2023, and my aspiration to be of benefit runs high. At this time, I am stewarding the Reading as Zen Practice Circle (formerly known as the Study Circle), and I invite you to attend on the 2nd Sunday of each month. Next week, on February 19, we are discussing an article by Roshi Robert Althouse published in Tricycle magazine in 2020. <insert Tricycle link here> . I extend the invitation to you to read the (short) article and join the conversation. Last month, Roshi June and I had a wonderful conversation during the Reading as Zen Practice Circle. In fact, it was just the two of us because no one else came! The sweetness of this exciting exchange amplified the urgency of a paradox or slightly ironic “dilemma” that I am chewing on in my practice. Why am I so passionate about reading (and to a certain extent, writing) as a big part of my zen practice, so passionate that I am trying to share this habit as a way to encounter others in the sangha, near and in print? As I mentioned before, much of my spiritual path In Zen involves finding ways to GET OUT OF my head. (Strange, impractical metaphor, I know.) In his Introduction to Zen Buddhism, D.T. Suzuki wrote, Zen is emphatically a matter of personal experience; if anything can be called radically empirical, it is Zen. No amount of reading, no amount of teaching, no amount of contemplation will ever make one a Zen master. Life itself must be grasped in the midst of its flow; to stop it for examination and analysis is to kill it, leaving its cold corpse to be embraced. I respect D.T. Suzuki and I will try to grasp his words (as they exist: in print to be read) and keep gently questioning the ways I practice. At this point I have no idea what Zen is. I couldn’t define it if pressed (hopefully, neither can you?!) I am not interested, particularly, in what Zen “should” be— or how I as a student “should” be experiencing progress, especially if it is measured against some conceptually-encaged definition of Zen created by academics or scholars. All I know is that it would be great to take part in this inquiry together with others in the sangha who love to read about and practice Zen! In the end, no matter how we choose to come together- whether begging on the street, sitting in the Zendo, dancing in a Hula class, or reflecting in a Circle devoted to reading, our practices can only deepen for the sincere encounter.