"Why I Am Not A Buddhist Monk"
Excerpt:
My Zen name was Bopnim. Sunim said it meant something about forests and strength. Mostly I think that’s bullshit — I couldn’t even find it on Google Translate. But at the temple, I was Bopnim, a monk in training, not a disaster. I hid myself there as a kind of self‑imposed imprisonment, a place where I could limit my own self‑destruction. I was the perfect Zen monk — confused, earnest, and always going the wrong way.
A personal essay about discipline, neurodivergence, and the quiet humiliations that shape us. I write about the years I spent in a Buddhist seminary, and the rituals I couldn’t remember.
"One Hundred and Forty-One Miles"
Excerpt:
I’m a Buddhist, albeit not a particularly good Buddhist, but a Buddhist nonetheless. So when my daughter was in junior high, I thought it might be a good idea to start meditating on her departure… because her leaving for college seemed like a sort of death. I applied my very A‑type way of being to the grief process. Meditate on impermanence, get ahead of the tears, beat the sadness to the punch. It did not work.
A meditation on motherhood, impermanence, and the slow grief of watching a child grow away from you. This essay weaves music, memory, Buddhist practice, and a near‑kidnapping in 1977 into a portrait of a mother preparing both badly and beautifully for her daughter to leave for college.
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