Dear All,
A good friend of Treeleaf, the Rev. Heiku Jaime McLeod, Soto Zen Priest and Teacher, writer and journalist, and the author of the wise essay we are now visiting in our Treeleaf 'No Words' Book Club' entitled Picking and Choosing (LINK to ESSAY ... please pick and choose to read it!
) ... is coming to Treeleaf as a Guest Teacher on Sunday, January 28th! Please try to join us. I would really like to get LOTS of members of our 'Digital Sangha' to attend this event via ZOOM ... And even if you have not been joining in our readings! Come anyway! (And the chapter is available at the above link too.)
Her Talk will reflect on that essay, a clear and wise reminder that our way of "acceptance and equanimity" need not and should not lead to dispassion and uncaring. Quite the contrary! She also reflects there on what it truly means to survive the hardest times.
More about Heiku:
Heiku Jaime McLeod is a priest and teacher at Treetop Zen Center in Oakland, Maine (LINK), and a volunteer chaplain at Bates College. She is a member of the White Plum Asanga, the Soto Zen Buddhist Association, and the Zen Peacemaker Order. She received Dharma Transmission from Peter Seishin Wohl in 2016.
She’s a proponent of socially engaged Buddhism and believes practice must find its expression through compassionate activity in the world, growing out of a direct experience of connection with the Earth and all beings. Her teaching focuses on the opportunities for figurative “home-leaving” available to those who remain householders, and she strives to help students awaken right within the realms of work, love, and home.
Heiku makes her living as an editor and freeleance journalist, as the communications manager at the Colby College Museum of Art, and as a contributing editor for Buddhadharma: The Practitioner’s Quarterly. Heiku lives in Lewiston, Maine, with her wife, Melissa, and their two children.
Jaime enjoys reading, camping, nature walks, swimming, science fiction, mythology, and crafting, and on Facebook describes herself as "gregarious introvert, melancholy optimist, tender curmudgeon, puckish polymath, skeptical mystic."
She’s a proponent of socially engaged Buddhism and believes practice must find its expression through compassionate activity in the world, growing out of a direct experience of connection with the Earth and all beings. Her teaching focuses on the opportunities for figurative “home-leaving” available to those who remain householders, and she strives to help students awaken right within the realms of work, love, and home.
Heiku makes her living as an editor and freeleance journalist, as the communications manager at the Colby College Museum of Art, and as a contributing editor for Buddhadharma: The Practitioner’s Quarterly. Heiku lives in Lewiston, Maine, with her wife, Melissa, and their two children.
Jaime enjoys reading, camping, nature walks, swimming, science fiction, mythology, and crafting, and on Facebook describes herself as "gregarious introvert, melancholy optimist, tender curmudgeon, puckish polymath, skeptical mystic."
So I cringe when I hear the aim of Buddhism described as "detachment." I prefer the term "nonattachment," which doesn't conjure the same connotations of being aloof or disinterested--of being "checked out"--that detachment does. Waking up is not about checking out. It's about checking in, fearlessly facing what's in front of us without denial, without our habitual storylines, and without retreating to the safety of our fantasy worlds or addictions. ...
... Zen practitioners don't need to reside in a fantasy world, pretending everything is OK, even as the sky is literally falling. We simply do the next right thing, one step after another, tending to whatever needs to be tended to, letting go of whatever weighs us down.
... Zen practitioners don't need to reside in a fantasy world, pretending everything is OK, even as the sky is literally falling. We simply do the next right thing, one step after another, tending to whatever needs to be tended to, letting go of whatever weighs us down.
It can also be viewed "one way" at the time, or later, at the following screen:
Even if you do not have the book, you can read a PDF version here from PAGE 262 (please consider to purchase the book if the remainder looks interesting to you):
Zen Teachings For Challenging Times - Second Half (PDF DOWNLOAD LINK)
There will be a Q&A after her talk, at which you can either ask a LIVE question, or email me a question which I will read (email your question to Jundotreeleaf[a]gmail.com)
I would really appreciate a BIG TREELEAF TURNOUT for this event, and I assure you that it will be worth your time to attend.
DONATION:
The event is free, but we ask those who can afford to make a voluntary donation, whatever you might afford and feel's right, to her Sangha, the Treetop Zen Center in Maine, USA, which they work hard to maintain, via this link at their web page (please indicate that Treeleaf sent ya, and it is for this event
):Thank you.
Heiku's essay is part of an AMAZING book which I cannot recommend highly enough to all, a very unique collection of short essays by a group of women Soto Teachers, focused on Zen Wisdom and Compassion applied to real life problems. The book deserves to be better known, and is not to be missed. We are currently reading and reflecting on it in our "No Words" book club (LINK)
Gassho, Jundo
stlah
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