Tricycle | Awake in the World

There have been moments in my life when I’ve felt that I found Buddhism mostly so that my daughter, Maud, now fourteen, could grow up around a dharma practitioner. It’s never been a problem, trying to practice with Maud around the house: At five, she was as fascinated by the idea of my sitting as she was by everything else I did. For a five-year-old, how was my practicing shamatha different from my putting on makeup, doing yoga in the middle of the living room floor, driving a stickshift, struggling for hours at my computer over a single paragraph? It was all the same to her—the mystery of Mama, and of womanhood, and of humanness.