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20 Years, 20 Stories
It’s not uncommon for artists to remark that it was only years after completing a poem, say, or a musical composition or a sculpture, that they began to recognize fully what the thing was all about. Looking back over the first two decades of Tricycle, I think we can see something similar at work. Since the first issue appeared in the fall of 1991, we have been approaching a deeper understanding of what we can and should be doing—indeed, of what we are doing and have been doing through the years. But it has taken time for this purpose to become evident. More » -
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Focusing
For most of us, don’t-know is a place of get-me-out-of-here-quick. As a writer, sitting down to a blank page makes me instantly want to wash dishes, dust under beds, or finally sew those buttons on a coat I haven’t worn in years. But Eugene Gendlin doesn’t see don’t-know as the Bermuda Triangle of the psyche; to him it is just unexplored frontier, seas as yet uncharted—but friendly—that we can learn to navigate. For years, Gendlin offered a class at the University of Chicago in which he taught exactly that. The purpose of the class was to get students to tap into their implicit knowing—Gendlin’s term for what someone knows but is not yet able to express. “It took weeks to explain that the usual criteria were reversed in my course,” Gendlin says. Everywhere else in the university only what was clear counted at all, he explains. More » -
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Becoming Buddha
Located in the heart of Lower Manhattan's restaurant supply district, 222 Bowery is an unlikely dharma fortress. Constructed as a YMCA in 1884, this solid-looking brick hulk has become the home and studio space of a number of well-known New York artists and writers, including poet and Buddhist practitioner John Giorno, who has resided in the former Y's library since 1966. Greeting me on the wide interior staircase, his handsome, somewhat smashed face lighting up with an infectious smile, Giorno beckons me into a large square room, then pads barefoot over a carpeted floor to fix us coffee. His hair is short and faintly hennaed; his voice is flaring, reedy, and excitable, with a youthful enthusiasm belying his 57 years. More » -
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Hard Travel to Sacred Places
Burma This is Burma and it will be quite unlike any land you know about. —Rudyard Kipling The next morning we take the flight to Bangkok, and then the hour flight to Rangoon, or Yangon, as it's now called, the capital of the amazingly odd and oppressive country of Myanmar, which was formerly Burma. Even in the airplane we go through a time change. Everyone looks grim and shabby. The service is nonexistent, the plane old and decrepit. More » -
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First Cut
I In October of 1994 my brother John and I drove from New England to Iowa to revisit the farm town where we had grown up. I was thirty-eight years old, John was thirty-one, and our mother, who lived in the town and with whom we would be staying, was sixty-four. I did not like being thirty-eight. Thirty-seven had been much better and thirty-nine when it came would be much better. Here I am only talking about the look and sound of numbers and not about the events that came in these particular years. Forty-one suited me, forty-three did not, and forty-four, my age now, is if nothing else better than forty-three. More » -
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Where Does it End?
How did the world come into being? A cosmic egg, a pair of primal twins, a primordial fog that separates into earth, sky, water.... Years ago I learned that, though there are thousands of different creation myths, they tend to fall into the same handful of patterns. How did you come to Buddhist practice? Here, too, the myriad stories tend to fall into a handful of patterns: there's the childhood wound, the remarkable coincidence, the long malaise, the sudden unsought joy.... More »
