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    Apocalypse Landscapes Paid Member

    By Wendy Johnson
    My husband Peter and I were married in the Green Gulch meditation hall on April 18, 1976, exactly seventy years after the great San Francisco earthquake. We treasure our April 18th anniversary—it always reminds us not to get too settled down or routinized in married life. Every year we do something special on our day, just the two of us. No zazen, no kids, and absolutely no work allowed in our various overpampered gardens. This year we went for a long romantic walk across an abandoned landfill dump. More »
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    Against the Grain Paid Member

    By Wendy Johnson
    For the last few days I have been lost in the thicket of the Indian summer garden, gathering the ripe seed of Galactic lettuce, Russian sunflowers, and multi-hued quinoa that hails from the Andean highlands. My hands ache from cracking open brittle pods and threshing autumn seed treasures to plant in next year’s garden and to give away. More »
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    Timeless Spring Paid Member

    By Wendy Johnson
    Spring washes over the garden; a torrent of sea-green buds swell with rainwater. Song sparrows and orange-crowned warblers begin their dawn chorus well before zazen, reminding cross-legged sitters in the ten directions that it is time to sow Tarahumara sunflowers and Trail o’ Tears beans. At Green Gulch Farm we lightly mark and honor the changing seasons of the year. Lightly, since from the thirteenth century onward Zen master Eihei Dogen has been haranguing wall-gazing meditators… Spring washes over the garden; a torrent of sea-green buds swell with rainwater. Song sparrows and orange-crowned warblers begin their dawn chorus well before zazen, reminding cross-legged sitters in the ten directions that it is time to sow Tarahumara sunflowers and Trail o’ Tears beans. More »
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    On Gardening: Steaming With Buddhahood Paid Member

    By Wendy Johnson
    While I have been working and meditating at Green Gulch Farm Zen Center for almost three decades, a few seasons ago our family moved “off campus,” about a mile or so up the road, to the coastal community of Muir Beach, where an active clutch of former Zen Center residents continues to practice in the wide embrace of the so-called real world. More »
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    Heavy Grace Paid Member

    By Wendy Johnson
    Both my parents died at the end of 1998, each of them on a Monday, a little less than three months apart. Although they had been divorced for forty years, they flared out together like two long-tailed meteors burning a nasty parallel gash in the cold dome of the winter sky. Even though I have been practicing Zen meditation for twenty-eight years and working as a front-line hospice volunteer for ten, nothing helps. Nothing. The back of my head has been ripped off and I’m immune to that unctuous snake oil salve of “no coming, no going; no birth, no death” that well-intentioned Zen friends dab on my raw scalp. Give me good old Rujing from twelfth-century China any day, who, when setting fire to Elder Yi’s funeral bier, cried out, “Ah, the swift flames in the wind flare up - all atoms in all worlds do not interchange.” More »