Home › how we live

how we live
  • Tricycle Community 3 comments

    She's Got the Beat Paid Member

    By Joan Duncan Oliver
      There’s a story Cheri Maples tells about the first time she saw her Buddhist practice in action. The year was 1991, and Maples, then a patrol cop on the Madison, Wisconsin, police force, was responding to a domesticviolence call. A divorced dad was holding his young daughter hostage, refusing to hand her over to his ex-wife after a weekend visit. When Maples interceded, he threatened her. Ordinarily, she would have slapped handcuffs on the guy and hauled him off to jail. But she had just sat her first retreat with the Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, and the experience “had broken open my heart,” Maples says. She persuaded the father to release his daughter and then, instead of arresting him, spoke to him from her heart. Within minutes, he was in tears. More »
  • Tricycle Community 15 comments

    Prime Time Buddhism Paid Member

    By Joan Duncan Oliver
    Filmmaker Babeth VanLoo (right) speaks with artist Meredith Monk in a scene from VanLoo’s new film, Meredith Monk – Inner Voice.  Courtesy Babeth VanLoo Listen to the podcast here. More »
  • Tricycle Community 9 comments

    Buddha in the Googleplex Paid Member

    By Joan Duncan Oliver
    All the President's Meng: Chade-Meng Tan with Barack Obama, John McCain, Al Gore, and Bill Clinton More »
  • Tricycle Community 2 comments

    Mindful Music Paid Member

    By Danny Fisher
    “This is why we come early,” Buddhist singer-songwriter Ravenna Michalsen says for the third time this trip, as we search for the correct turn into Wellesley College. She’s playing a show for the college’s Buddhist Community tonight, and we’ve driven up to Massachusetts from New Haven, Connecticut, where various karmic causes and conditions have brought the two of us together again for another semester. More »
  • Tricycle Community 33 comments

    Ruffling Feathers Paid Member

    By Joan Duncan Oliver
    “THOUGH SHE BE LITTLE, yet she is fierce,” Shakespeare wrote of Hermia in Midsummer Night’s Dream. It would be an apt description of Mira Tweti, a 5-foot, 2 1/2-inch, 108-pound animal-welfare writer and Zen nun who’s probably the best friend any bird—captive or wild—could ever have. Tweti’s exposé of the parrot trade industry, Of Parrots and People: The Sometimes Funny, Always Fascinating, and Often Catastrophic Collision of Two Intelligent Species, published this fall, is rattling bird breeders across the country— maybe the world—and challenging parrot owners to reconsider the wisdom of keeping a caged companion.“This book, I think, will drive bird breeders to violence,” Tweti says matter- of-factly. “I’ve had breeders tell me that it’s all lies—and that I hadn’t said all the good things they’ve done. Like what? That they’re keeping the ‘stud books’ on parrots? Stud books are for horse breeders. That has nothing to do with keeping parrot species alive.” More »
  • Tricycle Community 0 comments

    Miracle Worker Paid Member

    By Joan Duncan Oliver
    Michael Daube, 43, founder of the nonprofit Citta IT'S THE STUFF of urban legend: While combing through the trash in search of materials for his artwork, a young artist finds a drawing with the initials D.H. in the corner. Could it be...? His hunch pays off: The drawing is a David Hockney, and he sells it for $18,000. Then—because this is real life and not a legend—he uses his windfall to build a hospital in India. More »