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    Beyond the End of the Road Paid Member

    By Benjamin Bogin
    In the last years of his life I visited Rick several times at the home he shared with his wife, Marcia, in Northern California. Often I would spend a week with them, tagging along to attend Buddhist teachings, eat lunches with friends, go to the hospital for chemo, or take long, slow walks through the redwoods—the day-to-day activities of an American Buddhist writer living with cancer. There was a sense of extraordinary openness in the way that he faced everything, from something as ordinary as eating breakfast to the most complicated aspects of life and death. To some extent I had always seen this openness, this simple but solid presence, in Rick; but in those final years when he was facing death so directly, it seemed to truly blossom. More »
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    Masatoshi Nagatomi Remembered Paid Member

    By Duncan Ryuken Williams
    "You bow like a Japanese," Masatoshi Nagatomi told me with his characteristic giggle. Thus began nine years of mentoring in Buddhist studies until his passing last year. He assured my worried Japanese mother that I would be safe in America and that he and his wife would look after me. His grandfatherly kindness extended co invitations for dinners at Thanksgiving, gifts of Japanese pickles, and the officiating of my Buddhist wedding. I am sure that during the course of his almost forry years at Harvard, every student of Mas Nagatomi similarly felt his bodhisattvic kindness and his dedication to nurturing his students not only in scholarly life, but also in life more broadly. More »
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    "Letter to the Wall Street Journal," 1966 Paid Member

    By Allen Ginsberg
    Every American wants MORE MORE of the world and why not, you only live once. But the mistake made in America is persons accumulate more more dead matter, machinery, possessions & rugs & fact information at the expense of what really counts as more: feeling, good feeling, sex feeling, tenderness feeling, mutual feeling. You own twice as much rug if you're twice as aware of the rug. Possessing more means being aware of more: & that "awareness" is banked in areas we call feeling. Bodily feeling sense or sensual feeling. More »
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    The Last Ten Years Paid Member

    By Helen Tworkov
    For ten years Tricycle has been borne on its path by countless people who helped start and sustain it with their wisdom, their immense talents. and their kindness and friendship. Along the way four contributors, each of whom played critical roles in completely different ways, have passed on. In this section, they are remembered separately; yet together, they provide a glimpse of our history. Rick Fields: 1942-1999 More »
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    The Opportunity of Uncertainty Paid Member

    By Sogyal Rinpoche
    One of the central characteristics of the bardos is that they are periods of deep uncertainty. Take this life as a prime example. As the world around us becomes more turbulent, so our lives become more fragmented. Out of touch and disconnected from ourselves, we are anxious, restless, and often paranoid. A tiny crisis pricks the balloon of the strategies we hide behind. A single moment of panic shows us how precarious and unstable everything is. To live in the modern world is to live in what is clearly a bardo realm; you don't have to die to experience one. This uncertainty, which already pervades everything now, becomes even more intense, even more accentuated after we die, when our clarity or confusion, the masters tell us, will be "multiplied by seven." More »
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    Insomnia Paid Member

    By Judith Simmer-Brown
    I'm awake again. Were those coyotes howling, or was that just a dream? It's four o'clock in the morning, and it is often difficult to tell what is a dream and what isn't. I lie here in bed, hearing my husband gently snoring next to me, my body warmly nestled, but my mind is moving, constantly moving. Since childhood, I've always been an insomniac. Being awake in the middle of the night is part of my psychological and spiritual landscape, part of my wholeness. But it is often excruciating, full of edginess and disparagement. Insomnia keeps me close to my pulse. And it is always a practice. More »