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It has been said that people who show up at AA meetings, Buddhist monasteries, and ex-Pat communities may not be the most well-adjusted people in the world. In my long life, I've done all three. And still I say...

Misfits are beautifulMisfits are teachersMisfits are often a pain in the ass

One of my favorite nuns who were trained in Vietnam
I’ve found the Pure Land monks and nuns trained in Vietnam to be far more compassionate, more open and not at all concerned that they might pollute themselves by associating with Westerners. They are monks and nuns worth emulating and learning from. From within the ranks of the Plum Village Sangha, I haven’t yet met a Zen practitioner with their grace or kindness.

--Excerpt from EVERY BUDDHA, SAME PRICE

Brother Francis, a close and humorous confidante at Plum Village
I lingered among the trees for a few minutes after people started to to leave, a tear in my eye about missing my children. A figure in a billowy golden robe approached out of the settling mist. It was Brother Francis, who has been such a gentle support to me since the day of his arrival from Thailand. He once said that I remind him of his mother, and then added hastily, “not that you look old enough to be my mother!”

--Excerpt from EVERY BUDDHA, SAME PRICE, page 203

Madie's windmill houseYesterday I had a long visit with a woman named Madie, who lives in a windmill house on the top of the windswept plateau near West Hamlet. When Sister Jina introduced me to her, we had an instant connection.
Madie is of medium height and her thin, wiry body is built of one hundred percent muscle. She has no car, so travels everywhere on an old dented bicycle. I often see her speeding along the dirt road, her bike loaded down with kindling gathered from the forest, or a basket full of muslin-wrapped fresh cheese, bread and produce from local farmers.
I can see Madie’s windmill silhouetted against the sky when I look out the second-floor window of my room at Lower Hamlet. It is about two miles away as the crow flies. A French architect gutted the ancient stone structure and built a three-story dwelling inside. The walls at ground level are four feet thick and get narrower towards the top. On the first floor are her kitchen and salon. Her bedroom and a library are on the windowless second floor, and on the third is a circular guest room with a spectacular view of Le Moulins and the vineyards below. Last winter a rare tornado blew a tree through Madie’s kitchen window and almost killed her. She seems to have been born under a lucky star.
--EVERY BUDDHA, SAME PRICE, page 283

Formal lunches have become even more awkward for me 
during the Summer Retreat then they were during the
winter, when I was new and focused on mastering the
protocols. On these occasions, we get in line by dharma
age, fill our begging bowl with selections from the table,
and walk solemnly past the throng of lay practitioners. They
stand to one side, palms together, until the last of us has
passed by. Only then can they approach the lay table to
serve themselves.

Excerpt from EVERY BUDDHA SAME PRICE, page 344

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The events in this journal took place over twenty-five years ago, beginning shortly before I took the Five Buddhist Precepts in 1993. I was in my mid-forties, facing the usual midlife crises, exacerbated by an early empty nest. My daughter was in college. My son, age 15, went to live with his father. Now that my children were out of the house, I needed to pick myself off the floor of day to day life in twentieth-century America whose central purpose had eluded me.

Entering a Vietnamese Buddhist monastery, I realize, is not a typical reaction to this stage of life. But I had some unfinished business, below my level of awareness, that I had yet to revisit. As an impressionable teenager I had lived through the domestic upheavals of the Vietnam War. I had been shaped by images of the horrors we had wrought in that tiny, vulnerable country. Within the broader context of my search for fulfillment and meaning, I believe these early feelings of guilt and outrage led me to the doorstep of a local Vietnamese temple. My spiritual discomfort and yearnings had suddenly presented me with my first learning opportunity. What would I make of it?

By the age of 46, I already agreed with the Buddha’s diagnosis of the existential problem we all face: “Life is suffering.” Now I was ready to confront it more scientifically. Was there a way out of suffering? And what was suffering, anyway? Was it self-generated, or imposed from the outside? Could I jump off the hamster wheel that keeps us all distracted until we die? The fact that Buddhism was a practice and not a religion was essential to my desire for a pragmatic approach to the problem. I wanted answers, based on experience.

This isn’t a journal about how I conquered my problems and fears through Buddhism. My experiences read more like a travelogue into new and unfamiliar territory, a spiritual adventure that led me to some unexpected places. There was quite a bit of blundering involved—sometimes bordering on the slapstick—bliss and pain in equal measure, and a mysterious case of mistaken identity. And plenty of suffering, which is a case of mistaken identity in itself.

In the intervening years twenty-plus years since I wrote this journal, many changes have taken place at Kim Son and Plum Village, though at the time of this writing, Master Tu of Kim Son and Thich Nhat Hanh, are still in charge of their respective monasteries. Both institutions were in their early adolescence at the time of my ordination. Many of the monks and nuns I knew then have moved on. Those who persevered, rose through the ranks. I have changed some of the names.

To my Vietnamese brothers, sisters and friends, thank you for welcoming me into your world. I remain grateful for your practical advice, humorous insight and patience with my radical cluelessness. I learned, but slowly. Please forgive any inaccuracies or misstatements.

Gratitude also to the many spiritual seekers, skeptics and agnostics who listened and talked, advised and cajoled, laughed and cried with me along the way. To those who weren’t there, I trust the journal speaks for itself.

American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies by Michael W. Kauffman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The story of the Lincoln Assassination is something I learned in the 4th grade, again in the 6th, again in high school. I read the textbooks, took the tests. What stuck in my memory was boiled down to a few sentences of "fact," many of which were set aside by the author, Michael Kauffman.

The author's meticulous research has opened up an incredible bonanza of overlooked information, resulting in an amazing account of the long, stumbling conspiracy against Lincoln. The idea was to kidnap him, originally, and take him to the Confederate capital of Richmond. The opportunities for this abduction presented themselves, but plans went awry. Finally, the desperate decision was made unilaterally by Booth to murder Lincoln at a performance at Ford's Theatre.

The details of the assassination, the escape of the fugitives, the federal effort to capture the suspects, the chaos of the aftermath, the long and complex pursuit of Booth and Herold, the trials and executions, are riveting.

I spent my youth in Virginia and the Washington D.C. area and had no idea of the drama that unfolded along the Potomac River and in Maryland during the chase. I am inspired to revisit those locations and see what is left there of the scenes described in the book, the swamps, the plantations, the small settlement towns.

It was a smaller world. There were fewer people in it, and many of them were related. Connections were quickly made. Gossip travelled rapidly. The Civil War was in effect still raging, even after Lee's surrender. Passions were high. John Wilkes Booth, an actor of renown on the stage believed that he would go down in history as a liberator from the tyrant Lincoln.

This book accomplishes a major restructuring of our understanding of this national tragedy.


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