June 1
will there be strawberries?
Looking possible …
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure, but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world. —Jack Gilbert, "A Brief for the Defense"
Our next Writing As A Wisdom Project gathering will be on Saturday June 1, from 9:00 am to 4:00 pm, in Greenfield. Space will be limited so please register soon if you would like to attend. To register, please leave a comment here, or email Catherine at neighborhoodzen@gmail.com.
Combining meditation in the Zen tradition with the practice of imaginative writing, Writing As A Wisdom Project invites intimate and creative study of the mind. Engaging playfully with language, we write together from prompts and read aloud, listen, and respond to one another’s words. Our writings and responses are explorations, and our conversations are based in imaginative insight rather than craft or critique. The day is appropriate for participants at any level of literary or meditation experience. Meditation guidance will be offered as needed.
Please bring paper and pens, even if you are accustomed to composing on a keyboard. Please arrive by 8:45 to get settled, so that we can begin promptly at 9:00. We will share lunch and everyone is encouraged to bring something (vegetarian) to share with others.
A contribution of $25 is suggested. Any donation is welcome but not required.
For further details or to register, please leave a comment here, or email Catherine at neighborhoodzen@gmail.com.
Ling’s Question from The Hidden Lamp,* story from China, probably 9th century
Ling Xingpo visited Master Fubei Heshang to pay her respects. They sat together and drank tea, and she asked him, “If a true word can’t be spoken no matter how hard you try, how will you teach?”
Fubei said, “Fubei has nothing to say.”
Ling was not satisfied. She placed her hands inside the opposite sleeves of her robe and cried out: “There is grievous suffering even within a blue sky!”
Again Fubei had nothing to say.
Ling said, “To be a human being is to live in calamity.”
*The Hidden Lamp: Stories from Twenty-Five Centuries of Awakened Women, edited by Zenshin Florence Caplow and Reigetsu Susan Moon
Catherine Gammon is a fiction writer and Soto Zen priest, ordained in 2005 by Tenshin Reb Anderson Roshi in the lineage of Shunryu Suzuki. Before beginning residential Zen training at San Francisco Zen Center’s Tassajara and Green Gulch Farm, Catherine served on the MFA faculty of the University of Pittsburgh.
Catherine’s new collection, The Gunman and the Carnival, is out this year from Baobab Press. Her novels The Martyrs, The Lovers (2023), China Blue (2021), and Sorrow (2013) are available on Bookshop, as well as at White Whale Bookstore and Riverstone Squirrel Hill, and her first published novel, Isabel Out of the Rain (1991), is available on Amazon. Catherine’s shorter fiction has appeared in literary journals for many years, as well as in a collection of stories from the 1970s, Beauty and the Beast (2012). A new short piece is forthcoming in great weather for MEDIA’s summer anthology.
Since serving as Shuso (head student) at Green Dragon Temple/Green Gulch Farm in 2010, Catherine has led retreats and given teachings in Zen and writing in the U.K., in Brooklyn, in Pittsburgh, in Massachusetts, and at SFZC’s Green Gulch Farm Zen Center. She lives in Pittsburgh, where in 2017 she started Neighborhood Zen.
