“When is daddy coming home?” I am pacing the living room, returning to the front window, looking out for my father. My mother doesn’t know. Daddy worked six days a week, making custom furniture. Evenings, he was out meeting with potential customers. When he wasn’t working, he was doing his political organizer thing. Daddy taught me to catch and throw a ball, took me to Dodger games, taught me to play chess. I cherished my time with him, but I couldn’t get enough. As a teenage

Roshi Jishu Holmes introduced me to demon work. It’s been an important part of my practice, but I didn’t see the connection with the hungry ghosts that Roshi Bernie Glassman was always talking about. Bernie was using a Buddhist image, beings with needle-narrow necks, starving because they could not swallow the food they craved. Bernie looked outward, vowing to feed all the hungry ghosts. His vow manifested in the Greyston mandala which brought jobs and housing, childcare and

In my graduate school days, C. Wright Mills was a giant. He was the sociologist who challenged the status quo. The Power Elite rattled cages. I loved his distinction between “personal troubles” and “public issues.” I look back now and wonder how it was that my doctoral dissertation landed so far from public issues. Somehow, I managed to write a dissertation which dealt only with a methodological problem. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that I managed to write 300-plu