Art By Tali Landsman

We flew to New York and to Boston to visit our family. We packed very little for this trip, trying to see if we could manage with few changes of clothes, in preparation for our Shikoku foot pilgrimage, for which we intend to carry only one set of extra clothes with us. In NYC, we booked a hotel in midtown Manhattan and walked everywhere; not once did we take a taxi or use the subway. We even walked over the Williamsburg Bridge connecting the Lower East Side and Brooklyn, walked around Williamsburg and then walked back to Midtown Manhattan. Every day we tried new restaurants and visited some of our old favorites. We ate home cooking Jewish food at the 'Second Avenue Deli,' had tasty ramen noodles at 'Momofuku Noodle Bar' on 1st Avenue between 10th and 11th Streets. We ate fantastic Thai food at 'Somtum Der' on Avenue A, between 5th and 6th Streets. They recently received a Michelin star for their cooking, but have kept their low eatery prices unchanged, even thou...

From our modern hermitage in the remote mountains of Colorado, we flew to NYC. What a change.... A big snow storm has fallen over our area in the past four days, pilling up quite a lot of snow on the roadsides. It feels as if the mountains are attempting to keep us within their white hugging arms, and not to see us leave.... At home, I just finished reading the book "Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits," by Bill Porter. In the book, the author interviews hermits living in the mountains, who practice the Tao, meditate and seek enlightenment and  immortality. One Taoist monk who has been living in isolation in the mountains since the 1930's, asked Mr. Porter who was this Chairman Mao that he kept mentioning. I could not help thinking how wonderful it must be to live in China and not to know anything about the Cultural Revolution, not to be affected by all the trauma that those times left on the Chinese people.  Another hermit said, "The mos...

I sat in the dentist's office, leafing through a magazine waiting for Jules to finish having his teeth cleaned. In the magazine I saw a photo of a woman running up a long set of stairs that lined a vertical mountain cliff. In the accompanying interview, she said that when she needs to relax, she goes for a trail run, the longer the better. For most people, relaxation means sitting on the couch with a book or a drink, but somehow this fabulous woman had re-wired her mind to view hard physical activity as relaxation. During this week I also thought about a book that I had read by a Tibetan Lama who was giving a talk in Aspen this week, about "Turning The Mind Into An Ally."   It is possible to pick and choose our thoughts and to train our mind to become our best friend, so that we can enjoy an active, strong, and beautiful body.  I believe that being active and doing physical work are paramount for our well being and that we should not "slow down" with age, but in...

Heaven is NOT some "afterlife" realm that one can only enter after shedding the physical body and departing from the physical, material world. We can enter Heaven right HERE AND NOW. What keeps us outside of Heaven are only our own grievances and unforgiving thoughts. It is very beneficial to do some preparatory work, in order to see where we have been stuck and how we can joyfully let go of our anger. In Zen Buddhism, the path to enlightenment includes examining our character and harshly grinding away all the sharp edges of our ego, until our True Self shines like a bright jewel. Buddhism lists 108 character or personality defects, that we all have to one degree or another. I have found that it is not necessary to go down the entire list of 108 faults we must examine and correct. With much honesty we can clearly see the many faces of anger that block us from Self realization and from enlightenment. Anger takes many forms. Resentment is hidden inside us, where we often choose...