One teaching I have been leaning into these days is the Three Tenets of the Zen Peacemakers.

1. Not-Knowing
2. Bearing Witness
3. Taking Action

I changed my name.

I went into retreat as Craig Hase.

And I came out of retreat as nico hase.

What happened?

It's that time again:

On September 15th, Devon and I will enter yet another cloistered meditation retreat. If all goes as planned, we'll emerge again on December 15th*, bright as polished coins.

Truth be told, it always feels a little jarring to duck out of the world for a quarter year. But this time, what with COVID and BLM and the SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT ELECTION IN OUR LIFETIMES . . . well, it's even weirder.

Lately I am right up against my nonsense. All the limitations, the bad little habits, my tight spots and weak spots and the silly things I say.

My goodness, it's wonderful.

As many of you know, we just finished twelve months of celibacy. Yes, for an entire year, we were paragons of Buddhist purity, chaste as medieval cherubs, and wholeheartedly uninformed about the wily ways of eros.

So it seems more than a little funny that we've found ourselves talking pretty much nonstop about sex of late.

Lately I've been thinking about my dissertation. It seems ancient to me now, a project from another time, but those conversations I had in the fall of 2015 and the winter of 2016 (before the election; before all of this) still mark a turning point in my own life: the long moment when I began to confront my own whiteness, my privilege, my participation in systems of oppression, and also the ways in which my own Buddhist communities had upheld those systems in their unwitting allegiance to a very comfortable status quo.

More to the point, though, I just haven't felt up to posting. The world is on fire. Try as I might, I can't think why anyone might want to read what I have to say.

Nevertheless, here I am. Fumbling in the dark for a few words that might reach across the divide.

Ecstasy comes from two Greek roots: Ex, meaning "outside of." And stasis, meaning "constrained or stable or stationary."

So to be ecstatic is to stand, at least momentarily, outside of boundaries, beyond what is stationary, stuck, or stable.

I haven't written a blog post since the unexpected advent of the worldwide pandemic that has, just in the span of a few short weeks, upended the assumed order of our personal, social, political, and (god help us all) economic lives.

Here’s what’s been happening in our world . . .