Goatieodeo, the goat I’ve been caring for here on Orcas, (he didn’t really have an owner) didn’t show up for his grain last week. I found him under a cedar tree in the woods he’d lived his life in on the adjoining property. The timing was ironic as I had found someone who really wanted to give him a great home among lots of other animals on her stupendous farm. She planned to come meet him that very day. 

Throughout writing this spiritual autobiography, the image I keep seeing is a cross-section of a large tree.  Having analyzed the rings and cracks hundreds of times during my wood-chopping years, how the image feels at 61 years old, excites me. Words like pith, heartwood, sapwood, growth rings and rays give historic location to the themes, the growth rings, leading me to here.

This is a long story about my passionate explorations into the Chinese language, which I tried so hard to learn, and my near-ordination as a Buddhist Nun. The story also ‘outs’ me as a psychedelic stumbler-the first and last time I had the full experience of “Dragon”.

In some ways, chaplaincy is a call to work with prisoners no matter the field. Difficult life transitions often make a person feel imprisoned in their circumstances. They look to chaplains and ministers as a means of lightening the spiritual burden they feel.

This depiction of the Ten Ox-Herding Pictures, also known as The Ten Bulls, stems from the Zen tradition of Buddhism and represents the stages one goes through in taming the mind. Though of Buddhist origin, it is relevant to the journey of gaining mastery over one’s mind, and being in the world with the intent and gifts to benefit others regardless of one’s faith tradition or beliefs. I revised the text to make the series more inclusive and to express a non-denominational vocabulary.

I began studying Buddhism at the age of 14, at the prompt of an 8th-grade English teacher. He had written in the margins of a paper I wrote “your writing rings the bell of the dharma.” My life was forever changed by the deafening bells that rang within the walls of my heart when my eyes first set sight on the word “dharma.”

Recommended reading for prison work put together by me. This is a very general reading list. Many of these can be categorized under more than one heading. Please share this with anyone you know who is interested in working with the incarcerated.

My interest in Rime goes back several decades to the late 70s when I began studying Tibetan Buddhism. At that time, Tibetan teachers in the west were few and far between. A fledgling dharma student such as myself would take teachings from whoever came through, whether it be a Geluk, Nyingma, Sakya, Kagyu, or even Bon teacher. I didn’t know that much about the differences between sects, and didn’t see any conflict between the various teachings I had taken. Many years later, someone asked me what lineage I “was” and I was stumped for an answer. When I explained that I took teachings whenever and wherever I could, from whomever, the questioner said, “Oh, then you are Rime.”

It’s a few weeks short of a year since my beloved horse left his beautiful body behind. This means a year ago, I was having a lot of intimate conversations with him about his approaching journey, our impending separation, and how and where we could still be together in our hearts.

Chaplains help people find their interconnection with spirit and how it intersects with their life in the world.

 Chaplains spiritually accompany people through all and any of life’s transitions. Chaplains understand the truth of impermanence and the truth of suffering. They know how to be a spiritual companion, how to be fully present to another’s needs.

All my adult life I have wondered why I rarely meet men my own age. When I finished high school, the mystery deepened. The men I met were either older or younger than me. I remember my first day of working for the Post Office in 1986. I was twenty-nine. There was me and another new hire, a man who remarkably was the same age as myself. I scrutinized his face, his hair, his skin. So this is what it looks like, I thought. How unusual.

All Buddha’s teachings are aimed at inner transformation. The Tibetan word for Buddhist is “nang-pa la” which can be translated as “inside dweller, or “inside traveler.” Buddhism invites us to scale the Himalayas of our inner psychological constructs. The teachings of Buddha are aimed at recognizing and transforming our wrong view of reality, which is brought about by the tendency to identify ourselves as an independently existing entity.

This is an article from a 1999 edition of Body and Soul Magazine, from a chapter in Roger Housden’s book Sacred America. Dale Borglum and Roger recognized that though I was in a ‘Blue Collar” job I utilized my job to fuel my spiritual practice. Looking back, I smile.

Looking back, a primary area of wounding and healing I have had to resolve was in my relationship to Christianity.

I was born to parents who were Christians in the same way their parents were, namely, identifying themselves as Roman Catholics and going to church on Sunday.  As a child, I annoyed my parents with questions about the church, God, Mary, Jesus, and the old priest who snuck outside during mass and smoked cigarettes.

Hinduism began shaping my spiritual heart when I was in my teens, in the streets of Seattle. A group of Hare Krishna’s chanted and pogoed regularly in Pike Place Market, one of my first and favorite haunts as an independent teenager. I loved the drums, the tennis shoes, and haircuts. More than that though was a feeling of butterflies hatching from a place I was just remembering.

I have enjoyed a long love affair with sacred texts. My definition of sacred text or scripture is when revelations and understandings of the Divine are made available to one during the study of a traditional or nontraditional spiritual text. I started seriously reading sacred texts at the age of 14 and have continued to this day-mostly Buddhist texts and have studied Chinese and Tibetan to understand them more fully.

One day, when I was about 13, my mother brought me home an odd-shaped little silver symbol. As she lay it in my hands, she said “I really don’t know why I am giving this to you other than I saw a man wearing one of these around his neck and I couldn’t take my eyes off it. I asked him what it was and he said it was the Jewish symbol for life, called a ‘chai. I knew I had to find one for you, so I looked and looked till I found one, and here it is.”

How Forest the Fish Helped Me Realize the Unnamed God. One day last week I drove up to our local post office. In front of me on a telephone pole was a hand-scrawled sign “My goldfish Forrest needs a new home.” I took down the phone number, hoping the little guy was still available to come and live with the other 150 or so fish in my backyard pool/converted fishpond.

I prepared for my morning meditation with setting the intention for clarity on the next direction for my life’s journey. I had been on the fence about whether to go into chaplaincy, through the Chaplaincy Institute for Interfaith Arts and Ministry, or going back to school for a psychology degree. I called in all my protectors and guardian angels, all my ancestors. I lit my candle, smudged the puja table with incense, and lowered myself to the zafu.

Gratitude is a slippery fish; one minute you have it, the next you don’t. Gratitude is a circular river: It may appear to start and stop, but does it? Gratitude is a gateway drug.