A Choir Grows in Brooklyn

September 03 · Articles & Essays, Creative Expression

“May I support the life of boundless untold beings”

By Sandy Joshin Del Valle

One Sunday afternoon in September 2023, Hojin sensei announced to the sangha her intention to launch a choir at the Temple. She just needed a choir leader and sangha members willing to participate. No training in voice or experience in singing would be required. We would come as we were. All that was required was attendance; showing up, and willing to practice on our own. In essence, Hojin voiced the Three Essentials of Zen; great faith, great doubt and great determination, as her recipe for success.

Illustrating the Lojong—Slogans of Atisha

November 28 · Articles & Essays, Creative Expression, Zen Training

By Eliza Nappi

Former ZMM resident and MRO student Eliza is an artist who, during the Fall Ango 2023 art practice, combined two of her favorite things: illustration and “Inktober” She writes:

Book Review > Butoh: Cradling Empty Space

May 19 · Creative Expression, Retreats, Reviews

Reviewed by Hokyu JL Aronson

The lights dim in a black box theater while the stage remains illuminated at opposing angles. Right away nothing happens. You become aware of your own expectations, the state of your digestion, the other audience members. Perhaps they know something you don’t. And then, slowly, a powdery white figure begins to move. Crouched low, barely covered in ragged, stained garments. Have they been there the whole time, even when you entered the room? Or did they slip in while you and your friend sat down, checking your phones once more before turning off the alerts? Was the performer listening in on the audience’s conversations? How could they have been crouched there so long, not moving? Wait, are there two of them?

Excerpt: Creative Process as Art Practice

March 18 · Creative Expression, Mountains & RIvers: Zen Dharma and Practice journal, Sangha News, Zen Training

This excerpt is from Mountains and Rivers, the annual book-length journal of the MRO which features original contributions from dharma teachers like Hojin Sensei, an artist, ceramicist and director of training at Zen Mountain Monastery. Learn more here about the journal and enjoy this teaching Hojin offered on creativity, connection and spiritual integrity.

Hojin Sensei: You can do an entire art practice with your eyes closed, so it’s not about technique. It’s about connections, about staying connected, turning off those voices that judge. Or, let the judge do your work! What does ‘judging my work’ actually look like? What would a judge draw? I mean, give ‘em a pen! Say “go to it, judge,” you know. They’d probably be, like, “naw, not that. You’re going to do that? no way, that doesn’t look like art.”

Painting Enlightenment—Healing Visions of the Heart Sutra

December 03 · Creative Expression, Reviews

The Buddhist Art of Iwasaki Tsuneo

By Paula Arai

Reviewed by Chikan Bacon

Illuminated Journals

November 30 · Creative Expression, Sangha News, Zen Training · art practice, creative expression, fall ango, illuminated journal, Jody Hojin Kimmel Sensei

By Birgitte J. Haug

As fall ango came to an end, Monastery residents gathered to share their three-months of art practice. Led by Hojin Sensei, herself an artist, I felt that her deep interest in the work was contagious. Creative expression in art practice, one of the “eight gates” of Zen training, enriches our practice with something vital and uniquely alive.

Face To Face

April 27 · Creative Expression, Retreats · art practice, Hojin Sensei

Zen training in the Mountains and Rivers Order includes taking up creative expression—both the traditional Zen arts as well as contemporary arts—to deeply study the self through using our inherent human creativity.

Hojin Sensei spoke in March after her recent art practice retreat, “Face to Face,” offering these words: This exquisite magical display we call our body, our self. What is it? Of course ‘face’ does not always mean the physical part of the body. In another way it’s the surface of the mind’s mirror which is also being attended to—seeing our bodies, the directness with our embodiment, as a sacred awakened activity.

Book Review: Not Hearing the Wood Thrush

February 20 · Creative Expression, Earth Initiative, Reviews · ecology, poems, Winter / Spring 2019

Oh my gosh! How did the high privilege ever come to me to review this book? I am lost in it and continually astonished. Margaret Gibson’s newest book of poems, Not Hearing the Wood Thrush, is ripe and full and endlessly transcendent. Not hearing the wood thrush is a fine art that we would all do well to learn

She makes her way and takes us with her through the dozen doors and windows of her poems into the woods, the river, and the star fields.

Art-Making Joy

November 20 · Conversations, Creative Expression · art, art practice, art therapy, blindness, drawing, painting, sight

Michelle Seigei Spark, senior lay student in the Mountains and Rivers Order, spoke recently with Mountain Record about creative process, resilience and joy.

The Fork

October 07 · Creative Expression, Poetry · Summer / Fall 2018

by Chase Takusei Twichell

A wooden Buddha gazes down
upon my desk from a small shelf
painted the same color as the walls:
Chinese Dragon. Beside him,
a picture Lucy drew when she was six
shows a bird with human face
and the words Have fun being a parrot
written below it in parrot colors.

Earnestly I vow to become one,
sleek-feathered, able to fly pathless
above human traffic in a kingdom
of light and air, no suffering.

I can’t go on feigning surprise
at the kalpas it’s taken so far,
since they’re all my kalpas.

I follow the path, but it forks.
To the right, faint blazes ruckle the bark.
The trail follows the brook all the way to Nirvana,
where I have never been. To the left,
the path soon splits again: right to Nirvana,
left to the trail that forks.