July 2025

Village Zendo Bulletin — July 2025

BULLETIN

July 2025



Open your heart,
Open your eyes,
Caring, Acting, Serving,
Thus we live our lives
Crossing, crossing over from
suffering to compassion.

                                                —Enkyo Roshi

Dear Sangha,

My mom used to like to talk about how we humans have “built-in forgetters” in us. This explains, for example, why we tend to do the same stupid stuff over and over again. But it also hints at a kind of deeper spiritual pattern: the way we can have those occasional enlightenment moments in which we connect with that unnameable something within us, and for a moment or two (or a day or two), we remember who we really are—before inevitably, we lose touch with this truth, get swept up in the whirlwinds of everyday life, and forget once again. Retreats are a place where these particular circumstances are often played out—you know, how after a week of intensive meditation, we emerge, glowing yet grounded, certain of who we are and what it’s all about—and then a few days later, there we are, yelling at the cat. 

In this light, one might point to forgetting as the basic human condition, and remembering as our practice. Yes, this is why we practice—to return to ourselves, and remember who we are—and this is also why, ideally, practice is not just something we do on retreats or on the cushion but instead is a near-constant effort. That way, we can resist our built-in forgetter more consistently—never straying too far before we bring ourselves, again and again and again, back home.

The truth is, the whole “Who am I?” question has always terrified me personally, mostly because my only honest answer to that question—I don’t know—always felt like a kind of failure. In interview once, I told Roshi Enkyo about my great fear of not knowing who I was, and she said something I will never forget: “When you’re brushing your teeth, you’re just Taylor, brushing your teeth.” In the simplest and most compassionate of terms, Roshi reminded me that I am always who I am—that I am never missing, and that there’s no way not to be myself, no matter what I’m doing, or how far I stray. Even forgetting myself, as I too often do, well then that too, is just Taylor forgetting himself.

This is, I believe, part of Roshi’s everlasting legacy—she has reminded us all, at one point or another, of who we really are. More than that, she has taught us how, through practice, to remember ourselves. And this is truly the most precious and intimate of gifts.

How will you remember yourself today?

With love and great forgetfulness,

Taylor Plimpton
Editor
 

JULY CALENDAR

Thursday, July 3: Zazen and Dharma Talk by Seiryu

Sunday, July 6:  Online: Practice and Inquiry Circle with Joshin Roshi
                           In-Person: Body, Breath and Mind, Intro to Zen with Howard

Thursday, July 10:  Zazen and Dharma Talk by Jo An Sensei

Sunday, July 13: Zazen and Dharma Talk by Bokushu Sensei

Thursday, July 17: Zazen and Dharma Talk by Mukei

Saturday, July 19: Summer Ango Retreat begins. 

The schedules for the in-person and online zendos will be announced soon.


_________________________________________
 

ONGOING GROUPS  
 

The Bolivian Sitting Group meets online Saturdays: 8 am 

              Bolivia Zoom Meeting ID: 297 525 8394; Password: 1234

The People of Color Sitting Group meets online Saturdays: 10:30 am

How to Meditate meets Monday evenings online: 6:30 pm

Sorting Out Your Stuff meets online Tuesdays: 10 am

Liturgy Training: In-Person

               1st and 3rd Wednesdays of each month: 6 pm

Grace and Grit meets online, first Thursday of each month: 3 pm
 



Summer Ango Retreat, July 19 – August 3
 

  IN PERSON ONLY 

Summer Ango Retreat
 
Wisdom House in Litchfield, Connecticut
 
Explore the heart of wisdom and compassion at two back-to back summer sesshins—July 19 through August 3—at Wisdom House in Litchfield, Connecticut.

You may join us for part of a week, a whole week, or both weeks.

In-person and online practice at our location in Tribeca will continue throughout this period. For those not able to attend

the retreat, please remember that Ango can be a time of intensifying our practice in the midst of our ordinary daily lives of coming and going to work, our families and relations. This is a time when we personally commit to more zazen, study, and other practices, such as clear awareness of our interaction with others and attentiveness to the precepts.

For Information and to Register, click   HERE  

 

TEACHINGS



The following is an edited version of Mukei’s Dharma Talk given on June 19th, 2025.
A video of the talk is available on YouTube   HERE  

Mukei's talk appears in tandem with a talk given by Rev. Gihan Un-no of Soto shu and Abbot of Eisho-ji temple in Kitakami, Japan.
 

Good evening, everyone. Thank you for being here. 

Today is June 19, and it's recognized in the United States as Juneteenth. 

It’s also called Emancipation Day, or Freedom Day, and it is the 160th anniversary of the end of enslavement in the United States.  

Now, an interesting thing about it is that everyone assumes that changing enslavement ended throughout the entire United States, but in fact, in 1863 President Lincoln issued an Emancipation Proclamation to free the enslaved in the Confederate States. In the Confederate States. And it wasn't until much later—in 1865—that in the southern part of the Confederacy, in Galveston, Texas, federal troops made their way to announce to the enslaved that they were free. Two years. 

Also, June 19 is the 61st anniversary of the day the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed in the Senate. The Act prohibited discrimination based on race, color, religion, natural origin, and it allowed people to be employed, to vote, and—can you imagine—to use public facilities. 61 years. 

As was mentioned earlier, I sit on the Board of Directors for the Zen Peacemakers, and we've had Bearing Witness Retreats to different parts of the world. Usually, everyone knows about the one in Auschwitz, which is about 30 years old, but in April, we did our fourth year of Bearing Witness to racism in Selma and Montgomery. And it was, it is, very enlightening, because it takes a period of time to form relationships with people. We were 28 people, three of us were staff, and I learned a lot. I learned a lot that made me think about—well, racism hasn't gone away. It hasn't gone away. 

Most recently, in this past retreat, we heard from the mayor of Selma, who told us that the city of Selma is like a Blue Island in a Red Sea. And the reason why is because the funding from the federal government does not come to Selma at all. It goes to other parts of Alabama, but not to Selma. And the reason why is that's where the civil rights movement started. 

It was well coordinated, this movement. People were told, “Wear your Sunday best and bring your toothbrush.” And you had people who were old, you had school children, you had pregnant women—a large number of people who decided to go to march for civil rights. 

But the truth is, if you were to go to Selma right now, it's decimated. They've received no funding from the last hurricane—a tornado—that hit them. A lot of the stores and buildings are gone. Their only claim to fame is the bridge. You have to go outside of Selma to get food. There's nothing in the city you can get. There are a few businesses, but that's it. 

So 28 people descended on the town of Selma most recently, and the hotel we were staying in—we found out they weren't serving breakfast and dinner. So we went to a local coffee shop, and the woman who was the hostess was very kind and gracious enough to welcome us. She was quite overwhelmed the first day—when you have 28 people descend upon you, and you have vegan and non vegan—and then subsequently, she decided and planned that for the two days that we were there we would have a room where we could sit and have a meal and talk to people and get to know them. And then on Sunday, she announced, “You know, I go to church on Sundays. Nothing is open in summer on Sundays.” But she says, “I'll make breakfast for you before I go.” Now, the interesting thing was that she's getting ready to leave and she says, “I'm getting ready to go to church,” and she holds up a cup. She says, “You all know what you owe. Put the money in the cup, put it on the shelf, turn out the light, close the door.” There are those of us who know that something like that would never fly in any part of the world.

The focus of the retreat, like all these retreats, is to look at your inner or, I should say our inner white supremacist. We all have them. We live in a racist, in a supremacist society. And I think sometimes it's very easy to look away and say, well, that's not me. But that supremacist is internalized in all of us. In getting to know my own my supremacist, I’ve become familiar with it as the one I'm always waiting to be hit upside the head by, the voice that says, “Who told you to do that? That's what you get.” 

What do you do with that voice? Well, I think that's what we're here for. I like to think that's what we're here for, that Juneteenth is not so much about the enslaved being free, but all of us being free because we're all enslaved. We're all enslaved. 

You have a man of color giving you a talk. That white supremacist might be saying something about him talking up here. I'll leave that to you to discern what that's all about. But it's important for us in our practice to be aware of that voice, and how do we work with it? 

And I do believe that's how the Bodhisattva vows come into place. How do we serve all sentient beings, including the white supremacist? How do we transform the inner white supremacy? Not the other white supremacist, the inner white supremacist. And how do we enter into those opportunities that allow us to serve why we practice? That's what we do, and it's important for us to be mindful of that. How do we support each other? 

I think it's important on this Juneteenth to know the white supremacist, the white supremacists in all of us—and don't turn away. 

An interesting note is that this year the current administration sent armed forces to California to deal with the protest against the immigrants. In 1965 President Johnson used the armed forces to protect those marching for civil rights. 

So unfortunately, racism is something that will always be part of our lives. It just takes on different forms. I like to believe that this day, Juneteenth, is an opportunity for all of us to look at ourselves, and see and use that part of us that we don't want to look at—that white supremacist. How can we serve? Good evening, everyone. I sincerely appreciate it.
 

SIGNS OF RESISTANCE 

Photo Essay by Adam Seido Levy



For the past four months, at 10:30 every Saturday morning, about fifty people gather on a street corner in a small rural town in upstate NY to protest. 

I've been documenting these people, some of whom I know, and their handmade signs. This is true grassroots protest, and the numbers are increasing weekly. 
 
 
 





 

 
REFLECTIONS

An excerpt on war from Me, I Am No Savior, by Taylor Plimpton

 

   
Taylor Plimpton as a child. | Photos by Freddy Plimpton
     

Every night at the zendo, we chant the Four Bodhisattva Vows, also known as the Four Impossible Vows, the first of which is, “Sentient beings are numberless, I vow to save them.” It seems the work of the bodhisattva and the superhero—saving the world—is the same, and it’s no easy task. Because whether it’s freeing an infinite number of beings or stopping an apparently inevitable march to war—what’s the point? When faced with such massive undertakings, paralysis is understandable.

The odd thing is that when it comes to current activism, Americans seem far from apathetic. Faced with all our other broken policies on immigration, gun control, climate change, and so on, people are as outraged—and engaged—as ever. Why, when it comes to war, are we so strangely silent?

“There are so many front-runner crises that are bringing people out into the streets, that the possibility of war sort of gets lost in the mix,” says Stephen Miles, executive director of the Washington, DC-based advocacy group Win Without War. “When you’re being outraged about children in cages, corruption, gun violence—all these things that are happening right now—it can be hard to get people to think about the thing that might happen in the future.”

Of course, the other contributing factor is that war isn’t just a future possibility, but a current reality—it has been happening for more than two decades now, and Americans have simply become desensitized, lulled into ambivalence. “You certainly have seen a normalization of the reality of the United States being at war,” explains Miles. “It’s been non-stop since September 11.”

I have to believe that this cavalier acceptance of war must stem from a kind of obliviousness—from not realizing what war really is, and what it really costs. After all, for the vast majority of Americans, war happens across a great sea, in distant deserts; we see it, if at all, on a screen, as if it were a movie. But it is not so distant for the men and women of our armed forces, whom we send so casually into the great heat and sorrow of it—and it is not so distant for our “enemies,” who despite our rhetoric, are, after all, just human beings like us.

There is a Zen koan: Stop the fighting across the river. Please know: it is not “someone else” across the river.

On Win Without War’s website, a running ticker shows the “Total Cost of Wars Since 2001” as closing in on $5 trillion—but of course, that’s not the real cost. There are varying tallies of how many lives have been lost in the War on Terror, but a November 2018 paper by Brown University’s Watson Institute, “Human Cost of the Post 9/11 Wars: Lethality and the Need for Transparency,” provides what seems to be a reliable and unexaggerated count. Even underestimated, and including only the conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq, the numbers are staggering: As a direct result of the nearly 3,000 Americans who lost their lives on September 11, some 500,000 more human beings are now dead. The combat in Iraq alone accounts for almost 300,000 of those deaths. The United States has lost nearly 7,000 soldiers and sailors, and more than 53,700 have been wounded. Perhaps most heartbreaking, 265,000 civilians have been killed in these wars—completely innocent men, women, and children—200,000 of whom were torn from life in the senseless war in Iraq.

By all accounts, a conflict with Iran would be far worse than it was in Iraq—an “all-out war” with a nation that has some 865,000 soldiers, as well as proxy armies and sleeper cells throughout the region, and beyond. A battle with Iran might not stay “across the river,” in the end—here at home, soft targets could be struck, and American civilians could die, too. Some estimate that before all is said and done, a war with Iran could cost more than a million human beings their lives.
And yet, in the face of the very real possibility of another catastrophic, needless war, we remain far too quiet. 

As John Tirman, executive director at MIT’s Center for International Studies and author of The Deaths of Others: The Fate of Civilians in America’s Wars, reminds us, the American public’s odd lack of a response when it comes to war is nothing new: “Even at the height of the war, in 2005-07, when the violence was ripping Iraqi society apart, the American public’s reaction was somewhat muted—widespread concern, but not much activism…. The indifference I encountered was striking,” he wrote to me via email. Some reasons Tirman points to for the muted reaction of then and now: the lack of a military draft, the internet and social media as diversions, vicarious activism, and perhaps most disturbing, systemic racism in various manifestations: “Both the victims abroad, the civilian populations that are bludgeoned by US wars, and those who actually fight the wars for the United States are non-white.” Sadly, Tirman believes the anti-war protests we’ve seen—from Vietnam to the 2003 demonstrations—were the exceptions: “My best guess is that indifference is the norm.”
 
***

I am in the city on the eleventh of September. From the roof of my apartment building I look downtown and can see the smoke pouring across the river.

The day after it happens, the wind shifts north and the whole city smells of burnt rubber.

On the street, an African man is selling little American flags. “God Bless America,” he says. “How much?” I ask. “Three dollars, two for five.” I buy one. They are cheap and plastic and say Made in China.

Later, scrawled in purple chalk on the sidewalk pavement, I read the words, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”

On the fifth day, a Saturday, on the subway downtown, I find myself seated next to a black man in a trench-coat who sits on a Muslim cushion. I am ashamed that I am afraid.

That night, my girlfriend dreams she is trapped in a dark alley and throws a hotdog at a terrorist: a truly American response.

Of course, another truly American response is to go to war, which we do within a month. Everyone is united behind it—Democrats, Republicans, the public—and anyone who disagrees is labeled a traitor. On September 14, when Congress votes 420–1 to approve the Authorization for Use of Military Force, Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) is the lone dissenting vote: “Let us not become the evil we deplore,” she says, standing up on the floor of Congress, completely alone, and making her voice heard: perhaps the truest American act. Yet for voicing her opposition, Lee is called anti-American and receives death threats.

And then, for the vast majority of the next 18 years, I do the next truly American thing: nothing. I am extremely practiced at this paralysis. I go to work, eat food, watch TV. For a while there, I smoke a lot of pot.

(It should be noted that this is different than Taoist non-action, or wuwei, in which the sage seeks to emulate the great Tao—“doing nothing, yet leaving nothing undone.” The ancient Chinese philosophy does indeed critique our strange propensity for making things worse by trying to fix them, but this does not mean that the height of Taoist practice is to simply sit around on the couch.)

Oh, I do what I can, I suppose. I walk in the Climate March, my wife at my side and my little son up on my shoulders; I participate in the March for Our Lives to protest gun violence, as well. I sign online petitions to save the bees, to ban assault weapons, to make sure President Donald Trump can’t involve us in another war without congressional approval. I receive about 27 emails a day from various organizations asking me to support one noble cause or another, and when it’s feasible, I do. But for the most part, I do nothing.

Sometimes I try to write about it, but usually my musings go unfinished, and unread. I have a folder on my computer desktop entitled WAR, and in it are the beginnings of essays on topics ranging from whether Americans are safer because of our War on Terror (short answer: no) to whether the US should begin a new branch of the military devoted entirely to creation rather than destruction—a substantial force that can be deployed anywhere in the world to respond to natural disasters, and so forth—(short answer: yes, it should). I manage to finish a few anti-war op-eds, send some out, but none are accepted. The topic doesn’t interest people, I guess, which is something that interests me. Why? Why doesn’t anyone seem to care?
 

Taylor Plimpton as a child. | Photo by Freddy Plimpto
 

We communicate in three places online:

our email list, a Facebook page, and a Groups.io list

where we share events and information among the whole

Sangha. Explore these various ways of staying connected and

up to date here: 
https://villagezendo.org/connect-with-us/
 


Editor: Taylor Plimpton

Editor Emerita: Nina Shuka Klippel

Managing Editor/ Design & Production: Howard Thoresen


 




   
     DONATE  HERE     

In these trying times, the Village Zendo still relies on your support.

If you are able, please make a donation.


 



VILLAGE ZENDO – True Expression Temple

260 West Broadway Suite ~ New York NY 10013

 








Village Zendo · 260 West Broadway · #1G · New York, NY 10013 · USA

Connect with Us

Join Village Zendo's newsletter to receive updates on events, workshops and retreats, and our monthly bulletin.

Thank you for subscribing!