BULLETIN
October 2025

“I think we need to break out of some sort of rigid solemnity about what we’re doing. This practice is fun!”
—Enkyo Roshi, A Little Bit of Zen
Dear Sangha,
We Zen students can be so hard on ourselves, so serious—it’s always work work work, practice practice practice—but it’s important to remember to celebrate sometimes, too. This Friday, October 3rd, the Village Zendo will be throwing a little party to honor the launch of the new website, Zen Women Pioneers, which features Enkyo Roshi and was created in collaboration with many VZ members. It sounds like a lot of fun, and I hope to be able to attend, and have a little fun myself.
I am not suggesting that our whole existence should be some kind of party (I personally have spent far too much time attempting to live like that, and it’s exhausting and pointless). This life is, after all, the grave matter—and there is much in it that needs to be attended to with the most serious of minds. And yet I do believe that there is room, too, for lightness, joy, celebration—indeed, these elements are essential. If we are to continue to do our work at the highest and most sincere level, we need to be able to step back every now and then, take a breath, relax, and acknowledge what we’ve accomplished with a smile (and, yes, maybe even a little pride). As Enkyo Roshi reminded me once at a retreat, it’s OK to be happy for a moment, and there should be no guilt in it. We all try so hard, after all, and it is important to recognize this—and celebrate it—before back into the fray once more we go.
With love and light,
Taylor Plimpton
Editor
OCTOBER CALENDAR
Thursday, October 2: Zazen and Dharma Talk by Mukei
Friday, October 3: “Zen Women Pioneers” Launch Party, 6 – 8 pm
Sunday, October 5: Online: Practice and Inquiry Circle
with Joshin Roshi, 9:30 am
In-Person: Body, Breath and Mind;
Intro to Zen with Howard, 9:30 am
Genjokoan Workshop with Ryoshin Hoshi, 2 pm
Thursday, October 9: Zazen and Dharma Talk by Jinno
Newcomers’ Meeting, 6:40 pm
Saturday, October 11: Zazenkai with Dharma Talk by Shinryu Roshi
Sunday, October 12: Zazen with Dharma Talk by Kim
Thursday, October 16: Zazen with Dharma Talk by HonGo
Sunday, October 19: Zazen with Dharma Talk by Ryoshin Hoshi
Thursday, October 23: Zazen with Dharma Talk by Ryotan Roshi
Sunday, October 26: Zazen with Guest Speaker Shodo Spring
Thursday, October 30: Zazen with Dharma Talk by Jisei
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
Friday, October 3, from 6 pm to 8 pm
In-Person *
RSVP HERE
LAUNCH PARTY
Please join us to celebrate the launch of our new website:
ZEN WOMEN PIONEERS
The site features Enkyo Roshi in the pilot project that aims to highlight
pioneering women in Zen Buddhism.
It was created in collaboration with many Village Zendo members.
Learn more here.
Special Guests in attendance.
* Opening Remarks and Film will be streamed online HERE
Light refreshments will be served.
Sunday, October 5
Online Only
Genjokoan: Fully Expressing Our Life
With Ryoshin Charles Kalmanek Hoshi
Sunday, October 5, 2 – 4:30 pm
In this workshop, we’ll introduce Genjokoan, one of the most important philosophical texts written by Dogen Zenji, a Buddhist poet, teacher, philosopher and founder of the Soto Zen school.
Genjo means “to fully manifest or express”; koan as it’s used here means “the heart of the matter." Genjokoan therefore means “fully manifesting the heart of the matter” or fully expressing the meaning of our life. It’s often translated as “actualizing the fundamental point.” I call it “the koan of everyday life.”
Our practice, when sitting zazen and in life, is to fully express and respond to the present moment, to reality-as-it-is, individually, in community and in harmony with the world. In zazen, we become intimate with ourselves and our conditioning: we see the ways in which we are caught up in attachment and aversion. When we experience moments of awakening, they have the potential to become another form of attachment. Dogen’s teaching is for us to be fully present to all of these aspects of our ourselves, without causing harm to ourselves and others.
Dogen’s use of language is original and is intended to move us beyond our conventional way of thinking. When you read Genjokoan, allow the words to penetrate your consciousness, like reading poetry.
This workshop involves small group discussion and sharing among participants. As such it will not be recorded.
This event will take place online.
Donation
The suggested donation is $40. Please consider any contribution you can afford if this is too much for you at this time. Your participation will be much appreciated.
Register: HERE
Sunday, October 26, 9:30 am
Guest Speaker: Shodo Spring
In-Person and Online
Open Reality
Only modern humans have imagined ourselves as gods…
And come to the edge of destroying life on earth.
Open Reality speaks to the world behind and beneath our daily collective trauma. It opens practical possibilities for creating a shared, flexible culture that knows the natural world both as family and as a working partner. It invites the reader to a world of possibility. What if industrial civilization isn’t the best that humans can do? What if we weren’t alone in the world, but embedded in a universe of conscious, intentional, powerful beings?
Shodo Spring is a dharma heir of Shohaku Okumura, and has also practiced at Minnesota Zen Center and San Francisco Zen Center. Her new book is Open Reality: Meeting the Polycrisis Together With All Beings. Her previous written work includes Take Up Your Life: Making Spirituality Work in the Real World (Tuttle 1996), and editing Shohaku Okumura’s The Mountains and Waters Sutra: A Practitioner’s Guide to Dogen’s “Sansuikyo” (Wisdom 2018), plus numerous essays in anthologies, and an ongoing monthly blog.
Shodo's practice focus has been engaged Buddhism, particularly climate activism. She participated in long walks in 2004 and 2006, and in 2013 led The Compassionate Earth Walk through the Great Plains along the northern KXL route. She began Mountains and Waters Alliance, hosted on a small farm in southern Minnesota; the book is an expression of that work. She recently retired from working as a psychotherapist in order to give full time to practice and teaching.
Join us in-person or online HERE
TEACHINGS
The following is an edited version of Sensei Fugan Dineen’s Dharma Talk, Riding the Great Turtle: Healing in Troubled Times, given 9/21/2025. A video of the talk is available on YouTube HERE.

Good morning. My name is Fugan, and I practice out on Cape Cod with an affiliate Sangha called Hyannis Zendo. . .
. . . Out here on the Cape, we know that fall is coming, in part because the osprey couple who live in a massive old nest across the marsh, just outside the windows here, they've left for the winter; and it's always a bit sad for us to see them go. And then I also think of the fish that they so expertly hunt, and the fish probably are feeling quite differently. And it's the last day of summer. Tomorrow is the autumn equinox. Night and day are of equal duration. Light and dark are in perfect balance. And this has me thinking about how things are feeling really out of balance right now, and we're living through a time when many things we've relied on seem irreparably broken or on their way there. Cracks, fissures, and wounds are appearing right in our families, in our communities, in our towns and cities, and in our nation.
And so this idea that there are wounds appearing, that we are in a time of great suffering, is something I think we're all feeling. People are suffering, the environment is suffering, and we come together here, and as Fusho, our Ino, chanted during the dedication to the Heart Sutra, we’re here seeking healing in our broken, broken world. . .
. . . Lately, I've been reading a book by the naturalist Sy Montgomery called Of Time and Turtles. And in it, she profiles a number of turtles who have been injured, and the people who spend much of their lives healing them. These people that have their hands full, quite literally. Although turtles have existed for hundreds of millions of years, before there were even dinosaurs, it's a really dangerous thing being a turtle today. According to Sy Montgomery, turtles are the most imperiled major group of animals on earth. Something like 20% of them die each year from human actions—car strikes, pet attacks, pollution; sea turtles getting caught in nets, ingesting fishing gear and plastics; climate change shifting their migration habits and putting them in peril—all this intentional and unintentional mistreatment that leads to such a high mortality rate. So the turtles that Sy meets in her volunteer work—at a place called Turtle Rescue League here in Massachusetts—are broken.
One is named Robin Hood, and he was shot in the neck with a crossbow arrow; many of them, like Pizza Man, had their shells cracked when they were hit by cars. And some were shattered. They have head trauma, broken bones, severed spines, infections, loss of limbs, some have lost their eyes. And yet, with the care and attention of the two women who founded and run this Turtle Rescue League, many of the turtles who seem like they were goners have survived, and many are released back into the wild.
They are tough and resilient, and the rescuers, too, are tough and resilient. They don't give up, even with gravely injured turtles. The turtles have this amazing ability to survive, and so the rescuers will keep trying to save their lives, even past the time when most people would think they were dead. Only when they become stiff with rigor mortis, or the smell of decomposition is in the air, do they give up. And even from the dead turtles they can sometimes harvest eggs and bring them to term. Natasha Nowick, who is one of the co-founders, says, basically, “If a turtle's organs are not spread all over the road, you might be able to save her.” They are icons of perseverance and serenity for a good reason. . .
. . . And as I read about these wounded turtles, I'm thinking about them carrying this history in the scars and fissures on their shells, and that they do this displaying equanimity and ease, and it makes me think of what we're doing here this morning. We come to zazen, at the beginning and throughout our lives probably, with our broken shells. Sometimes we come to sit and it feels like we're also smeared all over the road. And we don't leave those parts behind. We sit with fear, with doubt, with tragedy, sadness, all our cracks are on display.
Sy says that turtles live slowly. They breathe slowly. They heal slowly. This is a mark of their great understanding, their intelligence. And we come to the cushion again and again with this patience like a turtle, and we mend. And we don't know how we mend, but it's slow, breath after breath, maybe the wind outside in the trees or a truck backing up in that moment. We don't know, but we can relax. We can feel our bodies expanding as we breathe in and releasing as we exhale. And in Buddhist cosmology, Mount Sumeru, the center of everything, the core, sits on the back of the sacred tortoise, and that's where we sit in zazen. Her strength is right beneath us here and now, and so we can relax. . .
For the full transcript of the talk, click HERE
REFLECTIONS:
A Bud, a Fruit, and a Core
By Adam Seido Harrison Levy

I decided to eat an apple. Not any apple, but an apple from a tree that my wife and I planted twenty years ago, when our child, Alice, was born.
It was a gift from friends, and we had planted the sapling next to the barn, overlooking the fields.
We had just bought a farmhouse, got married, and had a baby—all within a year. We were high on life.
Under the sapling we also planted Alice’s placenta, which we had been storing in the freezer for months. We called it the Placenta Tree, and it grew fast and strong, just like the baby.
Now, twenty years later, while sitting on a rickety wooden chair, I take a bite of the apple.
My wife is now my ex-wife, and the baby is now a young woman attending college, and I am no longer that young man. A bud, a fruit, and a core. Each stage is distinct. All as it should be.
I throw the core in the high grass. And now it will return to the earth.
Finally content, I lean sleepily back in the chair, and as I do, I am stung in the back by an angry wasp.
I cry out, and my yell echoes off the barn and out into the fields.
Tasting the fruit of the vine and then, a moment later, the sting in the back. Each stage distinct. All as it should be.
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

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