Jane Hirshfield’s first poem was published in The Nation in 1973, shortly after graduating from Princeton University as part of its first class to include freshman women. She then put aside her writing for nearly eight years to study at San Francisco Zen Center, included three years as a monastic at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, the oldest Buddhist Soto Zen monastery in America.

Of her decision to enter into Zen practice, Hirshfield once said “I felt that I’d never make much of a poet if I didn’t know more than I knew at that time about what it means to be a human being.”

She shared more about her deep relationship with meditation in Noelle Oxenhandler’s 2023 Lion’s Roar article The Zen of Jane Hirshfield:

I just wanted to sit zazen, to follow the schedule, to plumb the question that had drawn me to practice in the first place: What does it mean to lead a human life?

…There’s nowhere more peripheral than a zendo. You’re sitting in the semidarkness, facing a wall. The practice of Soto Zen is shikantaza, just sitting. And it’s wordless — no koans, no verbal noting. You’re present, attending with your whole body and mind. And gradually you become permeable. You feel no distinction between what’s inside and outside the skin, and that unboundaried awareness reaches out in all directions, to all beings.”

In reflecting on the difference between writing and meditating, she said,

Both involve an intense listening. But they are different forms of listening. It’s as though you’re a deep-dish telescope pointed in different directions.

In poetry, you move from listening into a collaboration with arriving language—its rhythms, images, and associations. I’ll often hear the music of a poem before I find the words. In meditation, you move from that listening into life. Your life, felt as inseparable from the world’s life, is the expression of your practice…

Nothing new comes if we remain in a fixed position.

In a 2006 interview on Zen and the Art of Poetry, she called her time in formal Zen training “the diamond at the center of my life. Whoever I now am came out of that experience.”

That said, Hirshfield prefers not to be labeled a Buddhist poet. “I am a human poet, that’s all,” she told Spirituality & Health in 2013.

“Labels just get in the way. The fundamental wildness and mystery of existence slip every leash we try to put on them, and both meditation practice and the writing of poems are leash-slipping acts.”

Join Zen Peacemakers this Tuesday, September 29th for a conversation with poet Jane Hirshfield

Art, Activism, and the Practice of Peace:
A Conversation with Poet Jane Hirshfield

Tuesday, September 29, 2026
1:00pm - 2:30pm US Eastern

LEARN MORE AND REGISTER HERE

Dear friends, if you are considering attending the Bearing Witness Retreat in Auschwitz-Birkenau, now is the time to register and make your travel plans. Join us!

LEARN MORE AND REGISTER HERE

“When we bear witness to Auschwitz, at that moment there is no separation between us and the people who died. There is also no separation between us and the people who killed.

We ourselves, as individuals, with our identities and ego structure, disappear, and we become the terrified people getting off the trains, the indifferent or brutal guards, the snarling dogs, the doctor who points right or left, the smoke and ash belching from the chimneys.

When we bear witness to Auschwitz, we are nothing but all the elements of Auschwitz.

It is not an act of will, it is an act of letting go. What we let go of is the concept of the person we think we are. It’s why we start from unknowing. Only then can we become all the voices of the universe — those that suffer, those that inflict suffering, and those that stand idly by. For we are all these people. We are the universe.

The famous prayer about oneness, the Sh’ma Yisrael, begins with Listen: Listen, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.

Not only does oneness begin with listening, but listening also begins with oneness.

And Zen Peacemaker Order’s Buddhist service begins similarly: Attention! Attention! Raising the Mind of Compassion, the Supreme Meal is offered to all the hungry spirits throughout space and time, filling the smallest particle to the largest space.

Listen! Attention! Bear witness!”

— Bernie Tetsugen Glassman

Join us.

Bearing Witness Retreat in Auschwitz-Birkenau
November 15-21, 2026
Oświęcim, Poland

Zen Peacemakers from all over the world and all walks of life will gather again in Auschwitz-Birkenau this November to bear witness to the joy and suffering of life together. We invite you to join us.

Learn more and register here

support the retreat and the scholarships for those attending by donating here

Zen Master Bernie Glassman was a world-renowned pioneer in the American Zen Movement. He was a spiritual leader, published author, accomplished academic and social entrepreneur. Roshi Glassman was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1939. His parents were immigrants from Eastern Europe and he grew up in a Jewish family with a strong socialist orientation. After graduating from Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, he went to work for McDonnell-Douglas in California in 1960 as an aeronautical engineer, concentrating on interplanetary flights, and obtained a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from UCLA in 1970. Roshi Glassman spent decades teaching Zen and working in Socially Engaged Buddhism, founding Zen Peacemakers in 1996 and developing Bearing Witness Retreats. He passed away in Massachusetts USA on November 4th, 2018 from natural causes.

From “Why Bernie Kept Going Back to Auschwitz-Birkenau” article adapted from a blog post written by Zen Peacemaker’s founder Roshi Bernie Tetsugen Glassman.

Read the full article in the Peacemaker Journal

“Poetry and science each seek to ground our lives in both what exists and the sense of the large, of mystery and awe. Every scientist I know is grounded in curiosity, wonder, the spirit of exploration, the spirit of service. As is every poet.

~ Jane Hirshfield

Our friend, poet Jane Hirshfield, is known for writing about the interconnectedness of life and the crisis of the biosphere with, as Vladimir Nabokov, lepidopterist, poet, and novelist encouraged, “the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.” She has been the poet in residence for the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest in Oregon and for a neuroscience program at the University of California, San Francisco, and, in 2019, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

As Hirshfield has said, “Poetry and science are allies, not opposites.”

On Earth Day in 2017, in conjunction with the March for Science in Washington DC, she co-founded Poets for Science to support and celebrate scientific discovery and expression with an interactive installation of science poems that’s now traveled to universities, museums, research centers, parks, and festivals across the US.

Hirshfield spoke about Poets for Science and the power of poetry at the Nobel Prize Summit in 2023, a periodic high-level conference hosted by the Nobel Foundation and organized by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the Stockholm Resilience Centre to address critical global challenges.

To those wondering what poetry has to do with scientific facts, she said:

“Reality is foundational. No animal ignoring the actual will long survive. The presence of poetry at the March for Science was about advocating for a feeling — the sense of shared lives, shared fates, shared existence.”

Earlier this week, Hirshfield offered readings along with other poets at a Poetry for Our Planet event hosted by the Climate Museum and American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

And this November, the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University will host the first ever Poets for Science Gathering, “celebrating nearly a decade of public work linking poetry with scientific inquiry.”

What began as a response to scientific censorship has now become a movement, exploring the connections between poetry and science, with calls for poems, international gatherings, and campaigns integrating poetry, science, and social action.

Her poem “Optimism” calls our attention to this very resilience, creativity and persistence. To, as Maria Popova wrote, “the improbable and inhospitable environments in which life, against all odds, persists — the raw optimism of nature.”Nothing is fixed or finite, even in the midst of seemingly impossible situations.

OPTIMISM
by Jane Hirshfield

More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow,
whose foam returns over and over to the same shape,
but the sinuous tenacity of a tree:
finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another.
A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs —
all this resinous, unretractable earth.

Source: Given Sugar, Given Salt (HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 2001)

Join Zen Peacemakers on Tuesday, September 29th for a Peacemaker Circle with poet Jane Hirshfield

Art, Activism, and the Practice of Peace:
A Conversation with Poet Jane Hirshfield

September 29, 2026
1:00pm - 2:30pm US Eastern

Join Poet Jane Hirshfield and Geoff Shoun O’ Keeffe for a dialogue about art-making and activism, the ways that creative heart-mind increases compassion, and the perennial question of meeting the difficult with tenderness, humility, and courage.

LEARN MORE AND REGISTER HERE

> LEARN MORE ABOUT POETS FOR SCIENCE

LEARN MORE AND REGISTER HERE

Rabbi Eva Sax-Bolder is returning for the fourth year as ‘rabbi-in-residence’ at the Zen Peacemakers Bearing Witness Retreat in Auschwitz-Birkenau this November.

In this article, first published in Boulder Jewish News, she shares her experience with the Three Tenets — Not-knowing, Bearing Witness, Taking Action — at the heart of our approach to peacemaking.

“The place where you stand is holy ground.”
— Exodus 3:5

Each November for the past three years, I make my way back to Poland as the rabbi-in-residence at the annual Zen Peacemakers Bearing Witness Retreat at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Together with people from around the world, Mozambique to Finland, Prague to Seattle, Jewish descendants of the Shoah, Buddhists, Christians, people of no tradition at all, children and grandchildren of German perpetrators, we gather on that ground and simply walk and sit as we connect with this place. We do not debate history. We do not explain or fix. We bear witness.

People ask me, quizzically and sometimes with consternation in their eyes: Why do you keep going back? It is a fair question and one I do not fully understand myself. I was born into a family with a mother and grandparents who survived while other family members perished in this camp. My mother and her parents were the fortunate ones who walked out of Birkenau. That ground holds my blood, my name, my history. And yet I return not only to mourn. . . I return to practice.

The Bearing Witness retreat is grounded in the three tenets articulated by Roshi Bernie Glassman, the Brooklyn-born Zen teacher and social activist who founded the Zen Peacemakers Order in 1996. Their guiding principles are: not-knowing, bearing witness, and loving action. These tenets move in sequence, but they are not truly separate ~ each one flows into and holds the others.

Not-knowing means arriving without fixed ideas, without the armor of certainty.

Bernie used to say it is like entering as a child, with every bone, every cell, every hair of your body open to what is actually there. At Auschwitz, this means resisting the temptation to already know what one may feel, to make meaning, and to shape words to attach to the experience. It means letting the place land on you before you begin to interpret it or as we like to say, “we are there to listen to the soil.”

From that open ground, bearing witness becomes possible.

Not testimony, not performance, but a dissolving of the distance between the one who looks and what is looked at. When I sit on the frozen ground at Birkenau, reading and hearing names spoken aloud, I am not observing history. I am, for a moment, inside it. The crumbling barracks, the rusted wire, the absence that hums through every inch of this place. . . I let it enter me. I do not protect myself from it.

And from bearing witness, loving action arises.

Not planned or prescribed, but emerging naturally from genuine presence. Sometimes it is tears. Sometimes it is kaddish. Sometimes it is a conversation with a German participant whose relatives were Nazis that neither of us could have scripted. The action is not something we bring to the retreat. It is something the retreat gives birth to.

As a daughter of survivors, I grew up with a grief that had no edges. It was not spoken of directly; it lived in my mother’s silences, in what was not said at the dinner table, in the stories that stopped abruptly before the hardest parts could be revealed. This is the nature of intergenerational trauma. It does not end with the generation that endured it. It migrates. It settles in the bodies of children who were never there. When I first stood at Auschwitz-Birkenau as an adult, I felt something I had not expected: recognition. Not of a place I had visited, but of a place I had somehow already been carrying. The retreat has taught me that this inheritance is not only a wound, it is also a form of memory that the body shields on behalf of those who could not speak. Going back is a way of honoring what my mother and her parents survived. It is a way of saying: I have not looked away.

The Hebrew word teshuvah is usually translated as repentance, but its root is simply shuv ~ to return. It is the same root in hashivenu: return us. Return us to You Oh Mystery, return us to ourselves, return us to what we know to be true. Teshuvah is not about punishment. It is about the courage to turn back toward what matters and aligning with my truth~ the truth that is contained in all parts of me.

Each time I return to Auschwitz, I am doing teshuvah in the most literal sense. I am turning back toward the ground of my mother’s and grandparents’ survival. I am practicing the not-knowing that Bernie taught, arriving without answers, open to whatever arises. And I am bearing witness in the deepest Jewish sense of the word: eid, witness, the one who was present and does not forget.

Friends and members in my community wonder about a rabbi sitting at a Zen retreat.

I understand the question. But what I have found, year after year, is that this practice has deepened my Judaism rather than displaced it. Sitting in silence on that frozen ground, chanting Kaddish with Christians and Buddhists and people who have never entered a synagogue — I have felt the full force of our obligation to memory, to witness, to zachor~ to remember.

Bernie himself was a Jewish boy from Brooklyn. The three tenets he gave the world were not separate from his heritage. They were, I believe, another expression of who he was and what he came into the world to be.

Not-knowing is the beginning of awe. Bearing witness is the work of every Jew who reads names aloud on Yom HaShoah. And loving action? Is this not tikkun olam? The Zen frame gave me new language for something Judaism has always asked of us.

That is why I return.

Not only for my mother, or my grandparents, or the six million. I return because of this practice: arriving open-minded and open-hearted and staying present allows action to arise from love as a form of prayer.

The ground of that place still speaks.

As long as I am able, I want to be someone who listens as a way to remember.

— Rabbi Eva Sax-Bolder

Read the full article

Rabbi Eva and Zen Peacemakers from all over the world and all faith traditions and walks of life will gather again in Auschwitz-Birkenau this November to bear witness to the joy and suffering of life together.

We invite you to join us!

Bearing Witness Retreat in Auschwitz-Birkenau
November 15-21, 2026
Oświęcim, Poland

Learn more and register here

and/or support the retreat and the diversity of those attending by donating to support retreat costs and scholarships here

Rabbi Eva Sax-Bolder is a spiritual leader and artist, designing transformative learning, lifecycle and ritual opportunities to provide seekers with joyful and creative approaches to Judaism. R’ Eva retired as the Rabbi of The Shul of NY and most recently, as ‘Rosh Hashpa’ah, head of Spiritual Direction for the ALEPH Ordination Program, supporting the spiritual development of the seminary students and faculty. She is an alumna of CLAL’s trans-denominational Rabbis Without Borders and the IJS Clergy Leadership Program, she is also a teacher of Jewish Mindfulness Meditation, Mussar, Wise Eldering and the Jewish Studio Process, integrating the expressive arts into her rabbinate. R’ Eva maintains a private practice as a mashpiah, a Jewish spiritual director.

She is honored to return for the fourth year as the rabbi-in-residence at the Zen Peacemakers Bearing Witness Retreat in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

LEARN MORE AND REGISTER HERE

Bernie Glassman and Krishna Das met soon after the 2015 Native American Bearing Witness Retreat in the Black Hills and shared about the practice of Bearing Witness and their personal moving experiences of the retreats in South Dakota USA and Auschwitz-Birkenau Poland.

BERNIE: So we all talk about the interconnectedness of life, the oneness of life, but if we look carefully at ourselves and see how many aspects of life we shy away from or won’t come in contact, and then try to figure why. I think the biggest reason is fear.

KD: I had a lot of fear before my first retreat.

I thought, how am I gonna deal with this? Just the fear of going, being in that place where so much suffering happened and so much torture and so much inhumanity was manifest.

It was, I just didn’t know what was gonna happen to me, you know?

To go, and go through the process and the practice of being in the camp — it was very freeing from that fear that I had.

Just on that simple level.

And then to be talking about fear, how much fear there must have been in the camp at the time during the war. It was extraordinary…

I remember when you gave me those eight lines to work on from The Gates of Sweet Nectar, the actual translation as you gave it to me, the last line was “all of your sorrow, I make it mine,” which is the Bodhisattva taking on the sorrows of the world.

So when I brought that to you, you said, “Oh, I want the joy too, you got to put that in there.” So I changed it to “your joy and your sorrow.” It’s more inclusive…

That first time I was in Auschwitz, I had my harmonium with me because I had been singing in Europe. I took it into the women’s barracks and I sang Gopala, Gopala, which is the child Krishna. And I felt [the women spirits] felt such joy from that, because they were remembering their children and the love that they had for their children. That was a very beautiful experience, completely unexpected.

BERNIE: I think that’s the beauty of the Bearing Witness, is that what comes out is never really what is expected. There’s no planning it.

KD: Yes, there’s no planning it.

BERNIE: We just open, bearing witness and letting it be.

From ”What Shall I Sing to You” A Conversation with Krishna Das & Bernie Glassman

Join us.

Bearing Witness Retreat in Auschwitz-Birkenau
November 15-21, 2026
Oświęcim, Poland

Zen Peacemakers from all over the world and all walks of life will gather again in Auschwitz-Birkenau this November to bear witness to the joy and suffering of life together. We invite you to join us.

Learn more and register here

and/or
support the retreat and the diversity of those attending through scholarships by donating here

Excerpt from Letter to Bernie Glassman about Auschwitz Retreat ~ from Natalie Goldberg, published in the Peacemaker Journal

In June 2011, a hundred and fifty of us traveled from all over the world to Auschwitz to Bear Witness.

I had heard about these Auschwitz retreats. I was drawn, but too scared. It was too immense, too far away. How would I even get to Poland?

But I have always loved being a Jew and was haunted by the Holocaust.

When I taught in the public schools I read Night by Elie Wiesel aloud to my students and we had Holocaust projects.

A mother came to me one morning before class, “Don’t you think it’s too hard for sixth graders? My daughter had nightmares all last night after doing research for her paper.”

“No,” I said.

“If we look evil in the face, we will know it and not run from it.”

She nodded as she backed out the door.

Join Zen Peacemakers in Bearing Witness this November

This year, Zen Peacemakers from all over the world and all walks of life will gather again in Auschwitz-Birkenau to bear witness together. We invite you to join us.

Scholarships are available, and guidance for Raising a Mala to support travel and retreat costs.

Bearing Witness Retreat in Auschwitz-Birkenau
November 15-21, 2026
Oświęcim, Poland

Learn more and register here

Natalie Goldberg is a poet, teacher, writer, and painter. A student of Zen Buddhism for 24 years, she trained intensively with Katagiri Roshi for 12 years, and is ordained in the Order of Interbeing with Thich Nhat Hanh.

Natalie teaches writing workshops nationally based on the methods presented in Writing Down the Bones. Her other books include Wild Mind; Long Quiet Highway; Banana Rose; and Living Color.

> READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE

Excerpted from “Why Bernie Kept Going Back to Auschwitz” article adapted from writing by Zen Peacemakers founder Bernie Tetsugen Glassman.

When you come to Auschwitz, stay a while, and begin to listen to all the voices of that terrible universe — the voices that are none other than you — then something happens. During a retreat, a man of Jewish descent living in Denmark stood up one evening and spoke about forgiving those who had perpetrated cruelties at Auschwitz. A short while later I stood up and suggested: “And then what? Is that the end of it? Or is there something else to be done?”

If I really bear witness, if I become all the voices of Auschwitz, then it is myself that I am forgiving. If I see that at every moment a part of me is destroying while another part is being destroyed. A part of me goes hungry while another eats to excess. A part of me is paralyzed and a part of me takes action. Then it makes no sense to stay in the place of blame and guilt, of anger and accusation.

When I begin to see that all these parts are me, I can begin to take care of the situation.

When we’re bearing witness to Auschwitz, we’re doing nothing other than bearing witness to aspects of ourselves. It’s no different when we bear witness to poverty, homelessness, hunger, and disease. We see how one part of us does something, and another part of us suffers.

If we get stuck in anger and in guilt, then we’re paralyzed, we can’t act. When we see that all these demons are nothing other than us, we can actually take action. We can begin to take care of the other, who is none other than our self.

~ Bernie Tetsugen Glassman

Join us in Bearing Witness this November

Zen Peacemakers from all over the world — Jews and Poles and Germans, Palestinians and Israelis, Buddhists and Christians and Atheists, descendants of victims and descendants of perpetrators — will gather in Auschwitz-Birkenau this November to bear witness to the joy and suffering of life together.

We invite you to join us.

Scholarships are available, and guidance for Raising a Mala to support travel and retreat costs.

Bearing Witness Retreat in Auschwitz-Birkenau
November 15-21, 2026
Oświęcim, Poland

Learn more and register here

Attend an Information Session:
Wednesday, September 2nd
12:00 - 1:30 pm US Eastern
Online - Open Q&A - All are Welcome
LEARN MORE

Excerpted from Pilgrimage to Auschwitz article by Vishvapani published in the book Challenging Times: Stories of Buddhist Practice When Things Get Tough.

Read more

Excerpted from “What Shall I Sing to You” A Conversation with Krishna Das and Bernie Glassman on the Peacemaker Podcast

Read more

Excerpted from Long, Long Ago: Reflections on How It All Started by Eve Marko

Read more

Excerpts from Love Letter from Auschwitz by Peter Kuhn, originally published in The Mindfulness Bell.

Read more

From Why Bernie Kept Going Back to Auschwitz-Birkenau article adapted from writing by Zen Peacemakers founder Bernie Glassman about his returning to Auschwitz-Birkenau year-after-year, and the purpose it has served for both him and other peacemakers.

Read more

From Letter to Bernie Glassman about Auschwitz Retreat ~ from Natalie Goldberg

Read more

I accompanied Bernie Glassman to Auschwitz-Birkenau in December 1994, before anyone conceived of a bearing witness retreat at the site of the concentration camps.

[During that first visit,] I experienced a profound act of letting go. Certain things changed radically afterwards, first of wh…

Read more

For thirty years, each November, Zen Peacemakers have gone to Auschwitz-Birkenau, a place that has become a monument to intolerance. We come to sit. To face what most of us spend our lives turning away from.

We call this bearing witness.

Shortly after the 20th anniversary of the first bearing witness retreat in Auschwitz, Roshi Bernie Glassman shared what…

Read more

Late one authentic interior Alaska summer afternoon, our radios crackled with frantic communication. One of our helicopters had gone down. The helicopters were used during the summer months to shuttle equipment and crews to and from the even more remote exploratory drilling sites across the region. The calls were coming from one of those crews who had witnessed the crash near a landing site on the ridgeline high above the main camp. There were no other helicopters on-site. There were no roads, not even trails, beyond the main camp.

We gathered and shuttled personnel and gear up to the end of a tailings haul road. Fire and rescue teams made up of miners, millwrights, and other staff started up the steep, brush- and spruce-tangled slope on foot. Without bearings to an exact crash location, we spread out and followed the occasional shotgun blast from the crew at the scene—shotguns a necessity given the arctic grizzlies in the area. After twenty or thirty minutes, one of the responders radioed they were on scene. CPR in-progress. The rest of us followed their whistles and shouts to the scene.

I arrived with several others with some of the medical gear. The pilot had been pulled from the remnants of the helicopter by the crew he was picking up. Mangled wreckage was scattered through broken trees and brush. They had been doing CPR all that time. Given the extent of the trauma, I knew there was little we could do—but we did it anyway. I felt and listened for any signs of cardiac activity—the cardiac monitor lagging behind with whoever was carrying it up. There were none. I intubated and started an I.V. and rotated responders in and out of the CPR cycles—most of whom I had taught basic life support skills at the mine. A few rounds of I.V. epinephrine, a medication that can enhance CPR and, in some cases, prompt electrical activity in the heart. After some time, I called it. We stopped.

Without the focus and immediacy of the emergency care we’d been administering, a silence set in. The responders, now numbering more than twenty, awkwardly gathered themselves. The stillness, after what we’d been doing the last forty-five minutes or more, was both pensive and overwhelming. Bird song—a series of two slow, widely-spaces ethereal multi-tonal notes, came from the denser spruce below us. Varied Thrush, I thought to myself. I brushed the dirt out of the victim’s hair and face. One of my cohorts knelt and took one of the victim’s hands in his. I looked up at the crowd of people that, by a rich human mix of choices and chance, found themselves in that moment, in that place.

I stood and found some words. “We are here—right here, right now,” I said. “Take a moment, and just take it in. And I invite any of you, if you might wish, to acknowledge this—all of this—in whatever ways that seem right for you.”

Some stepped forward and knelt beside the victim. Some laid their hands, gently, on him. One soaked a bandana in water from his drinking bottle and wiped off the victim’s face. Some knelt with their hands in prayer. Others brushed the mosquitoes and black flies from the victim’s skin and blood. Unspoken, but expressed and felt, each in their own way—“We are here.”

------------

Just being present. This “just,” as a descriptive adverb, arises throughout Zen teachings. Dōgen and his successors have found endless ways of teaching that zazen is just sitting, that Zen is the practice of just being present in the moment as it arises, right here right now. What we are called to do in moments such as the one we experienced at the scene of a fatal helicopter crash above a remote mining facility southeast of Fairbanks, Alaska, at its core, may be just being present and responding to and in the moment—just showing up, just being human.

This just, though, is not the diminishing descriptive we often place on it in our language and our culture. This is an expansive just—an opening, not a closing. This expansive just, this “boundaryless, empty awareness,” as Peter Coyote reflected in a 2025 Zen Peacemakers podcast, opens ourselves to our “deepest, truest nature,” and all that might flow through and from this original self. This just being present, this emptiness, “doesn’t mean nothingness,” Coyote offers. “Emptiness means boundlessness.”

In a spontaneous, authentic engagement in and with the world and those with whom we share it, we often do not have the platitudes that customarily follow the “We are gathered here today” found in many, if not most, more conventional Western religious traditions. In the moments requiring unrehearsed, spontaneous response, the acts of gathering attention and mindfully choosing the words occur before dualities and discrimination, when one does not perceive the mountains walking or not walking. To find the words, or the absence of words, we need to settle in with the attention and mindfulness fostered by authentic practice.

We need to practice this just being present. We need to just sit.

References:

Coyote, Peter. The Three Tenets of Current Affairs. Peacemakers Podcast. Zen Peacemakers. May 29, 2025. https://voice.zenpeacemakers.org/p/the-three-tenets-of-current-affairs.

Bio:

An alumnus of the Zen Peacemakers (ZP) Bearing Witness Native American Retreat program, Peter Pierson worked 20+ years as an advanced life support paramedic in northern Minnesota, North Dakota, northern Arizona, and remote arctic Alaska—and for part of that time also as a Unitarian Universalist lay minister and regional emergency services chaplain.

A one-time Minnesota Regional Arts/McKnight Foundation Fellowship recipient, his radio essay work had been produced and broadcast with KAXE/KBXE—Northern (MN) Community Radio and CBC Radio One in Canada. His work has been featured previously in ZPI’s Journal and with Natural History Institute’s Real Ground, Minnesota Historical Society Press’ Voices for the Land, Vertical Jones, The Climbing Art, and other venues. He and his partner now live in the Kansas City area where, as a graduate of the Upaya Zen Center Chaplaincy Training program, serves as a volunteer chaplain in the Kansas State Correctional Facility-Lansing.

April 2, 2018

After seven months in the county jail, I received a thirty-year, no-parole sentence. I was then transferred to the federal prison hospital in Missouri. I went from a cellblock housing ten pri…

Read more

‘You’ll feel better about it when you go there’

This brief reflection has a title. There is a bit of a story behind that, which will become clear as you read.

Last Saturday, I participated in a Zen Peacemaker training and listened to a teacher share her experience of travelling to Auschwitz to participate in a Bearing Witness retreat ru…

Read more

Wandering in the desert, looking for the Promised Land: this is our life. The discipline of sesshin intensifies this impression of wandering; sesshin feels confusing, discouraging, disappointing. We may have read books that paint a pretty picture of the promised Land, what it’s like to achieve awareness of buddha nature, enlightenment, and so on. Yet we…

Read more

Last weekend, I met fellow Zen Peacemakers- Roshi Eve Marko, Mary O’Connor, Ken Daigu Hillman, and Rinzai teacher Cristina Moon in Minneapolis, and we joined hundreds of Buddhists, clergy, activists, and thousands of Minnesotans, and joined activities in response to the two month long invasion and occupation of their city, dubbed Operation Metro Surge. …

Read more