Brent Beavers, a Buddhist hospital chaplain in the San Francisco Bay Area, had been on the job for less than a year when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. The virus upended routines at the intensive care unit where he was completing his residency, even as restrictions on visitors, meanwhile, changed how he did his job. 

Unable to be together, patients and families needed more help with the heightened anxiety, sorrow and grief that come with illness and death. He was often a patient’s only human contact besides the busy doctors and nurses.

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At the saw-toothed edge of autumn, violent forest fires obscured the noonday sun at Green Gulch Farm. Ominous clouds of charcoal soot and thick, vermilion smoke darkened the Pacific Northwest, covering the last rows of butter lettuce with ghost-gray ash.

Source: A Zen Harvest - Tricycle

A major New York Jewish organization co-hosted an event in New York this week to debate a subject that most in the city assume has long been settled — whether the swastika is good or bad.

While the notorious hooked-cross symbol has long been associated with the evil of Nazism and hate, it has for even longer been revered by Hindus and Buddhists, who argued Monday that swastika was misused by Hitler and its image should be rehabilitated.

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Lord Ganesha greets visitors to the home of Jagdish and Shobha Patel in Holland.

A figurine of the deity is positioned prominently in an altar set into a wall just off the kitchen, depicted as is traditional with the body of a man and the head of an elephant. One of several such depictions that the couple displays in their home, this one in porcelain and in the characteristic style of Lladró, it serves a purpose both spiritual and artistic.

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