PZI Events Calendar
W E L C O M E to the PZI Events Calendar! Here you will find all upcoming events and registration links for PZI Zen Online retreats, sesshins, and weekly meditations & talks. Search by individual event, day, or month. Save to your Google Calendar or iCal Calendar. No experience required to participate. All event times are Pacific Time. Questions? Contact Emlyn Guiney
F E A T U R E D
September 15 Sunday Zen: With John Tarrant & Friends
September 21 Daylong: With John Tarrant & Tess Beasley
October 22–27 Fall Sesshin: with John Tarrant & PZI Teachers
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ZEN LUMINARIES: The Asking: New and Selected Poems – Jon Joseph & Friends in Conversation with Poet & Essayist Jane Hirshfield
March 27 @ 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
Free – $500
Join Jon Joseph & Friends on Wednesday for a lively conversation with special guest Jane Hirshfield. All are welcome. Register to participate. Dana and donations grateful accepted.
Jane Hirshfield is an American poet, essayist, and translator. Hirshfield is also a Buddhist who received precepts at San Francisco Zen Center in 1979. Hirshfield’s poetry reflects immersion in a range of poetic traditions. Polish, Scandinavian, and Eastern European poets have been particularly important to her, along with the poetry of Japan and China.
It is arguable that the riddle, the existential joke of being, of meaning, of Dickinson’s ‘prank of the Heart at play on the Heart,’ is as powerful a source as song for the lyric poem. Central to Hirshfield’s vision is a kind of holy delight that is at the heart of riddles and koans.
—Lisa Russ Spaar (American poet)
From her interview with Tricycle Magazine in Fall 2023:
Jane Hirshfield on “asking”: “How now go on?” is a question more and more in awareness. It has several faces. One is, “How can I keep opening my eyes to each morning’s fresh news?” One is, “What can I do to be helpful in turning the world’s tiller in a different direction?” One is, “How to counter despair and my simple, profound disappointment in the course of our culture over my lifetime?”
The shift from fixity, assertion, and shouting into a spirit of asking and dialogue is itself the key. Asking turns the heart-gate from closed to open. What a gift, a life’s bi-directional Q&A with the immeasurable What-Is. My advice to young writers is often: “Open the window a little wider than you feel comfortable.” My advice in practice is to ask each thing, event, person you meet, “What is your teaching?”
Jon Joseph Roshi of San Mateo Zen and PZI created this series to support the hardworking innovators and shining voices of modern Zen: scholars, writers, poets, translators, activists, artists, teachers, and more.
All proceeds for each event, including teacher dana, go directly to the guest speaker. Event attendees are encouraged to give as generously as you are able, so we can offer deep thanks to Luminaries guests.
Our suggested donation range is $10 for PZI Members and $12 for Non-Members, but the scale is sliding depending on one’s ability to contribute. We also greatly appreciate Patrons, who help support the program with larger gifts of $50—500.
