My grandfather, a history professor, focused much of his research on the Church's (murderous) treatment of heretics during the Middle Ages. His findings prompted a wariness towards organized religion that remains strong in my family. I was raised as a third-generation Unitarian, but have thought of myself as Buddhist for a few years now.

Despite all this, I love Jesus. He greatly inspires me. Partly it's the sheer compassion he showed in so many Biblical stories. Partly, it's the mystery of the healings he performed--could they really have happened? Partly, it's the wise, pithy teachings that lodge in the mind, gently provoking for years: e.g., "The Kingdom of Heaven is all around you, but men do not see it." Partly it's how he always, always included the outsiders looked down on by polite society--routinely turning down invitations from the town elite to bunk with the tax collector, asking the Samaritan woman at the well for a drink of water, healing the Syrophonecian woman's sick daughter, and so on. Partly it's how he seemed to be struggling to overcome his own resistance to his destiny--those 40 days in the wilderness, for example--as though he could foresee the eventual fate of someone who so bravely went against society's grain.

Last night, Rodney Smith, the guiding teacher of the Seattle Insight Meditation Society, put it perfectly, encouraging us at Christmastime to "celebrate what consciousness can become."

And indeed I will. Merry Christmas!

A winter storm just finished having its way with us, after bringing days of snow and cold that left streets icy and slippery. I'm cautious about driving in such conditions, so for the most part I didn't.

But this morning, after a warm front finally swept in and left the streets newly bare of snow, I headed up to St. Edwards Park for a much-needed walk in the woods. Few other walkers were on the trail, but I had plenty of company: a wren rustling through the forest litter; chickadees calling from the Indian plum trees along the lakeshore; a Douglas squirrel leaping with impossible grace from the trunk of a fir tree to an alder branch.

This regular walking loop leads down through tall cedars and firs to the lake, then along the lakeshore and back up. The last leg of the route winds up out of the cedar/fir forest into a grove of tall alders. As I entered the grove and breathed in the sweet, earthy alder scent--especially impactful because there had been very little to smell in the chilly forest below---my heart leapt with happiness.

With that happiness came a memory from when I was an undergraduate student at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. As a biology student, I needed to walk or ski about a mile back and forth each day from the main campus to a smaller cluster of buildings where lab classes were typically held. During the long, dark winter months, when temperatures were far, far below freezing, we students hustled back and forth, swaddled in layers of wool and down, with only our squinted eyes and frosted eyelashes visible.

In that season of intense cold and dark, the odors of earth and vegetation were completely absent. But by early spring, after the sun had slowly inched higher into the sky, there eventually came a day when the sunlight falling on aspen trunks along the trail had strengthened enough to cause sap to liquify and flow again. On that day each year, the first smell of that sap after the odorless winter made me instantly, headily, utterly drunk with the happiness of being alive.

Some Zen teachers use the term "skinbag" to refer to our bodies, their intention being to encourage us to drop our attachment to our bodies and our other transitory worldly preoccupations. I take their point, but I also celebrate the way that our bodies' senses connect us to so much: to our emotions, each other, the knowledge of our aliveness, the natural world that surrounds and sustains us. The first aspect of Buddhism's Eightfold Path is Wise View--the understanding that we are so inextricably connected to everyone and everything else that any sense that we are separate selves is an illusion to be seen through. Surely our skinbags can help us experience the truth of the connection that lies beneath the illusion.

A few days ago, CNN reported the firing of an animal shelter employee who had mistakenly euthanized Target, a dog who saved U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan from a suicide bomber. The employee was accused of not following procedures correctly. The name of that employee was not mentioned in the news report because--not unexpectedly--many threats had been made against them.

It is easy to assume that with diligence, a human being can avoid making errors. What naturally follows from that assumption is the belief that any error a person makes must represent a moral failure on his or her part. When someone makes an error that has grave consequences, as in this case, we can be especially harsh in our judgments of their action.

However, cognitive scientists have learned that this assumption is not accurate. Human beings cannot completely avoid making errors, because the mind by virtual of the way it operates is error-prone. Research done during the last few decades has revealed the kinds of errors most commonly made, the circumstances that can make errors more likely (e.g., a procedure that's confusing in some way for a person trying to follow it), even the differences between errors commonly made by experts vs. novices.

Professor James Reason's taxonomy of human errors, which I encountered in grad school, drove home these points for me, because it was so easy to see that I commonly make many of the errors described in his detailed taxonomy. Take, for example, the category of unintentional actions, which includes actions that don't proceed as planned. This category includes two main types of errors: slips and lapses. You make a slip when you pour cereal into your breakfast bowl, then absent-mindedly pour coffee onto the cereal instead of milk. I certainly do this now and then. You make a lapse when you set your briefcase or backpack by the door so you won't forget it, but then leave without it (I made this error last week).

Professor Reason includes a wide variety of other types of errors in his taxonomy, which is laid out in his book, "Human Error."

I don't know any of the details about what went wrong in the animal shelter, nor should I. I don't think that the fact that we necessarily make errors absolves us of all responsibility for our actions, because we know from experience that we can make fewer errors by being more careful. But it seems to me that Professor Reason's taxonomy should suggest to us that cutting each other slack, especially when all the facts aren't available to us, is a wise approach.

Earlier this week, I found myself in my cubicle at work, tussling with a brown string tied around my left wrist. This string is my protection cord, which my dharma buddy C had tied around my wrist just a few weeks ago during the Seattle Insight Meditation Society's annual refuge vows ceremony. During that ceremony, the sangha members gather together, chant in Pali the commitment to take refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma (the "truth of what is"), and the Sangha (the community of Buddhists), then tie protection cords around each others' wrists. The cords serve to remind us of the vows we made until, impermanent as all things, they finally wear off our wrists and must be discarded.

This year, C remembered my story about the first time I took refuge vows with the sangha a few years ago. It happened that I had sat in an area surrounded by couples, so when the time came to tie refuge cords around each others' wrists, everyone around me turned away from me and towards their partners, leaving me feeling more than a little forlorn as they happily tied cords around each others' wrists and I was left to my own devices. This year, C kindly made sure to be sitting next to me, ready to tie on my cord--and such gratitude I feel for her compassionate act!

So why, then, was I trying so hard to wriggle this very special cord--sign of a friend's caring suppport as well as my spiritual commitment--off my wrist? The problem was that I'd followed a whim, asking C to tie my cord around my left wrist--my "hand of power" as I had joked, because I'm left-handed. But now I was looking ahead to a weekend receiving teachings from Younge Khachab Rinpoche, a Tibetan teacher. I realized that a refuge cord on my left wrist would likely look disrespectful to someone from a part of the world where the left hand is reserved for toilet activities and a protection cord would without question be tied around the right wrist.

So I tugged, wriggled, and fussed for a few more minutes, and to my delight was able to get the cord off my left wrist and onto my right. Now I was nearly presentable enough to be in the same room with Rinpoche. Only one thing was still lacking: I felt a strong call to polish up my Tibetan etiquette. In two previous weekends with Rinpoche, I'd seen his experienced students perform prostrations when entering and exiting the teaching hall. I hadn't known how to do those prostrations, and had settled for a Japanese-style pressing of my palms in front of my heart, hoping that I wasn't being terribly disrespectful. This time, I wanted to be better prepared to avoid a cross-cultural gaffe. So this morning, I googled for instructions for properly honoring Tibetan lamas, and found some detailed, step-by-step guidance. I practiced bowing to my laptop until I felt that I had memorized the steps. Now I was ready!

Earlier this evening, I took a seat in the meditation hall, and waited with the other students for Rinpoche to enter the room, feeling far more confident than last time. When he did, we all rose and began to bow in near-unison. Perhaps I wasn't the only one who had been googling etiquette rules. But our formality proved to be over-the-top for Rinpoche. With an eloquent wave of his hand and a gently humorous expression, he indicated that we should just sit down and make ourselves comfortable. To press his point home, he sat himself down, picked up a meditation cushion, and balanced it on his head, grinning, as we settled ourselves.

And thus was an ancient teaching conveyed to us, one that must have been passed down century after century by one great lama after another, perhaps starting with Padmasambhava himself: Don't get your knickers in a knot about unimportant things.

As Nicholas Kristof commented in his blog, On the Ground: We are all Haitians today.

My dear Dharma buddy C just mentioned this blog, having forgotten how to find it. Her email note made me blush, given how long it's been since I've written a word here. This post is for you, C, so you have something new to read. And if you (or Emma) start a blog, I will proudly link to it.

By way of a New Year's greeting, C had sent this beautiful thought a few days ago:

"My teacher Nyogen Roshi is fond of quoting his teacher, Maezumi Roshi, who said something like, 'It is impossible not to do your best. You just don’t think it’s your best.'” - Karen Maezen Miller, The Laundry Line

That generous thought came back to me a few days ago as I watched the 2001 Bollywood movie, "Asoka." I had known only a little about Emperor Asoka, who reigned during the third century BCE, and the movie inspired me to learn more.

Historical accounts differ and may be as much or more legend as fact. But they generally agree that Asoka's early reign was brutal. Some sources say that he dispatched a brother or two to gain his throne. Like an Indian version of Genghis Khan, he seems to have been ruthless in his quest to expand his empire to encompass the whole of the Indian subcontinent. He nearly succeeded in achieving his aim--but then he chose to attack the nearby principality of Kalinga (the present-day Indian state of Orissa).

His invasion of Kalinga proved to be especially bloody, leading to 100,000 casualties, by one estimate. On the day after the battle, the story goes, Asoka walked alone among the piled corpses and wailing survivors, slowly taking in the extent of the death and destruction he had wrought. The legend is that he cried out, "What have I done?," and renounced violence forever on that blood-soaked battlefield.

Emperor Asoka devoted the rest of his life to promoting the welfare of his subjects, and proselytizing Buddhism, at the time a minority religion in his homeland. He declared Buddhism to be the state religion. His missionaries, who included some of his own children, and those who followed after them, spread Buddhism as far as Rome and Egypt to the west, eastward to Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, and northward into the Himalayas and eventually into China and Japan.

In the following centuries, at the same time that Buddhism was growing deep roots in China and Japan, where it would become Zen; in Southeast Asia, where it would become the Theravada "Forest Monastery" tradition; and in the Himalayas, where Tibetan Buddhism would be the eventual result, Buddhism slowly died out in India, the birthplace and home of the Buddha himself.

Asoka's worldly empire did not outlast him for long, but his spiritual legacy is priceless. It is not a stretch to think that had it not been for Emperor Asoka's determined efforts, Buddhism would not have survived. His Holiness the Dalai Lama might be an illiterate peasant in a remote Tibetan village. We would know nothing of the sound of one hand clapping or mountains walking, and I would be doing something else on Tuesday evenings besides attending the weekly sitting of the Seattle Insight Meditation Society.

It's heartening to think that even if we start out life with our worst imaginable foot forward, even if we live for years as the most bloodstained tyrant of our age, or if in some other way our sheer badness strains imagination, good may be the eventual outcome of our life, through twists and turns of fate we never could imagine. It's a liberating idea indeed that if we just keep on doing our best--and Maezumi Roshi would say that's all we can do, anyway--our story, like Asoka's, will eventually end far better than it began.