Colleen Morton Busch

Author of Fire Monks

How can you keep your heart open and mind clear during a pandemic?

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Near the end of March 2020, ten days into the Bay Area’s shelter-in-place order, I reached out to Fire Monk David Zimmerman to inquire about the parallels between his experience protecting Tassajara Zen Mountain Monastery from a wildfire in 2008 and his current experience, as abiding abbot at San Francisco Zen Center’s City Center, during the coronavirus pandemic. Here is our exchange. May it open your heart, settle your mind, and help you to remember that we’re in this (and every) conflagration together. Tenzen David Zimmerman CMB: Is your experience during the … [Read more...]

“To grow back just what’s needed from what’s left”

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I opened my Wislawa Szymborska Collected and Last Poems this morning and there was a poem waiting, just the right poem for this moment we're all in together. Here you go...and in case you're wondering, as I was, a holothurian is a sea cucumber. AutonomyBy Wislawa Szymborska In danger, the holothurian cuts itself in two.It abandons one self to a hungry worldand with the other self it flees. It violently divides into doom and salvation,retribution and reward, what has been and what will be. An abyss appears in the middle of its bodybetween what instantly … [Read more...]

Hope nevertheless

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Fire Monks readers will remember Jane Hirshfield, if they don’t already know her poetry, as a steady, calming presence in the 2008 wildfire threat to Tassajara Zen Mountain Center. Because Jane lived at Tassajara during the 1977 Marble Cone Fire, she didn’t panic; she just got busy, meeting with visiting firefighters and Tassajara residents to share her knowledge and experience, but also clearing leaves, brooms, any potential fuel, away from structures. They didn’t know for sure that fire would reach Tassajara, but residents started preparing in case it did. … [Read more...]

Listen to Fire Monks!

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In January I had the honor of recording the narration for the audiobook of Fire Monks with the pros at Live Oak Studio in Berkeley, California. There's a nice write-up by the studio here. It’s been more than a decade since fire raced towards Tassajara, but the subject of wildfire and how we humans live with it is only more pressing today. Eighteen million California trees died from drought and beetle infestation in 2018 alone—and that’s a decrease from 2016 and 2017—making ready, upright kindling. The Camp Fire of the same year tore through the community of Paradise in … [Read more...]