Karen Maezen Miller

the anniversary of what was

Karen Maezen Miller — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 03:58:22 +0000

Fifty years ago I was a college sophomore majoring in journalism and covering my expenses with a work-study job that paid $2.30 an hour. I’m not sure any of those things exist any longer except for college sophomores and, well, me. It was America’s Bicentennial, 1976, and we were, if not celebrating, at least recognizing our shared history. Streets filled, flags waved, bands marched, fireworks exploded. The war had ended and Nixon was gone. We had come through a terrible darkness. We couldn’t imagine how terrible a darkness could be.

I don’t believe that at age 20 I felt either pride or patriotism in my country. Those feelings would have been forced. What I felt was belonging. I had a place here, and I believed I would always have a place, a promise, a home and a future.

There are things we don’t need to say about who we no longer are.

But I will say them anyway. There may be many causes, many factors, and many failures that have led to this staggering point, but a single man embodies them all. A lone assassin, an enemy within, whose obscene greed and gluttony reveal his contrary purposes: to both possess and destroy everything. What was once home feels hollowed, hollowed of history, starved of promise, empty of decency and devoid of people. Very bad TV.

The irony, of course, is that he never felt he belonged. And in his rampage to take, and name, and own for himself what was once ours to share, he has guaranteed that he will never belong among us, he will never be free, he will never be brave. He will be a ghost, a shadow, a stain, a scratch on the marble, mold on the shower curtain, algae in the pool once built to reflect our better angels.

Photo credit: Reuters

this is how it is right now

Karen Maezen Miller — Mon, 04 May 2026 20:46:18 +0000

I said this a lot during the lockdown six years ago. “This is how it is right now,” I’d say to the people who had started meditating with me on Zoom (once we’d figured out how to do that). “This is how it is right now,” I’d say to my daughter as she was yanked from her dream of a life into the dismal captivity of her childhood bedroom. “This is how it is right now,” I’d say to every masked somebody who’d come close enough to hear me, knowing full well that I was saying it to myself. It was the only comfort I could muster for an unyielding, unmanageable, and incomprehensible catastrophe. It’s just temporary, I was reminding myself, although I didn’t quite believe it. Who could believe it? Sometimes temporary seems to last forever.

Infected or not, we had all been felled by a menacing illness that had no boundaries and no end.

Scourges come and go but some scourges come back worse than before. So I’ve been repeating this mantra again. This is how it is right now, and we know why, and we know who, but we do not know when it will come to its crashing demise. With the costs and casualties we are made to bear, with ignorant and untamed presidential impulses inflicting pain and horror worldwide, with every day dawning worse than the one before, we can be excused if we fall into a kind of personal paralysis. We cannot breathe. We cannot move. We cannot hope.

So let’s start by breathing. As you breathe, repeat to yourself, “This is how it is right now. This is only how it is right now.” But look up, look up! Things change. They are changing already. I am standing with you under an open sky.

This is a photo of the sky above the garden this morning.

erecting the sanctuary

Karen Maezen Miller — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 03:34:33 +0000

When Buddha was walking with his disciples he pointed to the ground and said, “It would be good to erect a sanctuary here.” Indra took a blade of grass and thrust it into the ground saying, “The sanctuary has been erected.”

— Case 4, The Book of Serenity

Photos by Rick Taizan McCleary of the Dewdrop Sangha retreat at Marillac Center, Leavenworth KS, March 19-22, 2026

get home safe

Karen Maezen Miller — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 03:51:29 +0000

I could write about the war, I suppose. About greedy, evil thuggery and all things Epstein. I could write about the terribleness of how it is now and what it will become. Instead I’m writing about this. It has a more hopeful ending.

One day last month I got on the freeway to go to an appointment downtown. The drive made me anxious, anxious because of LA traffic, the time of day, the miles to go, and yes, because of my age. Even before you lose the ability to do the things you’ve always done, you lose your confidence, and that’s more or less like losing everything.

But I made it there. Not on my first pass, mind you. The glass buildings had flown by so fast—all shimmer and glare—that I wasn’t sure where I was. I passed blocks lined in the tarps and tents of an urban encampment. When I turned into a parking lot to check the directions on my phone, I found a photo, an actual photo, of the building I was supposed to be at. I made a U-turn and, thank God, I recognized it.

The woman on the phone had said they had a parking garage but they also had valet parking. I pulled up to the valet stop, happy to have help.

A long time ago, I used to tell a joke about myself: “I don’t go anywhere they don’t have valet parking.” It wasn’t entirely true but it was funny. All kinds of things used to be funny.

My appointment was quick. Downstairs, I claimed my car and got in. Closing the door for me, the valet looked at me and smiled.

“Get home safe,” he said.

What a remarkable thing to say, a truly remarkable thing I can’t recall any valet attendant ever saying to me in all my carefree years of parking. Maybe that’s what people in his family said to each other every day and for good reason. A lot of people, good people, weren’t getting home safe anymore, and not because they were bad drivers. Too many dads and moms, wives and husbands, sons and daughters, kindergartners and grandparents, young people, old people, neighbors, shopkeepers, nurses, veterans, and soldiers weren’t getting home at all.

Everywhere, every day, everyone just wants to get home, and some won’t have a home to get home to, or a street, or a city, or a country. Where will it end?

I can’t get his words out of my mind, so I’ll give them to you.

May all beings get home safe.

Photo by Marcus Bellamy on Unsplash

what a girl in a bonnet can hear

Karen Maezen Miller — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 20:02:01 +0000

As a little girl I often wore a bonnet. When I first saw this picture of my big sister and me in an old photo album, I assumed a bonnet was what all little girls wore. But it wasn’t. I wore it because I was sickly, prone to perpetual colds, coughs, sore throats, and ear infections. There wasn’t much more you could do than plop a hat on a sick kid in the 1950s. Colds, old wives believed, were brought on by the cold. And earaches, I suppose, by a bitter wind.

At one point a doctor scolded my mother. If I didn’t get well, he said, I could lose my hearing. She must have been frozen in fear and shame to be thought a bad mother.

I had to wait until I was 3 to get the tonsillectomy that would help. The surgery required an overnight hospital stay without my parents. It wasn’t their choice; parents weren’t allowed to stay. It would be a few years before someone realized that children might need their parents when they were sick and scared, that mothers did not interfere with doing good. No, parents practiced medicine of a more powerful kind: calm, soothing, loving, and constant.

I have vague memories, images really, of that night alone. I was in a crib in a room with other children. I was terrified, although I didn’t have a word for what I was feeling then. It felt like my parents had disappeared and were not coming back. The room was big, I was small, and the night was long. There were pictures of cartoon characters on the walls, pictures meant to cheer us. But in the dark, they weren’t cartoons, they were monsters.

I’ve been thinking about that time, about fear and abandonment. About monsters that come out of the dark. And about those bonnets, my flimsy defense against the world.

In every day’s news I’m reminded that parents love their children. Children need their parents. And that all of us need helpers when we’re down and hurt. Families need other families. Neighbors need other neighbors, or that’s the end of neighboring and neighborhoods, towns, cities and countries. I’m reminded every day of what we’re not, and what we have become. An evil army of cartoon misfits and masked miscreants has transformed into monsters that blame the innocent and kill the good.

We can see it all clearly and with our own eyes; we can hear without interference; we know who’s lying, who’s dying, and which side is the right side. We speak out, we step, and we pray, hard.

“The eyes of the Lord are upon the righteous, and his ears are open unto their cry. The face of the Lord is against them that do evil, to cut off the remembrance of them from the earth.” — Psalm 34: 15-16

if not now

Karen Maezen Miller — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 23:41:43 +0000

There is a long-held view that at this time of year we should take stock of where we are and where we’re headed.

I subscribe to that. It’s a good time to renew our intentions and redirect our actions.

In Buddhism, “intention” refers to that part of the Eightfold Path which is called “right intention.” Right intentions are the reason we practice.

Buddha identified three kinds of skillful, or right, intentions:

1. Letting go of desire and attachment
2. Cultivating kindness instead of hatred
3. Wishing no harm to any being

These are the reasons we suffer and how we cause suffering for others, so they are important. But I suggest we be far more direct than that, far more literal in our aims.

Our intention must be to be completely, totally, wholeheartedly present in every moment of our life. You don’t have to be a Buddhist to see the merit in that. Maybe you wish you lived in the present, and hope that someday you will be better at it.

To inhabit each moment completely sounds like a tall order. You might think, Maybe buddhas can do that, but give me a break, I’m only human.

But it’s really simple. It comes down to this. To inhabit this moment right here now, you have to stay away from two things. Just two things.

1. The how come—which is you, thinking about the past.
2.The what if—which is you, thinking about the future.

Notice how often you are dividing yourself by ruminating on the past—past hurts, past events, and past people—or on the future, trying to get ahead of a possible problem, by anticipating and overthinking it. Too many of us rely on that kind of forecasting. What do I need to prepare? What do I need to prevent? We spend a lot of time trying to avoid a reality that doesn’t yet exist.

Just by doing that we lose the power of our complete, undivided attention on the present moment: the now, which is the only place and time we ever are. The whole of your life, your only life, is right here now.

Until when are you waiting?

Listen to this full dharma talk by clicking on the player below or by following this link.

Karen Maezen Miller · If Not Now

Top photo by Fallon Michael on Unsplash

Embedded photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

what I’m working on

Karen Maezen Miller — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 00:30:42 +0000

For my birthday my daughter gave me this monogrammed notebook. It fits in my hand. She inscribed it, “Take this with you everywhere. Use it for everything.” A few days ago I picked it up and put a pen to the pages. This is what I wrote.

People ask me what I’m working on now. They mean “What are you writing?”

I say “nothing.”

They seem surprised, since I’m a writer. And then I tell them that I was asked to write something this year, and I played with the idea that I would, that it was wanted and needed. But soon enough I found that I couldn’t. I didn’t have even one word with which to begin. My mouth is too full, I would say, as if that explained anything. Too full of anger and shock and disbelief. Full of every kind of betrayal, outrage, fear, and disgust.

“I have nothing to offer anyone,” I’d say. No hope, or peace, or resolution.

Instead, I said, “I feel as if I’m sitting at the deathbed of my country.” And what do you do when sitting at a deathbed? Nothing. You have run out of options, you are devoid of ideas. You simply sit in complete companionship, needing nothing, saying nothing, a steady presence. There are no words for that place. At least no words to reach it.

I wondered, when did this terror bloom? Not just on a grim election night a year ago, when the abyss yawned wide before us. We were afraid long before that.

Still and all, what a year it has been. Did we survive? Will we?

Straightaway where I live there were the horrific wildfires forcing our evacuation into the inconceivable. Would we still have a home? A street? A town? We met this moment, my husband and I, with spontaneous bouts of Covid, suffered in nameless hotels in farther reaches until we were allowed back home to a house intact, yes, still standing, and yet littered in ash and debris, amid miles of eradication, a war zone, a bomb site. A bad omen, an unthinkable metaphor.

My hair kept falling out. I stopped sleeping. Well, I stopped sleeping past 3 am or 2 am or 11 pm. In any case, thus began the end of sleep and a nightly vigil of wakefulness and worry. Because after the fires we were swept up in a flood of insanity and destructiveness, vengeful desecration, a national collapse too sudden to have been imagined in anyone’s worst fears.

That was their power: our new government turned our worst fears against us, leaving me to wonder, why do they hate Americans?

Because they hate America, that’s why. Because these bitter hearts have not been loved enough, liked enough, or lauded enough. For whom enough will never be enough. As though the most adolescent, evil instincts are unleashed by paunchy, pasty misanthropes who couldn’t get a date to the prom. Does it all boil down to junior year?

I tried to remember the last night I allowed myself to fully rest, feeling safely restored to sanity and security. It was election night 2020, when I was certain this reign had ended. Who would have guessed five years ago that our pillars and principles were so fragile, so deeply ill-favored? But we’ve seen them crumble into towers of dust in an instant and we cannot turn away.

What have I done with my time besides write? Read. Forty some-odd books this year, all fiction, each one more honest, more truthful, more real, than our muzzled media where democracy dies in darkness.

Puzzles, puzzles, puzzles, I do puzzles. A crossword or two a day, word searches, spelling bees, you name it, every word puzzle there is and the archives too, each one less puzzling, totally solvable, than the puzzle that presents itself every day in the halls of government, the temples of justice, the mocking confines of our so-called national security.

Are they escapes? Yes! Escapes to logic, fact, grammar, and all the rules that once governed the course of human events. Let us unearth that relic of a world: ordered, dependable, useful. With the rule of law that decrees “i before e except after c.”

All this and yet there are bursts of light, hope, and faith found in the only place they live — in people’s hearts.

For strength, I find it in the people who join me — in person and online — to sit in silent harmony.

For courage, I find it in the strangers who join me on our streets and sidewalks, to the refrain of drumbeats and cowbells, to call out the lies, larceny and lawlessness of our nation.

As for faith, I find it in you, even as you find it in me.

And none of this is work. It is all love.

zen: the authentic gate

Karen Maezen Miller — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 19:35:34 +0000

We cannot attain genuine enlightenment unless we practice under an authentic teacher; we will be led to a spurious experience if we practice under a false teacher. ― Kōun Yamada, Zen: The Authentic Gate

When I started my practice I received a very specific imprint, a very specific instruction on working with a teacher.

At that time there was no internet, no Buddhist magazines (at least that I knew of), very few books, and even fewer books that a true Zen teacher would want you to read. There were no discussion groups. There was no clinical or workplace practice called mindfulness. There was not nearly as much psychology as there is now and I wasn’t yet aware of what came to be called Buddhist or Zen psychotherapy.

So all there was to go on was . . . my teacher.

His laugh, his sigh, his bare feet walking on the wooden floor.

And it was enough. I didn’t understand what I was doing or much of anything my teacher was saying, but it didn’t diminish the power of his presence. Later on I would come to realize that what I experienced was simply the manifestation of dharma. A true Zen teacher is the manifestation of the teaching.

So what constitutes a true teacher? A teacher is one who practices with a student, and practice is what constitutes a teacher.

Later on when I was a student of Nyogen Roshi, he would explain the student-teacher relationship like this: We all start out in a pitch black room. We’re blind and we’re lost. To find the Way, you want to practice with a teacher who has been in that room with a teacher, who has been in the room with a teacher, who has been in the room with a teacher, because that’s who will lead you out.

Zen is a living practice. Person-to-person. You won’t find the living teaching in a book or in a lecture, although books and lectures can lead you to it, the way your thirst can lead you to water, the sun can lead you to shade, and the wind can lead you to shore.

This post is based on a recent dharma talk about working with a teacher. Listen to it in full right here:

Karen Maezen Miller · The Authentic Gate

Photo by Takeshi Yu on Unsplash

this perfect way

Karen Maezen Miller — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 02:11:00 +0000

Here we are, in the midst of this perfect way,
and our practice is to realize it. — Maezumi Roshi

Chapin Mill Retreat
October 9-12, 2025
Register here

Every year around this time, the people who practice with me come together at Chapin Mill Retreat Center in Batavia, NY. There are many reasons we keep returning. Designed in the manner of a centuries-old Japanese Zen monastery, it is the perfect place to broaden our practice beyond the cushion. Through daily activities such as cleaning, cooking, meditative meals, and service training, we naturally extend our practice to aspects of everyday life.

But underneath all that is a more powerful reason. We want to realize our lives as perfect, and by perfect, we don’t mean without difficulty or disappointment. We don’t mean without fear or worry, or without pain, sickness, and loss. By “perfect” we mean “complete.” It’s easy to feel that our lives are inadequate, lost or shattered. We come here to sit in silent stillness and see through the broken pieces.

The three-day program includes seated and walking meditation, chanting services, Dharma talks, and private encounters with a teacher—me. Beginners are welcome. Newcomers fit in. Sitting alone and yet sitting together, we practice as one. Perhaps it’s time. It’s always time. And always healing.

survival training

Karen Maezen Miller — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 16:14:24 +0000

It started, as most things do, with me.

I was the one who needed encouragement. After that impossible November day, it no longer mattered what I believed. It sure as hell wasn’t true.

And then the fires from nowhere swept our homes. Everywhere, disasters exploded. Before long, we were broken by sickness, stress, and the colossal weight of immoral insanity. Alone, with no voice, no choice, and no country. Was there any way forward? Would there ever be a brighter day?

Nearly every month I gather with my fellow practitioners, the Dewdrop Sangha, on the evening of a full moon, to affirm our practice. To remember that we train for this: to face everything, for the sake of everyone, and to keep going. To reclaim the power of our presence and the scope of our responsibility. I give a talk to others but I’m talking to myself.

We can do this, together. This is the hard part, the training it takes for us to survive. I wish I could do more but this is all I have. If you’ve listened before, listen again. Listening brings us close.

On my site, you’ll see embedded players below. If you receive my blog via email without the embedded players, the links to each talk are here:

Encourage Others, Nov. 13, 2024
“I am very discouraged. What should I do?” The teacher replied, “Encourage others.”
The Lotus Blooming in the Fire, Feb. 12, 2025
We are in this together with all beings throughout all space and time.
The Dharma of Loneliness, May 12, 2025
Loneliness is a profound teaching and an opening to our own wisdom.
Everything is Mutual, July 9, 2025
Here we are, in the midst of this perfect way, and our practice is to realize it.

Karen Maezen Miller · Encourage Others

Karen Maezen Miller · The Lotus Blooming in the Fire

Karen Maezen Miller · The Dharma of Loneliness

Karen Maezen Miller · Everything is Mutual

Photo by Andrew Moca on Unsplash