We're approaching the sad anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks. I was in lower Manhattan that day, and thinking of that terrible loss is still hard. The lower corridors of the World Trade Center used to be part of my daily commute. I walked from the PATH trains to the Chamber Street subway station five days a week, and I still see the whole route clearly in my mind.

By this time next year, for the 10th anniversary, a memorial park is supposed to be open to the public. The city promises a "forest" of 400 trees surrounding two huge reflecting pools built into the footprints of the fallen towers. The first 16 trees, 30-foot-tall swamp white oaks, were planted last week.

On Saturday, from 6 to 9 pm, the New York Buddhist Church on Riverside Drive, Manhattan, will be holding its annual 9-11 Memorial Floating Lanterns Ceremony. The NYBC is a Jodo Shinshu temple established in 1938. The ceremony will be both Buddhist and interfaith. Before the many lanterns representing the dead are floated out on the Hudson River, a series of interfaith prayers will be led by the Interfaith Center of New York. Food will be provided by the local Sikh community.

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Via the Rev. Danny Fisher -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama will give three-day teachings on the Heart Sutra and Gyalsey Thokme Sangpo's "37 Practices of a Bodhisattva" that will be available to the public via live webcast. And if you miss the live webcast, you can download and watch the teachings later. Very cool.

Catch the live webcasts on the Dalai Lama's website beginning tomorrow, September 8, and continuing to September 10. Sessions will be from 9:30am-11:30am and 1:00pm-3:00pm Indian Standard Time (GMT+5.30).  If you are like me and need help calculating time zone differences, here is a time zone converter.

My other recommendation is going to sound a bit odd, but it's a sermon by the Rev. James Ford, Unitarian Universalist minister and ordained Soto Zen priest -- "Jesus Was a Carpeter: A Sermon on Religion and Politics." I think some of you might enjoy it.

As you might see above, there's a new feature on Buddhism and equanimity, which is something I'm working on personally. Well, sort of working on it. At least, I've recognized I need to work on it. That's a start.

Anyway, after I wrote the article I found a post by NellaLou at Buddha Cabaret that begins with a quote from Insight meditation teacher Gil Fronsdal about equanimity, part of which I also had used in my article. In brief, it says equanimity is about not getting pulled off center by attraction or aversion. And to do that, it helps to be able to see the big picture and not get stuck in one side or another.

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As I mentioned in a recent post, I've been reading Zen teacher Grace Schireson's book Zen Women: Beyond Tea Ladies, Iron Maidens and Macho Masters. Here Grace Schireson discusses Zen convents and how they adapted Zen training practices for the specific abilities and cultural circumstances of women:

Studying the process of adaptation -- maintaining the intent of practice while appropriately varying the form -- can be useful for Western practitioners. For example, while most meditators face the wall or the floor in front of them, at times the nuns of Tokeiji temple practiced meditation in front of a mirror, a practice especially suitable for deconstructing a woman's attachment to her physical self-image, whether positive or negative. Addressing some of our culturally specific more stubborn Western delusions through adaptation is currently underway in the West. These adaptations, versus a rigid imitation of our Asian teachers, are an important component of our developing Western Zen practice. Studying women's adaptations may assist us in completing the transplantation of Zen to the West.

Let's discuss --

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