Tenney and Megan each give talks on the final night of the retreat. Tenney brings in a collection of anecdotes to continue exploring the sustenance available when we allow loss and grief to permeate us and intertwine with the radiance and eternal quality of things that practice helps make palpable. Megan muses on the Prajna Paramita teachings and their grounding in our deep and primal relation to the maternal, evoking the receptive, embodied, and pre-verbal aspects of practice revealed in gesture, breath, and rhythm. The Mother of all Buddhas, Prajna Paramita is the Perfection of Wisdom; the loom of origins and the source; the Tathagata Garba or womb of Buddha nature that we also carry within us; original perfection.

 A group conversation follows the talks.

  (talks given March 8, 2025 at the Redemptorist Renewal Center at Picture Rocks in Tucson) 

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About us:

Desert Rain Zen is located in Tucson, Arizona. But almost all our activities take place on Zoom or as hybrid events, so you don't need to live here to practice with us.

For more information you can email us at [email protected] or find us at https://www.desertrainzen.org/ and on Facebook.

You can also find additional teachings and updated information about Tenney's various activities at tenneynathanson.com

Megan gives the third night retreat talk, bringing in several Issa poems that focus on impermanence, loss, and grief, then offering an extended meditation on “the world of dew / is the world of dew / and yet, and yet.” How can we allow ourselves feel this “and yet, and yet” fully, letting our hearts be broken when they are broken and feeling and working through our grief as deeply as we can? What makes it hard to do this, and how can our practice help us enter this difficult terrain and accompany our grief, allowing its transformation, and our own? 

A group conversation follows Megan’s talk.

 (talk given March 6, 2025 at the Redemptorist Renewal Center at Picture Rocks in Tucson) 

*

About us:

Desert Rain Zen is located in Tucson, Arizona. But almost all our activities take place on Zoom or as hybrid events, so you don't need to live here to practice with us.

For more information you can email us at [email protected] or find us at https://www.desertrainzen.org/ and on Facebook.

You can also find additional teachings and updated information about Tenney's various activities at tenneynathanson.com

Tenney gives the talk on the second evening of our retreat (the end of our first full day). Taking up three koans from The Blue Cliff Record that all concern the mysterious interweaving of the ephemeral and the eternal, he focuses on our mobile and multiple human responses to this intertwining of what’s poignant, painful, or tragic with a maybe unanticipated sense of radiance, timelessness, and serenity. 

 The Blue Cliff koans: case 82, “Dalong’s Flowers Like Brocade”; case 18, “Huizhong’s Seamless Monument”; and case 53, “Ancestor Ma’s Duck Flies Away.”

 A group conversation follows Tenney’s talk.

 (talk given March 5, 2025 at the Redemptorist Renewal Center at Picture Rocks in Tucson) 

*

About us:

Desert Rain Zen is located in Tucson, Arizona. But almost all our activities take place on Zoom or as hybrid events, so you don't need to live here to practice with us.

For more information you can email us at [email protected] or find us at https://www.desertrainzen.org/ and on Facebook.

You can also find additional teachings and updated information about Tenney's various activities at tenneynathanson.com

Tenney and Megan give introductory talks on the first night of our Spring 2025 Desert Sunrise Retreat, "The World of Dew." Issa's heartbreaking haiku for the death of his young child is a central focus of these opening talks, and of the retreat. Tenney and Megan each begin to explore the intertwining, in our practice, of our deepening awareness of the stillness and silence at the heart of things with the endless rising and falling that are its manifestations. How might "the deep samadhi of the universe" let us open more fully to our experiences of joy, and also of heartbreak and loss?

Tenney Nathanson Roshi leads Desert Rain Zen in Tucson, Arizona. Megan Rundel Sensei leads the Crimson Gate Meditation Community in Oakland, California. Together with Springs Mountain Sangha in Colorado Springs, led by Sarah Bender Roshi, these groups comprise The Open Source, founded by Joan Sutherland Roshi. The Open Source is part of the Pacific Zen School, co-founded by Joan Sutherland and John Tarrant.

(talks given March 4, 2025 at the Redemptorist Renewal Center at Picture Rocks in Tucson)

*

About us:

Desert Rain Zen is located in Tucson, Arizona. But almost all our activities take place on Zoom or as hybrid events, so you don't need to live here to practice with us.

For more information you can email us at [email protected] or find us at https://www.desertrainzen.org/ and on Facebook.

You can also find additional teachings and updated information about Tenney's various activities at tenneynathanson.com