Welcome O’Keeffe Woodworks subscribers!

-Geoff O’Keeffe, Monday, April 7, 2025

Thank you for subscribing to my Substack pages. I posted much of what I’ve written over the years to serve as archive. And I add to that with great irregularity. I hope you find something inspiring there amidst the quite less than focused topical nature of what I do. Emerson may have commented about consistency being the hobgoblin of small minds. Maybe not. But I like the quote if only to have a chance to say “hobgoblin”. But moreover, I hold no fealty to being consistent nor predictable.

I don’t so much want to apologize, but rather, explain. Unlike the rigors of fifty years of Zen practice. As an amateur writer, I utterly lack discipline. I’ve read a hundred author bios, and I know all the various practices made famous by Hemingway, Didion, and others. Write every day, four hours. By noon. Then drink gin. Write drunk. Edit sobor. I haven’t managed that, or perhaps just the easy part. I’ll create something when I am inspired, and there may be a convention center sized parking lot in between efforts, empty of cars.

So, thank you for your interest in this broken string of commentaries.

A quick word about who I am, then I promise not to repeat that. I would be “retired” had I planned well and not squandered my retirement in my twenties. So, I work full-time as Executive Director of Zen Peacemakers, an international, engaged social action non-profit made up of 6,000 members in 25 or so countries. See more at zenpeacemakers.org. I love my work. I volunteer and teach at Eon Zen Center in Boulder, Colorado where I am a Dharma Holder in the White Plum lineage. I live on five acres in a tinder box at 7,120 feet in the eastern foothills of the Rocky Mountains, am married with three adult kids and three grandkids.

One of the challenges I face posting—and many of you write and perhaps can relate—is that I have grown weary of my opinions. I am a Baby Boomer who opposed the Vietnam war, spoke out about civil rights, spoke for the Women’s movement, the environment, against nuclear weapons, the MX missile, El Salvador, ad nauseum. I shouted from rooftops since I was ten. Given sixty years of effort, I have to think that I have changed the minds of roughly zero people, perhaps having alienated thousands. Plus, resulting from countless hours of zazen, certainty about what is real has taken on a more gossamer texture. I could be wrong, and for every occurrence in this relative world, there are myriad perspectives about them. I also must admit that, righteously bolstered as I most often felt as to the importance of my positions, all too often I was emoting and distancing, putting someone else in their place, elevating mine, scoring from the three-point line.

But things still do need be said. Suffering, injustice, and violence are everywhere, and humans are causing it. One fairly young democracy is quickly falling into racist, theocratic, oligarchic tyranny. Silence is not what’s needed unless there are 250,000 of us sitting silently in front of seats of power.

So how do we proceed? What do I write?

Some know of Case 14 from the collection of Zen koans, Mumonkan, from Tang Dynasty China:

The Case
Once the monks of the Western and Eastern Halls were arguing about a cat. Nansen, holding up the cat, said, “You monks! If you can say a word of Zen, I will spare the cat. Otherwise, I will kill it.” No one could answer, so Nansen cut the cat in two. That evening, when Joshu returned, Nansen told him of the incident. Joshu thereupon took off his sandal, put it on his head, and walked off. Nansen said, “If you had been there, the cat would have been saved!”

Often, this koan pisses people off, and we don our PETA postures and do battle about humane cat treatment. Nansen may or may not have killed the cat. That’s less the point. This old story holds a powerful message for the predicament I and you face today: How do we remain alive to the harm and suffering around us without further dividing us? Indeed, how do we cut the cat in one?

Once again, thank you for following me and I’d love this to be more of a dialogue than an old man standing in front of the cigar store shouting into the wind.

Geoff O’Keeffe