Press & Blog

Peter Gabriel’s “Face the Wall,” from the new album o\i, is a song about looking death in the face. For anyone who has sat zazen, the title is also an instruction. This essay reads the song through Zen practice: why we sit facing a wall, how the song’s darkness compares with Zen’s emptiness, and why the most hopeful figure in the lyric may be the witness.

A six-shot revolver has six chambers. The album this song opens is called Dopamine Chamber. A spiritual reading of Fontaines D.C.’s “Six Shot Morning”: can you call the world beautiful when you can’t feel it, what happens when sadness becomes content for the screen, and why “always” sounds less like a promise than a sentence. Plus the Buddhist idea that clinging to permanence is where suffering starts, and what sitting offers in place of an audience.

Most days don’t announce themselves. A song that insists each one is “just another day on earth” ought to feel like a dismissal. To me it feels closer to a blessing. A spiritual reading of Brian Eno’s “Just Another Day,” newly back in print: is the word “just” resignation or release, why repetition works like a mantra, what it means to imagine putting it all behind us, and how impermanence cuts both ways, taking the hard days and the good ones.

When U2 released "The Greatest Show on Earth," one word stopped me: once. This is a spiritual reading of the song's questions about love, faith, and impermanence. Falling in love is the easy part. Staying is the practice. What does it mean to keep faith in someone you can never fully know, to ask whether a vow is a church of love or fear, and to love without clutching something that was always going to change? Along the way: Zen, hurt, and what's left when the lights go out.

Interpol’s new title track asks what we do with a mirror that weighs a ton. This essay reads it as a spiritual question: is silence the end of feeling or the far side of it? Drawing on my own experience of sitting with a loss I could not go around, and on what I tell my students about shortcuts, it makes the case that the silence you buy and the silence you go through are not the same.

The Atlantic’s profile of Willoughby Britton documents real harm from intensive meditation. This response, drawn from the Ten Ox-Herding Pictures, the Yoga Sutras, and the Eightfold Path, argues the missing ingredient isn’t caution but a suitable teacher, an ethical framework, and a community that notices when someone goes missing.

Not a canonical list. Seven Zen books that have actually done work in Andrew H. Housley's practice over the years — Taisen Deshimaru's Ring of the Way, Kosho Uchiyama on Dogen, the plainspoken teachings of Kodo Sawaki, Peter Matthiessen's grief-soaked Himalayan travelogue The Snow Leopard, Shunryu Suzuki's Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, Camus's The Stranger, and John Fante's Ask the Dust. Some from squarely inside the tradition. Two by writers who never sat. All of them, over tim

Take what you need. Andrew H. Housley on the slow, surprisingly difficult Zen practice of taking only what is required — and noticing how much is already here. Five practices for daily life: embracing the present moment, simplifying material possessions, silencing the mind's noise, non-attachment, and finding beauty in the ordinary. With wisdom from Shunryu Suzuki, Dogen, Ikkyu, and Basho. A reflection on abundance, appreciation, and what becomes shareable once you discover y

Our culture hides the dying from the living and calls death a failure. Ram Dass called it the culminating adventure. On the spiritual work of making peace with what we can't control.

Waiting Impatiently follows Ian, a well-worn yoga teacher and Zen student, as the world shuts down and he can no longer outrun his past. This short post introduces the debut novel, where the idea came from, what early readers said, and the promo video that gives a taste of the story.