Ron is a retired professor of Buddhist Studies, one of the founders of Dharma Realm Buddhist University at the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas in Talmage, and a community advocate in Ukiah and Mendocino County.
Posts published in “Essays”
Professional reformers, longtime activists, and stakeholders in the marijuana industry attended an invitation-only meeting at the Waterfront Hotel in Oakland January 9 to discuss plans for a marijuana ‘legalization’ initiative to be on the ballot…
Marking the beginning of a new year on January first is a foolish thing. January is a cold, wet month filled with gloomy skies. Check the obituary page, more people give up the ghost in…
I was working at the Tides Bookstore in Sausalito in the spring of 1970 when my book came out. I had been a Milwaukee Poet, and with my friend Chuck put out a little poetry…
No stocks or bonds, no savings account, no credit cards. Essentially I am an economic non-person, living on the cheap. The upside of this is no debt, the downside is few luxuries, at least of…
(The following excerpt is from a chapter by Anderson Valley resident Susan Robinson, of her recently published book, The Music from the Lighthouse — wherein we follow the journey of Autumn Pender, a writer and…
She moved as if she were visiting from a planet with a less dense and restrictive atmosphere; gravity seemed to affect her less and air could not gain purchase on her surfaces. With elegant terpsichorian…
We have one cat now, a twelve-year-old shorthaired gray named Django. We almost lost him eighteen months ago to complications arising from his extreme obesity—he weighed over twenty pounds—and in order to save him we became draconian masters feeding him half as much as we used to and splitting that lesser amount into four meals a day to encourage stomach shrinkage. The results have been good. Django has lost nine pounds, is noticeably more energetic and agile, and our veterinarian recently declared him fit as a fiddle.
(Terry started out in Utah, became a teacher, then moved to California and then to Mendocino County where she has been involved in school gardens, harvesting seaweed, and other community projects…) I grew up in…