Wendy Johnson: The Whole Earth Is Medicine

It is impossible to summarize a dharma talk so undomesticated and wild as the one delivered here by Zen teacher and master gardener Sensei Wendy Johnson. With passion and grit, Wendy invites us into the poetry of koans, our family stories that “bring the mind to a stop and rearrange our molecular structure so that we can better live in apocalypse […] and uncover what we’re meant to do.” Wendy’s koan from the Blue Cliff Record says, “Medicine and disease subdue each other. The whole earth is medicine. What is your self?” Wendy urges us to see outside of binary views and to live fully and poetically because “a breakthrough depends on poetry”. “How do you make medicine out of poison, how do you make healing out of a broken heart, how do we hold someone we love so much who is traversing the Great Matter? Of course we know how we do it. . .fresh, radical, poetically, light-heartedly with deep footsteps.”