I often struggle to come up with things to post. Most of the time I feel
my life is just so mundane and routine that I think "nobody wants to read
about this." Most people probably feel this way. However I find other
people's live completely fascinating and I love asking people about themselves.
So I came up with an idea to interview various bloggers. With that, I bring you
Zenchick.

BRIAN: Tell me how you first became aware of weblogs.

ZENCHICK: My friend Mike, who is a webmaster for a living, sent me a link just about a year ago to the weblog of an old friend of his from
college. She and her
husband have a website and they both blogged. I was in the middle of a long training period for my job, so when I got his email with the
link and his "I think you
should do this," I just hit delete.

B: When did you get around to discovering the blog universe?

ZC: Sometime last summer, Mike set up his own blog on Blogger and let me know. I went to Blogger, set one up, but never posted. Then I started to really
read Jenny's site, Mike's friend with the blog. We like to refer to her as "Jenny from the
blog". And found it intriguing. At this point, my training was
done and I had
a lot more time and room to breathe. When I started following Jenny's links and links from those links...well, I was hooked. Literally. I became totally overwhelmed reading all of these blogs at
one time, and completely unable to keep track of who was whom, where they lived, what they did, and how I found them. And yet, that didn't stop me...obviously.

B: Have the kinds of things you post about changed since you first started?

ZC: I think the range of things about which I post has broadened tremendously. And I think it took me a good long while to find my "blog
voice". I really think
I learn a lot by reading other blogs and seeing what people post about and what their style is.

B: How would you describe your blog to someone who never saw a blog before?

ZC: Well, I've been asked by a lot of non-bloggers what it is.
"There are no non-blogger,"
MAK says. "Only people who have yet begun to
blog." I usually
tell them it's an online journal of sorts that's posted on a web page. I get a lot of
blank stares. Someone once exclaimed, "Oh my gosh, aren't you worried about
people reading your private stuff?" I then explained to her that since I know
ahead of time that it's going to be on the internet, I only post stuff that I'm
comfortable with everyone reading. I also describe some of the specialty blogs, like a lot of the
Zen and Buddhist blogs I read, and that it's a whole little interconnected subculture.

B: You also have another blog about the loss of your
cat. Why did you decide to create a separate blog just about that?

ZC: Well, when I began blogging I couldn't have anticipated that my
fairly young kitty would get sort of suddenly sick and I'd have to have her put to sleep. I
was posting about it as it was happening, and found myself posting a great deal about what I was dealing with after she died. I had seen that some people had more
than one blog, sometimes a general blog and a specialty blog, a professional blog and a personal one, so I decided that I would start a new blog, just about my loss.
That way, anyone who was interested could still read those posts, but my regular blog readers didn't have to be subjected to it.
I find it very healing to write and when the kitty died I got an immense amount of
virtual support from the blog community, which I still get on the cat loss blog.

B: About that virtual support and the whole interconnected subculture, does it ever surprise you that you now have this whole
community of friends solely through blogging?

ZC: It surprises me daily! Not only that I have this 'community' of people who I've never laid eyes
on that I count as my friends, but that I've actually met
some other bloggers. I even posted my Amazon.com wish list on my blog, which I had seen around
but didn't feel comfortable doing at first. It seemed like asking
for gifts from strangers. Then along rolled my birthday and here come Amazon.com packages from bloggers! It was surreal.

B: What was it like meeting a blogger in person for the first time?

ZC: Well, ironically enough it was two days after the cat died, so everything was sort of surreal then anyway. The first one I met was
Vince who lives in San Francisco but was in Baltimore for a conference. We had lunch. Now, we hadn't emailed at
all, or commented that much
on each other's blogs, so it wasn't like "Oh my goodness...after all this time, here you are!" But it was very natural. So much so, that I went to visit him in San Francisco
about two months later. I would have to say that it was different when I met bloggers with whom I had corresponded a
lot. More of an adjustment period, I guess, to being with
them in person.

B: Let's talk about your spirituality. Tell me about Shambhala and how you discovered it.

ZC: Well, about nine years ago, one of the teachers at Shambhala held a private class in "mindfulness meditation." He sent out brochures to many
people and one
of the lists he got was licensed social workers, which I am. I had just begun to read about Zen
Buddhism as a result of a rather random conversation one day and I
knew someone at the time who was involved with Shambhala. She highly recommended this class, so I took
it. 90 minutes, once a week. About a year later I decided to go to the Shambhala center and find out what it was all about. I went for their regular open
house and went running the
other way. I wasn't ready. I was so un-ready, in fact, that if someone had asked me then, "Why didn't you go back to Shambhala?" I probably would have
responded, "Do you want pizza or Chinese food?" It wasn't even on my radar screen, going back or not going back.
Over the ensuing years I did a great deal of reading about different kinds of Eastern spirituality and practice, did T'ai Chi for a
while. Started a regular yoga
practice. For the last few years I had this nagging voice going, "go to Shambhala, you'll like it now," but I still wasn't ready. I don't quite know what made me
"ready" last summer, but I began going then, and it felt 180 degrees different than it did all those years ago. It felt right.

B: Is it easy to balance Shambhala with Judaism? Does one ever conflict with the other or do they compliment each other?

ZC: Well, Shambhala is a non-sectarian spiritual path, that's based on principles of Tibetan Buddhism. The basic notion is that, with mindfulness and the
cultivation of a mindfulness practice, in this case, meditation, we can conduct our everyday lives with wisdom and compassion. The aspiration is to create a
community, a society even, of dignity and compassion. So there's certainly no conflict
there and because it's not a religious path there are many others there who practice their own religion. I would say,
however that I struggle to make the two meet somehow. I feel a certain void at
Shambhala. I could never just go there and not practice Judaism anymore.
Conversely, I feel a lacking for me in Jewish practice that there is not a Shambhala-like component. So, I would say yes, it's fairly easy to balance it...I would like to
find a way to bring the two closer together though.

B: How so?

ZC: Well, there are some organizations that practice Judaism within a spiritual context.
Or should I say are esoteric within a Jewish context? Potato. Po-tahto. For instance a
retreat center in the Catskill Mountains of New York called Elat Chayyim. There they have integrated meditation, yoga, and social activism within
Judaism and I find in a place like that, I get both sets of needs met, my needs as a Jewish person, and my needs as a
meditator. Unfortunately there aren't any
places like that here in my little burgh.

B: Have you ever considered starting something like that yourself?

ZC: I have actually. There were a few people interested in it last year and we tried to get together, but it didn't really have any momentum. And
here the
Jewish community is quite conventional and homogeneous, so it just fizzled.

B: So now comes the part of the interview I like to call the Final Four.
Ripping off that creepy Inside the Actors studio guy, I've decided to end each interview with the same four questions.
Here we go. Whom do you admire most? In what way does that person inspire you?

ZC: I'd loathe to have to pick one person that I admire the most, but I will say that someone I have a great deal of admiration for is my acupuncture
practitioner. We are the same age and so I really relate to her. For years, before going back to school for
this she worked at Christie's Auction House in
Manhattan. That couldn't be any different from what she does now! She is solid as a
rock and the most compassionate person I have ever met. She is also very
present, much more so than most people I encounter, myself included! I am inspired, awe-struck sometimes at how open, mindful, and compassionate she can
be and I often think of her in situations where I'm not feeling grounded and think "What would she do? What might she say to me about this?"

B: If you could wake up tomorrow having gained any one ability or quality, what would it be?

ZC: Fearlessness. Both in the spiritual sense, as the focus of the Shambhala path, and in the functional sense. I worry a lot.

B: For what in life do you feel most grateful?

ZC: Well this is going to sound trite, but the ability to be present, even in the small doses I find it. It is
true though when I'm truly present, I am able to
appreciate all of the wonderful things I have in my life.

B: If you were guaranteed honest responses to any three questions, who would you question and what would you ask?

ZC: 1. My father: what are your secret dreams? 2. Anne Lamott: where ever
did you learn how to write like that?!? And will you teach me?! 3. Amy,
my late best friend: what's it like up there??

B: Thank you very much Zenchick. This was fun for me.

ZC: My pleasure!