Mischief Makers

Jack Kornfield (My Kind of Monk), 2020

acrylic on panel  
30 x 24 in

Joan met Buddhist teacher and author Jack Kornfield when her sister Mimi was dying of cancer two decades ago.

“Since then, he’s been with our family as a resource,” she says.

Trained as a Buddhist monk, Kornfield – co-founder of the Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Marin County and the Insight Meditation Center in Massachusetts – has been one of the key teachers making Buddhist meditation and mindfulness accessible to Western students.

In that spirit of peace and equanimity, Joan painted him as “an island of serenity in a sea of riotous color.”

His books, among them “A Wise Heart” and “A Path with Heart,” have been translated into 20 languages and have sold more than a million copies.

In a New York Times interview in 2020, Kornfield was asked about how best to cope with the fear and anxiety of the covid-19 pandemic.

“With this pandemic, we have to accept where we are, the uncertainty of it, and then say, ‘All right, I’m going to steady my own heart and see how I can contribute,’” he said. “If you’re a scientist, you contribute in your lab. If you’re a poet, like those people singing from the balconies in Italy, send your poems out and buoy up the hearts of others. If you have the capacity, buy groceries for your neighbors. So it’s not about passivity. In Zen, they say there are only two things: You sit, and you sweep the garden. So you quiet the mind, and once you’ve done that, you get up and tend the garden with the gifts you’ve been given.”