2024:06.08 - Peter Coyote - Things As It Is, A Roving Discussion of Zen in the Vernacular

Exploring Nature, Culture and Inner Life

Join Host Steve Heilig as we bring back author, actor, and local celebrity Peter Coyote to The New School. They talk about Peter’s recent books—Zen in the Vernacular: Things As It Is, and Tongue of A Crow—and ramble across many other topics. Peter Coyote Peter has written five books including the international bestseller Sleeping Where I Fall and_The Rainman’s Third Cure: An Irregular Education,_ which reached second on the Marin County bestseller list. His third book, entitled The Lone Ranger and Tonto Meet the Buddha, outlines a long-standing series of classes he runs using acting, improvisation and masks to induce temporary ego-free states and is based on Peter’s work as a Zen Buddhist student of more than 40 years. As an actor, he has performed for some of the world’s most distinguished filmmakers, including Barry Levinson, Roman Polanski, Pedro Almodovar, Steven Spielberg, Martin Ritt, Steven Soderberg, Sidney Pollack and Jean Paul Rappeneau. He was the co-host of the Academy Award show with Billy Crystal in 2020. He is a double Emmy-Award winning narrator of more than 160 documentary films, including Ken Burns acclaimed The Roosevelts, for which he received his second Emmy nomination in July 2015. Steve Heilig Steve is director of Public Health and Education for the San Francisco Medical Society and the Collaborative for Health and Environment at Commonweal, co-editor of the Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, and a clinical ethicist at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. He is also a trained hospice worker and former volunteer and director of the Zen Hospice Project. A longtime book critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and other publications, he has authored more than 400 pieces on a wide range of medical, public health, ecological, literary, and other topics. #petercoyote #coyote #commonweal #newschoolcommonweal #conversationsthatmatter #tongueofacrow #poetry #zen #buddhism