Nada Brahma Sound Is Divine

Thursday, December 31, 2015

Just be ordinary


Elena Ray "Dreamstime"



"In Buddhism there is no place for using effort. Just be ordinary and nothing special.
Eat your food, move your bowels, pass water, and when you’re tired go and lie down.
The ignorant will laugh at me, but the wise will understand."


Lin Chi

The older I become





"The older I become,
the more I sense,
the less I speak,
the more I pray —
in ever so many ways."



Clarissa Pinkola Estés, The Virgin of Guadalupe & the Memorae Prayer
http://kaykeys.net/spirit/mary/memorae.html

Saturday, December 26, 2015

Sandstorm


Photo : Karoline Hjorth, Eyes as Big as Plates



"Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions.
You change direction but the sandstorm chases you.
You turn again, but the storm adjusts.
Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn.
Why?
Because this storm isn’t something that blew in from far away,
something that has nothing to do with you.
This storm is you. Something inside of you.
So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm,
closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn’t get in,
and walk through it, step by step.
There’s no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time.
Just fine white sand swirling into the sky like pulverized bones.
That’s the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine."



Haruki Murakami, from 'Kafka on the Shore'

Friday, December 25, 2015

I want to give thanks



Photo : Ernst Haas



I want to give thanks to the divine
Labyrinth of causes and effects
For the diversity of beings
That form this singular universe,
For Reason, that will never give up its dream
Of a map of the Labyrinth,
For Helen’s face and the perseverance of Ulysses,
For love, which lets us see others
As God sees them,
For the solid diamond and the flowing water,
For Algebra, a palace of exact crystals,
For the mystic coins of Angelus Silesius,
For Schopenhauer,
Who perhaps deciphered the universe,
For the blazing of fire,
That no man can look at without an ancient wonder,
For mahogany, cedar, and sandalwood,
For bread and salt,
For the mystery of the rose
That spends all its colour and can not see it,
For certain eves and days of 1955,
For the hard riders who, on the plains,
Drive on the cattle and the dawn,
For mornings in Montevideo,
For the art of friendship,
For Socrates’ last day,
For the words spoken one twilight
From one cross to another,
For that dream of Islam that embraced
A thousand nights and a night,
For that other dream of Hell,
Of the tower of cleansing fire
And of the celestial spheres,
For Swedenborg,
Who talked with the angels in London streets,
For the secret and immemorial rivers
That converge in me,
For the language that, centuries ago, I spoke in Northumberland,
For the sword and harp of the Saxons,
For the sea, which is a shining desert
And a secret code for things we do not know
And an epitaph for the Norsemen,
For the word music of England,
For the word music of Germany,
For gold, that shines in verses,
For epic winter,
For the title of a book I have not read: Gesta Dei per Francos,
For Verlaine, innocent as the birds,
For crystal prisms and bronze weights,
For the tiger’s stripes,
For the high towers of San Francisco and Manhattan Island,
For mornings in Texas,
For that Sevillian who composed the Moral Epistle
And whose name, as he would have wished, we do not know,
For Seneca and Lucan, both of Cordova,
Who, before there was Spanish, had written
All Spanish literature,
For gallant, noble, geometric chess,
For Zeno’s tortoise and Royce’s map,
For the medicinal smell of eucalyptus trees,
For speech, which can be taken for wisdom,
For forgetfulness, which annuls or modifies the past,
For habits,
Which repeat us and confirm us in our image like a mirror,
For morning, that gives us the illusion of a new beginning,
For night, its darkness and its astronomy,
For the bravery and happiness of others,
For my country, sensed in jasmine flowers
Or in an old sword,
For Whitman and Francis of Assisi, who already wrote this poem,
For the fact that the poem is inexhaustible
And becomes one with the sum of all created things
And will never reach its last verse
And varies according to its writers
For Frances Haslam, who begged her children’s pardon
For dying so slowly,
For the minutes that precede sleep,
For sleep and death,
Those two hidden treasures,
For the intimate gifts I do not mention,
For music, that mysterious form of time.



–  Jorge Luis Borges

Tuesday, December 22, 2015

Still the Mind


Art : Katia Chausheva



"What I am really saying is that you don't need to do anything, because if you see yourself in the correct way, you are all as much extraordinary phenomenon of nature as trees, clouds,
the patterns in running water, the flickering of fire, the arrangement of the stars, and the form of a galaxy.
You are all just like that, and there is nothing wrong with you at all."



-  Alan Watts, Still the Mind

Saturday, December 19, 2015

Remember it





"All I insist on, and nothing else, is that you should show the whole world that you are not afraid.
Be silent, if you choose; but when it is necessary, speak—and speak in such a way that people will remember it."


- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Friday, December 11, 2015

Love





"The question of love is one that cannot be evaded.
Whether or not you claim to be interested in it,
from the moment you are alive you are bound to be concerned with love,
because love is not just something that happens to you:
it is a certain special way of being alive.
Love is, in fact, an intensification of life, a completeness,
a fullness, a wholeness of life."


- Thomas Merton

Wednesday, December 9, 2015

The Sound of Silence







"When you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion.
It glides over you without shape or form, exactly like water.
Its color is silver.
And silence has a sound you hear only after hours of wading inside it.
The sound is soft, like flute notes rising up, like the words of glass speaking.
Then there comes a point when you must shatter the blindness of its words,
the blindness of its light."


- Anne Spollen, The Shape of Water

Monday, December 7, 2015

As you wander under the moon...


Photo by MARC LESTER / ANCHORAGE DAILY NEWS

The moon rises into view over the Chugach Mountains in this view from the Anchorage Coastal Wildlife Refuge
on Wednesday, Sept. 22, 2010, in Anchorage, Alaska.



As you wander under the holding of the moon,
stay embodied to the vulnerability as it washes through you.
Receive the transmission of lunar essence as it emerges from inside her.
 
In one moment of pure astonishment, behold the colors, the sounds,
and the somatic spinning of light that have arrived as her emissaries,
come to remind you of something the world has forgotten.
 
As you receive her into the coming days, do whatever you can to help others.
Hold them and offer them the gift of your kindness and your presence.
Show them how much you love them and how much you care about
how they are making meaning of their life as a sensitive,
alone, and connected human being.
 
Look carefully at the one you love for in the not-so-distant future they will no longer be here.
You may not be able to touch and to hold them tomorrow.
 
As the veil is parted and the secret moon inside your heart appears,
you will remember how precious it truly is here.
And what a rare opportunity you have been given
to break open in a star of love.
 


Matt Licata

Taking place around our world


 
 
 
"Without this world, we cannot attain enlightenment.
Without this world, there would be no journey.
By rejecting the world, we would be rejecting the ground and rejecting the path.
All our past history and all our neuroses are related with others in some sense.
All our experiences are based on others, basically.
As long as we have a sense of practice,
some realization that we are treading on the path,
every one of those little details, which are seeming obstacles to us,
becomes an essential part of the path.
Without them, we cannot attain anything at all – we have no feedback,
we have nothing to work with.
So in a sense all the things taking place around our world,
all the irritations and all the problems, are crucial."


- Chögyam Trungpa

Sunday, December 6, 2015

Wandering in the forests of the inner and the outer worlds.

Today I feel the need to share with you that...





 
There are pieces of you wandering in the forests of the inner and the outer worlds.
Do you sense them nearby? Do you feel them gathering around you?
 

Sadness, shame, loneliness, and grief.
Abandoned joy, unbearable openness, and long-forgotten aliveness.
Even the ancient ones anxiety, unworthy, and unlovable have arrived and are circling.
 

Look carefully as they are being assembled for an extraordinary meeting.
Your raw, sensitive heart – your tender, ripening body – the most outrageous host.
 

Open to your fellow travelers and keep them close, for they are weary from a long journey.
They have not come from outside to harm you,
but are only longing for one moment of your presence and your care.
They have not appeared in order to be ‘understood,’ ‘transformed,’ or ‘healed,’
but have come spinning out of the unseen only to be held.
Held, not ‘healed.’ For what you are has never been unhealed.
 

While they may appear as obstacles along the way, they are only seeking wholeness.
If you will provide sanctuary where they can unfold and illuminate,
they will reveal their essence as pure,
wisdom-allies on the raging path of metabolization by love.
 


Matt Licata

Saturday, December 5, 2015

No Knowing


Art : Wang Yi Guang



No Knowing

Do not follow the path I say

for it does not exist

you cannot find enlightenment

contained within a list

do not follow leaders

they cannot set you free

and perhaps now most importantly

listen not to me.
 

- Ikkyu

Tuesday, December 1, 2015

Birth, old age, Sickness and death






"Birth, old age,
Sickness and death:

From the beginning,
This is the way
Things have always been.
Any thought
Of release from this life
Will wrap you more tightly
In its snares.
The sleeping person
Looks for a Buddha,
The troubled person
Turns toward meditation.
But the one who knows
That there's nothing to seek
Knows too that there's nothing to say.
She keeps her mouth closed."



~ Ly Ngoc Kieu (11th century), Vietnamese Buddhist nun & temple director; earliest known woman writer of Vietnam
(poem translated by Thich Nhat Hanh and Jane Hirshfield)

Monday, November 30, 2015

Prayer





Grandfather,

Look at our brokenness.
We know that in all creation
Only the human family
Has strayed from the Sacred Way.
We know that we are the ones
Who are divided
And we are the ones
Who must come back together
To walk the Sacred Way.
Grandfather,
Sacred One,
Teach us love, compassion, and honor
That we may heal the earth
And heal each other.


-  Ojibway Prayer

Sunday, November 29, 2015

The Body





"The body is an instrument,
and unlike the mind is blessed with a permanent limitation.
Thoughts can soar and emotions can roar,
but the feet are subject to laws that keep them on the ground.
The body lives in the present, doing only one thing at a time.
It is a faithful companion in the search for presence
when it is given more attention and respect,
when one tries to listen to its messages,
even though they are expressed in
a language foreign to the mind."



— Patty de Llosa on befriending the Body

Sunday, November 22, 2015

I Am Not Old



Photo : Riitta Ikonen and Norwegian photographer Karoline Hjorth




I Am Not Old


I am not old…she said
I am rare.
I am the standing ovation
At the end of the play.
I am the retrospective
Of my life as art
I am the hours
Connected like dots
Into good sense
I am the fullness
Of existing.
You think I am waiting to die…
But I am waiting to be found
I am a treasure.
I am a map.
And these wrinkles are
Imprints of my journey
Ask me anything.



- Samantha Reynolds


Friday, November 20, 2015

Humanity





"Make the universe your companion,
 
always bearing in mind the true nature of
 
all creation - mountains and rivers, trees and grasses,
 
and humanity - and enjoy the falling blossoms and scattering leaves."
 


- Basho, Records of a Travel-Worn Satchel


Thursday, November 19, 2015

Farewell


Art : Christian Schloe, Farewell



Out of my deeper heart a bird rose and flew skyward.
Higher and higher did it rise,
yet larger and larger did it grow.
At first it was but like a swallow,
then a lark,
then an eagle,
then as vast as a spring cloud,
and then it filled the starry heavens.
Out of my heart a bird flew skyward.
And it waxed larger as it flew.
Yet it left not my heart.



~ Kahlil Gibran
from The Forerunner, His Parables and Poems


Connection






Siddhartha said someone who brushes

against you in the street has

shared an experience

with you for five

hundred

lives.



- Mary Ruefle from Talking to Strangers


Wednesday, November 18, 2015

Decision






"I don't know what I'm doing most of the time.
 
There's a certain humor in realizing that.
I can never figure out the kind of tie to put on in the morning.
I don't have any strategy or plan to get through the day.
It is literally a problem for me to decide which side of the bed to get out on.
These are staggering problems.

I remember talking to this Trappist monk in a monastery.
He's been there twelve years. A pretty severe regime.
I expressed my admiration for him and he said
'Leonard, I've been here twelve years and every morning,
I have to decide whether I'm going to stay or not.'

I knew exactly what he was talking about."



- Leonard Cohen


Relationship






"But only someone who is ready for everything,
who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible,
will live the relationship with another person as something alive
and will himself sound the depths of his own being."


- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet


Sunday, November 15, 2015

THE SHELL






 
THE SHELL


An open sandy shell
on the beach
empty but beautiful
like a memory
of a protected previous self.


The most difficult griefs,
ones in which
we slowly open
to a larger sea, a grander
sweep that washes
all our elements apart.


So strange the way
we are larger
in grief
than we imagined
we deserved or could claim
and when loss floods
into us
like the long darkness it is
and the old nurtured hope
is drowned again,
even stranger then
at the edge of the sea,
to feel the hand of the wind
laid on our shoulder,
reminding us
how death grants
a fierce and fallen freedom
away from the prison
of a constant
and continued presence,
how in the end
those who have left us
might no longer need us,
with all our tears
and our much needed
measures of loss
and that their own death
is as personal
and private
as that life of theirs
which you never really knew,
and another disturbing thing,
that exultation
is possible
without them.


And they for themselves
in fact
are glad to have let go
of all the stasis
and the enclosure
and the need for them to live
like some prisoner
that you only wanted
to remain incurious
and happy in your love,
never looking for the key,
never wanting to
turn the lock and walk
away


like the wind,
unneedful of you,
ungovernable,
unnamable,
free.




THE SHELL.
From RIVER FLOW: New and Selected Poems
© David Whyte and Many Rivers Press



Saturday, November 14, 2015

"I'm going to miss you"



Art : Cheiko



Zen teacher Issan Dorsey, who established the Maitri Hospice in San Francisco,
was on his deathbed when one of his closest friends came to visit him.



"I'm going to miss you," the friend said.



"I'm going to miss you, too," responded Issan. He was silent for a moment.
Then he asked, "Are you going somewhere?"



- Sean Murphy
One Bird, One Stone


Meeting Life with Gratefulness



Père Lachaise Cemetery Paris - Letters from the other side




"I am grateful for this precious life."

"I am grateful for this old and beautiful earth."

"I am grateful for the holy gift of friendship."

"I am grateful that I have the heart to serve."

"I am grateful for the silence and stillness that join us."

"I am grateful for those hard lessons learned."

"I am grateful for every given day."

"I am grateful for you."



Paris 13. 11. 15


Friday, November 13, 2015

Samsara





Samsara literally means "wandering-on."

Many people think of it as the Buddhist name for the place where we currently live.
But in the early Buddhist texts, it's the answer, not to the question,
"Where are we?" but to the question, "What are we doing?"
Instead of a place, it's a process:
the tendency to keep creating worlds and then moving into them.
As one world falls apart, you create another one and go there.
At the same time, you bump into other people who are creating their own worlds, too.



The process can sometimes be enjoyable.
In fact, it would be perfectly innocuous if it didn't entail so much suffering.
The worlds we create keep caving in and killing us.
Moving into a new world requires effort:
not only the pains and risks of taking birth,
but also the hard knocks - mental and physical - that come
from going through childhood into adulthood, over and over again."



- Geoffrey DeGraff




The Thangka Painter






giving-themselves






"Heaven and Earth give themselves.
Air, water, plants, animals, and humans give themselves to each other.
It is in this giving-themselves-to-each-other that we actually live.

Whether you appreciate it or not, it is true."
 

- Kodo Sawaki

Thursday, November 12, 2015

The truth about ourselves



Photo : Anna O, Started to blossom in my box



"Something happens when we face the truth about ourselves.

For one thing,
 
there is no room for pomposity, arrogance, or self-absorption.

More than one person has pointed out
how closely conjoined "humility" is with "humor."
A sense of humor, like a true sense of humility,
involves ruthless honesty about who we are,
without disguise or pretense.

The temptation, of course,
is to become weighted with gravity,
and to take ourselves very seriously indeed.

The point is that the opposite route is the direct one.
The truth of the matter is that we are
singularly gifted in avoiding self-discovery,
even though we pay lip service to it.

Impressed with our self-importance and weighted
with the seriousness of the adventure of self-discovery,
we are sitting ducks for missing the meaning of what is going on."



-  Doris Donnelly

That's what makes us human



https://www.youtube.com/embed/zirBEITCYEI?rel=0&controls=0&showinfo=0



We're all looking for heaven, which is later and elsewhere.
Actually everything in front of us right now
is a miracle, here and then gone, forever.

What's the nature of that miracle?

I don't know:
no one does, and that's it's nature.

You can't even really say that:
but you have to keep on asking the question.
That's what makes us human."


Norman Fischer

Wednesday, November 11, 2015

Someday


Photo : Joel Robison

https://www.youtube.com/embed/154f-dap_ac?rel=0?rel=0&controls=0&showinfo=0





"Lightly, my darling, lightly.

Even when it comes to dying.
Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic.

No rhetoric, no tremolos, no self-conscious persona
putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Goethe or Little Nell.

And, of course, no theology, no metaphysics.

Just the fact of dying and the fact of Clear Light.
So throw away all your baggage and go forward.

There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet,
trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair.

That's why you must walk so lightly.
Lightly, my darling . . . Completely unencumbered."



- Aldous Huxley


Tuesday, November 10, 2015

I was made to be here...






Why then, have to be human?

Oh not because happiness exists,

Not out of curiosity . . .

But because being here means so much;

because everything here,

vanishing so quickly, seems to need us,

and strangely keeps calling to us . . . To have been

here, once, completely, even if only once,

to have been at one with the earth –

this is beyond undoing.



– Rainer Maria Rilke

Sunday, November 8, 2015

The Path



Art : Childe Hassam



"The path is in daily activities...

If you seek some special life outside daily activities,

that is like brushing aside waves to look for water."



~ Wu-chun

Saturday, November 7, 2015

A surface, an image, a past.



Art : Matthew Davis




You will walk toward the mirror,
closer and closer, then flow
into the glass. You will disappear
some day like that, being
more real, more true, at the last.


You learn what you are, but slowly,
a baby, a boy, a man,
a self often shattered, and pieces
put together again till the end:
you halt, the glass opens.


A surface, an image, a past.
- William Stafford


Friday, November 6, 2015

Freshness


Art : Andrey Remnev




"I am trying to check my habits of seeing,

to counter them for the sake of greater freshness.

I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I'm doing."


- John Cage

Game


Art : Igor Mitoraj



"In precisely the same way, you are both what you do and what happens to you.
You have a little game in which you play that you are not responsible
for what happens to you, you are only responsible for what you do.
This illusion allows you to compete with the two sides of yourself.
It is like getting two knitting pins, one in each hand,
and having a fencing match with yourself.
If you sincerely try to stick one hand with the other, the first
hand must really try to stick the other, just to defend itself.
You will come to a sort of standstill, unless you decide
that your right hand is the one that is going to win,
and then you have broken the rules of the game,
which is what we do all the time."



- Alan Watts

Thursday, November 5, 2015

Earnestness


Art : Cecilia Paredes, Wallflowers blending into backgrounds



"How do you go about finding anything?
By keeping your mind and heart in it.
Interest, there must be, and steady remembrance.
To remember what needs to be remembered, is the secret of success.
You come to it through earnestness.


When you are in dead earnest, you bend every incident,
every second of your life to your purpose.
You do not waste time and energy on other things.
You are totally dedicated.


To know that you are a prisoner of your mind,
that you live in an imaginary world
of your own creation, is the dawn of wisdom.
To want nothing of it, to be ready
to abandon it entirely,
is earnestness."


- Sri Nisargadatta

Wednesday, November 4, 2015

Old Story


Art : Winston Chmielinski




You don't want to hear the story
of my life, and anyway
I don't want to tell it, I want to listen


to the enormous waterfalls of the sun.


And anyway it's the same old story -
a few people just trying,
one way or another,
to survive.


Mostly, I want to be kind.
And nobody, of course, is kind,
or mean,
for a simple reason.


And nobody gets out of it, having to
swim through the fires to stay in
this world.



- Mary Oliver from her poem Dogfish

Tuesday, November 3, 2015

It is as it is.





"People have asked about my practice. How do I prepare my mind for meditation?
There is nothing special. I just keep it where it always is.
They ask, 'Then are you an arahant?'

Do I know?

I am like a tree in a forest, full of leaves, blossoms and fruit.
Birds come to eat and nest, and animals seek rest in its shade.
Yet the tree does not know itself.
It follows its own nature.
It is as it is."


- Ajahn Chah

Sunday, November 1, 2015

The mountain



Mount Everest (Artist unknown)




"Mountains have long been a geography for pilgrimage,
places where people have been humbled and strengthened.
They are symbols of the Sacred Center.
Many have traveled to them in order to find the concentrated energy of Earth
and to realize the strength of unimpeded space.
Viewing a mountain at a distance or walking around its body,
we can see its shape, know its profile, survey its surrounds.
The closer you come to the mountain, the more it disappears.
The mountain begins to lose its shape as you near it.
Its body begins to spread out over the landscape, losing itself to itself.
On climbing the mountain, the mountain begins to vanish.
It vanishes in the detail of each step.
It's crown is buried in space.
It's body is buried in the breath."


~ Roshi Joan Halifax, from her essay, "The Way of the Mountain"


be.






The point is not to want to benefit anyone or make them happy.
There is no audience involved, no 'me' and 'them.'
It is a matter of an open gift, complete generosity
without the relative notions of giving and receiving.

That is the basic openness of compassion:

opening without demand.
Simply be what you are,
be the master of the situation.
If you will just 'be' then life flows around and through you."


Chögyam Trungpa, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism


Coming home





 
When we look at all the suffering around us, at poverty, violence, or climate change, we may want to solve these things immediately.
We want to do something.
But to do something effectively and ethically, we need to be our best selves in order to be able to handle the suffering.


Being able to stop, to breathe, and to walk or move in mindfulness are the keys to the practice.
They can be done anywhere, at any time. We can say: Breathing in, I know this is my in-breath. Breathing out, I know this is my out-breath.


It’s very simple but very effective.
When we bring our attention to our in-breath and our out-breath, we stop thinking of the past, we stop thinking of the future, and we begin to come home to ourselves.
Coming home to ourselves is the first thing we need to do, even for politicians, scientists, or economists.
Don’t think this practice doesn’t apply to you.
If we don’t go home to ourselves, we can’t be at our best and serve the world in the best way.
We have to be ourselves to be our best. Our quality of being is the foundation for the quality of our actions.



- Thich Nhat Hanh, in "Creating an Enlightened Society".

Friday, October 30, 2015

Unconditional expression







"There is such a thing as unconditional expression that does not come from self or other.
It manifests out of nowhere like mushrooms in a meadow,
like hailstones, like thundershowers."


– Chögyam Trungpa


Aesthetic appreciation







"The next bodhisattva action is meditation.
In this case, meditation is almost, we could say, aesthetic appreciation.
This means awareness of body, awareness of colors, awareness of things around you,
awareness of people's different styles.
There's always room for everything that comes up.
Everything is treated reverently, respectfully.
Nothing is regarded as rubbish. Even the garbage heap is a work of art.
Things have their own place, and you appreciate this,
which is meditation in the broader sense.
Both the relevant and the irrelevant are respected,
so you don't have to economize on your time and energy.
Because of that, everything becomes an object of meditation,
of greater awareness, panoramic awareness.
You take tremendous interest in different styles, people's different approaches,
and the different physical situations of objects around you,
and the different emotional states within yourself.
For the bodhisattva, the whole thing is constantly meaningful and workable.


Aesthetic appreciation does not mean looking for beauty alone.
It means looking at things with space around them.
When things are seen with space around them,
they have their own pictorial quality, so to speak.
Things are seen in perspective rather than as representing demands or expectations.
So bodhisattvas make a wonderful audience for the theater of life and death.
This is meditation.
But at the same time, the bodhisattva takes part in this theater,
so the whole thing does not become merely a matter of impersonal observation."


– Chögyam Trungpa

Thursday, October 29, 2015

The Rain Spoke to Me


Photo : Igor Zenin





Last Night the Rain Spoke to Me



Last night
the rain
spoke to me
slowly, saying,


what joy
to come falling
out of the brisk cloud,
to be happy again


in a new way
on the earth!
That’s what it said
as it dropped,


smelling of iron,
and vanished
like a dream of the ocean
into the branches


and the grass below.
Then it was over.
The sky cleared.
I was standing


under a tree.
The tree was a tree
with happy leaves,
and I was myself,


and there were stars in the sky
that were also themselves
at the moment
at which moment


my right hand
was holding my left hand
which was holding the tree
which was filled with stars


and the soft rain —
imagine! imagine!
the long and wondrous journeys
still to be ours.



~ Mary Oliver

 

Wednesday, October 28, 2015

One World






There is but one world
and everything that is imaginable is necessary to it.
For this world also, which seems to us a thing of stone and flower
and blood, is not a thing at all but is a tale.
And all in it is a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser tales
and yet these are also the selfsame tale and contain
as well all else within them.
So everything is necessary. Every least thing.
This is the hard lesson.


 Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised.
Because the seams are hid from us, you see.
The joinery. The way in which the world is made.
We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted.
We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall.


 And those seams that are hid from us are of course in the tale itself
and the tale has no abode or place of being except in the telling
only and there it lives and makes its home
and therefore we can never be done with the telling.


 Of the telling there is no end.
And in whatever place by whatever name or by no name at all,
all tales are one. Rightly heard all tales are one.



–  Cormac McCarthy

Tuesday, October 27, 2015

Yeshe Tsogyal


This image from the murals of Samye in Tibet was created by Dechen Yeshe Wangmo
and published as a notecard to raise funds for the Tsogyal Latso nuns.
It is copyrighted by Jnanasukha.




: Yeshe Tsogyal :


Now until the dualistic identity mind melts and dissolves,
 it may seem that we are parting.
 Please be happy.
 When you understand the dualistic mind,
 there will be no separation from me.
 May my good wishes fill the sky.



~ Yeshe Tsogyal as she ascended into the sky...

Synchronizing #2




..“Synchronizing body and mind is not a concept or a random technique
someone thought up for self improvement.

Rather, it is a basic principle

of how to be a human being
and how to use your sense perceptions,
your mind and your body together.”


Chögyam Trungpa

Synchronizing







“This method of synchronizing your mind and body is training you to be very simple

that you are not special, but ordinary, extra-ordinary.”


Chögyam Trungpa


Monday, October 26, 2015

Healing






Healing is not a process which you need to ‘complete.’
There is no practice you can undertake to discover what you already are,
and life is not waiting for you to awaken or to transform.


Please do not postpone the freedom you are longing for, until you are ‘healed,’
have ‘resolved’ your past, created some dream reality of the seeking mind,
or are experiencing only those states of consciousness
you have deemed correct, ‘spiritual,’ and evidence that you are okay.
Dare to see that what you are is beyond okay
and not subject to the trance of the conceptual.


Take a risk, slow down and see that love will never organize itself
around your preferences. For it is a firestorm of creativity,
inviting you at all times into greater levels of wholeness and cohesion.
But this environment is wild and unprecedented
and will never conform to your hopes and fears.


What you are is a miracle. Your experience is sacred and holy.
Your senses and your body are outrageous and alive,
and filled with intelligence and originality.
Even your confusion is filled with wisdom.
Even your darkness is weaved of particles of light.



Matt Licata

Friday, October 23, 2015

Daring To Love



https://www.youtube.com/embed/v2o0nCLLDUQ?rel=0&controls=0&showinfo=0



For one human being to love another:

that is perhaps the most difficult task of all....,
the work for which all other work is but preparation.

It is a high inducement to the individual to ripen...
a great claim upon us, something that chooses us out
and calls us to vast things.



– Rainer Maria Rilke


Thursday, October 22, 2015

Giving Up Everything



Miranda Meeks




"The best way to look at suffering is with gratitude,
that it is happening in order to teach us some very important lesson.

It is useless to want suffering to go away.

It is impermanence, it will go away anyway,
but if we don’t learn the lesson that it is trying to teach us,
it will come back in exactly the same manner."


- Ayya Khema


Wednesday, October 21, 2015

Suffering







"Stunned and still not suffering.
Swollen with care and anxiety
and still not suffering.

Useless, old and full of grief,
but still not suffering."


―  Leonard Cohen, Book of Longing