Nada Brahma Sound Is Divine

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".