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)