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Nondual Highlights Issue #2116 Sunday, April 17, 2005
Come
home to your Selves.
The journey is no more
than a breath in time,
no more than a heartbeat
in distance.
- Emmanuel
Shoebox
My father has a small box in his dresser drawer. Most people have
a box like it -- filled with odds and ends of life -- mementos
not bold enough to display, yet holding moments of who they were
and have become. My father has been dead for fourteen years, yet
we haven't moved his memories.
I sit upon the bed and wonder. Who would understand the
significance of a child's toy decoder? Of a black and white photo
of men in uniform they never knew? As a curious little child, I
looked though my dad's box many times, held the sergeant's
stripes and the rifleman's badge, yet have no idea if they were
even his.
And today, what do I know of who he was? Here is a geode, an
ancient piece of quartz that a boy carried home from a creek bed
sixty years ago. Why? Why of all the things to save, did he save
this?
The thread of connection is severed, and all that holds these
memories in place are the thin walls of a shoebox. Such thin
walls separate us from the unknown.
What made my father who he was and where has he gone?
Hui Neng said, "Show me your original face before you were
born," and a famous koan was born. Who needs Zen masters to
ask the obvious? The koan of life and death, being and non-being,
presents itself to you constantly.
You are a box containing a collection of moments. Such thin walls
separate you from the unknown. What will you be when you are no
more?
- Shawn Nevins, from The TAT Forum, April 2005
Since everything is but an apparition,
Perfect in being what it is,
Having nothing to do with good or bad,
Acceptance or rejection
You might as well burst out laughing!
- Longchepa, thanks to DharmaGrandmother
Sfumato
Love is a yes to becoming,
a dropping of the bars,
a climb over leaves and branches,
a slide under the dust of the day.
It’s a back alley caravan
in the mind out to light,
to sun on river water and
fish breakfasts with otters.
Love is my stretching and finding
the universe painted with your face,
your scent, and my grinning
in a bloodhound way and
trotting down city streets
on a spring morning
hunting joy in the litter,
barking at marauding pigeons,
giving chase to a cat or two and
sniffing the wonders of everything,
these soul prints written on the nose.
Love is laughter spilling out of my feet
moistening the ground and
the taut twitch of upturned ears
listening for your voice.
It is having a volcano living inside.
It is finding joy at the city dump
scavenging in the museum of smells.
It is a devouring, a full-pawed lunge
into the skin of the moment,
a leaping into a feline gracefulness
married to a raw canine howl.
© Zen Oleary, April 16, 2005, posted to SufiMystic
Whoever wishes to quickly afford protection
To both himself and others
Should practice that holy secret:
The exchanging of self for others.
- Shantideva