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#1625 - Sunday, November 23, 2003 - Editor: Gloria
The mountain was in the stream, both on the surface and in the glittering white of the polished stones in the streambed. Reflecting easily despite the rapid flow of the current. The snowy white mass seemed to double in size. It was the purest white you had ever seen, and it floated in the blue sky. The day was incredibly fresh and clear as you walked in it, step by step, each step complete in and of itself. Each step the beginning of a leap into the infinite present. The mountain enfolded you; the mind stopped, stunned, and still. You walked through the silence toward the mountain, each step a leap into the deep silence which is always present, always unfolding.
- Journeys on Mind Mountain
Lykkja, photo by Alan Larus Lykkja means small field, and it is in the mountains, it is minus 12 C. We did not freeze and the cabin had a sauna. http://www.ferryfee.com/bluesky/lykkja.htm
Flash presentation of Hubble images, takes time to load. http://wires.news.com.au/special/mm/030811-hubble.htm
David Hodges ~ NDS
(I've been writing these over
the past few months and thought I'd share.
The Starbucks I visit on weekends is near the campus of Yale
University,
hence the references to Yale)
Starbucks Haiku
Rainy morning -
People in Starbucks
Talk about money
Rainy morning -
A Yale student reads
A book I never finished
Yale girl in Starbucks
Bends over her laptop
---Red thong!!!
Waiting for my latte -
Hey! That guy
Just stole my table.
Starbucks filling up -
I might have to go
Somewhere else
That man with one arm -
He's waiting outside
To ask me for money
Girl gabbing on cell phone
Pissing me off
In some other language
At the next table:
"That's a finger puppet"
--- "Yeah I know"
This isn't going anywhere -
Isn't there something
Besides the breath?
Practicing
Spirituality with Catholics
Day 24
November 24, 2003
SHARE MEANINGS
The woman sets the table. She watches me beat the eggs. I
scramble them in a
saucepan, .. . . I take our plates, spoon eggs on them, we sit
and eat. She
and I and the kitchen have become extraordinary: we are not
simply eating;
we are pausing in the march to perform an act together; we are in
love; and
the meal offered and received is a sacrament which says: I know
you will
die; I am sharing food with you; it is all I can do, and it is
everything.
-- Andre Dubus in "Broken Vessels: Essays"
Daily Dharma
"This is what you should
do: Love the earth and sun and animals,
despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks,
stand up for the stupid and crazy,
devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not
concerning God,
have patience and indulgence toward the people...
reexamine all you have been told in school or church or in any
book,
dismiss what insults your very soul,
and your flesh shall become a great poem."
~Walt Whitman
From the book, "Walt Whitman: The Complete Poems,"
edited by Francis
Murphy, published by Viking Press.
Lady Joyce ~ HarshaSatsangh http://www.omshaantih.com/Thankyou.html
Thank you, God, for Everything
As Thanksgiving, 2002, falling on November 28, approaches, I think how Jesse's birthday and the anniversary of the death of my mother and my unborn child all fall on the same day this year. My mind wanders back to another time. I am 28 years old, still thinking I know it all, still thinking that somehow I control my own destiny, still thinking that if I put my mind to it, I can do anything I want to do...defiant, rebellious, contentious, a young lawyer fresh out of law school. About to face the unexpected death of my mother. [...] story continues
Every year now, as Thanksgiving approaches, I celebrate it twice. On Jesse’s birthday, my mind wanders back again to this memory, bittersweet with pain and pleasure. The bounty of blessings, the surrender to All That Is. I have learned from the wisdom of Sono, Woman Zen Master, who advised every devotee who came to her to adopt an affirmation to be said many times a day, under All conditions. The affirmation was, "Thank you for everything. I have no complaint whatsoever." Thank you, Sonoji.
My daily variation on that theme appears on a placement sent home to me with Jesse, my little Thanksgiving cornocupia. A prayer of sorts that I had heard over the years, and ignored, until now. Before I eat, and sometimes, when things seem to be going all the wrong way, this is what I try to say...
Thank you for the world so sweet Thank you for the food we eat Thank you for the birds that sing Thank you God for Everything... HAPPY BIRTHDAY JESSE!!!
Joyce
(know_mystery) ~ NDS As Rumi said:
Deafened by the voices
you are unaware the Beloved lives
in the core of
your heart.
Stop the noise and
you will
hear His voice
in the silence.
~ Rumi ~
Andy ~ NDS
And yet we are driven to converse, By forces not our own.
"As we stray further from Love We multiply the words, Words and sentences long and orderly. Had we remained together We could have become a Silence."
(Yehuda Amichai)
This present birth and
death is the life of Buddha. If you reject it with distaste, you
are thereby losing the life of Buddha. If you abide in it,
attaching to birth and death, you also lose the life of Buddha.
.. When you simply release and forget both your body and your
mind and throw yourself into the house of Buddha, then with no
strength needed and no thought expended, freed from birth and
death, you become Buddha. Then there can be no obstacle in any
person's mind.
-Dogen, "Birth and Death"
From "Teachings of the Buddha," edited by Jack Kornfield, 1993. Reprinted by arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Boston, www.shambhala.com.
The Size of Spokane
The baby isn't cute. In fact he's
a homely little pale and headlong
stumbler. Still, he's one
of us-the human beings
stuck on flight 295 (Chicago to Spokane);
and when he passes my seat twice
at full tilt this then that direction,
I look down from Lethal Weapon 3 to see
just why. He's
running back and forth
across a sunblazed circle on
the carpet-something brilliant, fallen
from a porthole. So! it's light
amazing him, it's only light, despite
some three and one
half hundred
people, propped in rows
for him to wonder at; it's light
he can't get over, light he can't
investigate enough, however many
zones he runs across it,
flickering himself.
The umpteenth time
I see him coming, I've had
just about enough; but then
he notices me noticing and stops-
one fat hand on my armrest-to
inspect the oddities of me.
Some people cannot hear.
Some people cannot walk.
But everyone was
sunstruck once, and set adrift.
Have we forgotten howastonishing this is? so practiced all our senses
we cannot imagine them? foreseen instead of seeing
all the all there is? Each spectral port,
each human eye
is shot through with a hole, and everything we know
goes in there, where it feeds a blaze. In a flash
the baby's old; Mel Gibson's hundredth comeback seems
less clever; all his chases and embraces
narrow down, while we
fly on (in our
plain radiance of vehicle)
toward what cannot stay small forever.
-Heather McHugh, from Hinge and Sign (Wesleyan University Press).
* Sun reflection photo by Alan
Larus
Viorica Weissman ~ Million Paths
You are so at home in this passing state, In the lottery of the here and now, In slumber you find yourself in another Space no stranger than the waking place; Now ill at ease in a forgotten panel of your mind; You do not say: 'What place is this So strange, so different and yet the same?', Not at all; the diffident city of sleep Is as imaginary as that of sullied day. Is it surprizing then that the soul, the inner child, Which remembers nothing and nothing forgets, Should not recall its home and birth place when it's rugged with body's weight, traweled through The five-pointed darkness of here and now, Wrapped like a star in eiderdown? This innocent traveller enters and passes through Many states, collecting, like a forgotten Piece of porcelain, valedictory dust, How can it review its state and remember, When its memory is nothing but rust?
___ Mathnavi IV , 3628
__ Words of Paradise
Selected Poems of Rumi