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#1778 - Sunday, April 25, 2004 - Editor: Gloria

Where there is beauty, there is ugliness.
When something is right, something else is wrong.
Knowledge and ignorance depend on each other.
It has been like this since the beginning.
How could it be otherwise now?
Wanting to toss out one and hold onto the other
makes for a ridiculous comedy.
You must still deal with everything ever-changing,
even when you say it’s wonderful.  

- Ryokan (1758-1831)  

~  ~  ~  

A monk asked, “All of the buddhas and all of the buddadharmas
come forth from this sutra. What is this sutra?”  

Qinshan said, “Forever turning.”  

-"Zen’s Chinese Heritage"
 

  Viorica Weissman ~ MillionPaths

Paul Brunton (1898-1981)

  Middle Age

The child you think you don't want
is the one who will make you laugh.
She will break your heart
when she loses the sight in one eye
and tells the doctor she wants to be
an apple tree when she grows up.

It will be this child who forgives you
again and again
for believing you don't want her to be born,
for resisting the rising tide of your body,
for wishing for the red flow of her dismissal.
She will even forgive you for all the breakfasts
you failed to make exceptional.

Someday this child will sit beside you.
When you are old and too tired of war
to want to watch the evening news,
she will tell you stories
like the one about her teenaged brother,
your son, and his friends
taking her out in a canoe when she was
five years old. How they left her alone
on an island in the river
while they jumped off the railroad bridge.

-  Pat Schneider, from The Patience of Ordinary Things.

  Joe Riley ~ Panhala

Above Everything

I wished for death often
but now that I am at its door
I have changed my mind about the world.
It should go on; it is beautiful,
even as a dream, filled with water and seed,
plants and animals, others like myself,
ships and buildings and messages
filling the air -- a beauty,
if ever I have seen one.
In the next world, should I remember
this one, I will praise it
above everything.

~David Ignatow~
  (Whisper to the Earth: New Poems;
contributed by Zorika Petic)

  Web version: www.panhala.net/Archive/Above_Everything.html

Web archive of Panhala postings: www.panhala.net/Archive/Index.html
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Slow Children at Play

All the quick children have gone inside, called
by their mothers to hurry-up-wash-your-hands
honey-dinner's-getting-cold, just-wait-till-your-father-gets-home--
and only the slow children out on the lawns, marking off
paths between fireflies, making soft little sounds with their mouths, ohs
that glow and go out and glow. And their slow mothers flickering,
pale in the dusk, watching them turn in the gentle air, watching them
twirling, their arms spread wide, thinking, These are my children, thinking,
Where is their dinner? Where has their father gone?

 - Cecilia Woloch from Late

Amrita Nadi ~ Daily Dharma

"A Prayer For The Children"

We Pray for the Children who sneak popsicles before
supper, who erase errors into holes in math workbooks,
who can never find their shoes, who love their pets,
who play video games unceasingly, who argue with their
siblings, who shine in school plays. And we pray for
those who stare at photographers from behind barbed
wire, who live alone on the streets, who can't bound
down the street in a new pair of sneakers, who are
born in places where we would not be caught dead, who
live in an X-rated world.

We Pray for the Children who bring us sticky kisses
and fistfuls of dandelions, who hug us in a hurry and
forget their lunch money, who watch television past
bedtime, who forget to do their homework, who want the
same story read over and over, who ride their bikes
with ecstasy. And we pray for those who never get
dessert, who have no safe blanket to drag behind them,
who watch their parents watch them die, who can't find
bread to steal, who only receive affection when made
to do things that frighten them, who don't have rooms
to clean up, whose pictures aren't on anybody's
dresser, whose monsters are real.

We Pray for the Children who spend their allowance
before Tuesday, who throw tantrums in the grocery
store and pick at their food, who like ghost stories,
who shove dirty clothes under the bed, who never rinse
out the tub, who get visits from the tooth fairy, who
don't like to be kissed in front of their friends, who
squirm during religious services and scream in the
phone, whose tears we sometimes laugh at and whose
smiles can make us cry. And we pray for those whose
nightmares come in the daytime, who have never been
kissed or nurtured, who have never seen a dentist, who
watch their parents shoot up, who will eat anything,
who only have been touched in ways that leave them
ashamed, who aren't spoiled by anybody, who go to bed
hungry and cry themselves to sleep, who live and move,
but have no being.

We Pray for the Children who want to be carried and
for those who must, who we never give up on and for
those who don't get a second chance. We pray for those
we smother with attention and for those who will grab
the hand of anybody kind enough to offer it. We vow to
offer that hand in whatever way and whenever we can.

May all children be free from suffering and at peace."

~From personal notes, author and source unknown.

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