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#2409 - Friday, March 3, 2006 - Editor: Gloria Lee


 

Sonnets to Orpheus, Part One, XII  

Bless the spirit that makes connections,
for truly we live in what we imagine.
Clocks move along side our real life
with steps that are ever the same.
 

Though we do not know our exact location,
we are held in place by what links us.
Across trackless distances
antennas sense each other.
 

Pure attention, the essence of the powers!
Distracted by each day's doing,
how can we hear the signals?
 

Even as the farmer labors
there where the seed turns into summer,
it is not his work.  It is Earth who gives.
 

~ Rainer Maria Rilke ~    

(In Praise of Mortality, translated and edited by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)

 

Web version:
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  What's the trouble?

 
    Hui-tzu said to Chuang-tzu, "I have a gigantic tree, but its
trunk is too gnarled for the plumb line and its branches too
twisted for the ruler: even if it were set in the middle of the
road, carpenters would pay no attention to it. What you say
is similarly grandiose but useless, rejected by everyone alike."

Chuang-tzu replied, "Have you not seen a wildcat? It lowers
itself close to the ground to watch for careless prey; it leaps this
way and that, light and low, but then gets caught in a trap and
dies. A yak, on the other hand, is enormous; it can do big things,
but cannot catch a rat. Now you have a huge tree and worry
that it is useless: why not plant it in the vast plain of the homeland
of Nothing Whatsoever, roaming in effortlessness by its side and
sleeping in freedom beneath it? The reason it does not fall to the
axe, and no one injures it, is that it cannot be exploited. So what's
the trouble?"

From: 'Vitality Energy Spirit - A Taoist Sourcebook'
Translated and Edited by Thomas Cleary

 
 
posted by Gill Eardley to Allspirit
 


  Expedients

Buddhist teachings are prescriptions given according to specific
ailments, to clear away the roots of your compulsive habits and
clean out your emotional views, just so you can be free and clear,
naked and clean, without problems.

There is no real doctrine at all for you to chew on or squat over.
If you will not believe in yourself, you pick up your baggage and
go around to other people's houses looking for Zen, looking for
Tao, looking for mysteries, looking for marvels, looking for
buddhas, looking for Zen masters, looking for teachers.

You think this is searching for the ultimate, and you make it into
your religion, but this is like running blindly to the east to get
something that is in the west. The more you run, the further away
you are, and the more you hurry the later you become. You just
tire yourself, to what benefit in the end?

Zen Master Yuansou
'Zen Essence' Translated and Edited by Thomas Cleary

  posted by Gill Eardley to Allspirit    


  Alba

"Dawn breaking as I woke,
with the white sweat of the dew
on the green, new grass.
I walked in the cold, quiet as
if it were the world beginning;
Peeling and eating a chilled tangerine.
I have many sorrows,
dawn is not one of them."

~ Derek Walcott (Nobel prize winner)
   

posted by Mazie Lane to Allspirit

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