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#2527 - Sunday, July 16, 2006 - Editor: Gloria Lee
"A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it."
(rumi/barks)
If I flinched at every grief, I
would be an intelligent idiot. If
I were not the sun, I'd ebb and
flow like sadness. If you were not
my guide, I'd wander lost in Sinai.
If there were no light, I'd keep
opening and closing the door. If
there were no rose garden, where
would the morning breezes go? If
love did not want music and laughter
and poetry, what would I say? If
you were not medicine, I would look
sick and skinny. If there were no
leafy limbs in the air, there would
be no wet roots. If no gifts were
given, I'd grow arrogant and cruel.
If there were no way into God. I
would not have lain in the grave of
this body for so long. If there were no
way from left to right, I could not
be swaying with the grasses. If
there were no grace and no kindness,
conversation would be useless, and
nothing we do would matter. Listen
to the new stories that begin every
day. If light were not beginning
again in the east, I would not now
wake and walk out inside this dawn.
(from "The Soul of Rumi" trans Coleman Barks)
Terry Murphy on Allspirit
by Bob O'Hearn on Garden Mystics
Practicing Buddhism is about discovering
ourselves to be in a great, flowing river of continuities. Just
as our mother and father live inside us, so do generations upon
generations of mothers and fathers before them. Part of our task
is to discover how all our ancestors inform our lives--and the
same holds true for all forms of life, for we have been shaped
not only by human ancestors but also by the environments in which
they lived.
-- Joan Halifax, in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, Vol. I,
#4
The Buddha
described his teaching as "going against the stream."
The unflinching light of mindful awareness reveals the extent to
which we are tossed along in the stream of past conditioning and
habit. The moment we decide to stop and look at what is going on
(like a swimmer suddenly changing course to swim upstream instead
of downstream), we find ourselves battered by powerful currents
we had never even suspected--precisely because until that moment
we were largely living at their command.
-- Stephen Batchelor in The Awakening of the West
photo by Alan Larus http://www.ferryfee.com/bluesky/islands/once.htm
"No better love than love with no object,
No more satisfying work than work with no purpose.
If you could give up tricks and cleverness,
That would be the cleverest trick!"
~Rumi
From the book, "Rumi Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy
and Longing," translated by Barks