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At night, I open the
window and ask the moon to come and press its face
against mine. Breathe into me. Close the language-door and open
the love
window. The moon won't use the door, only the window. ~ Rumi
posted by Cathy Gintner
on Facebook
Yes I thought about this
song by Waterboys going to the pier on the other
side to see if the moon was visible.
.
Unicorns and cannonballs,
palaces and piers
Trumpets, towers and
tenements, wide oceans full of tears
Flags, rags, ferryboats,
scimitars and scarves
Every precious dream and
vision underneath the stars
Yes, you climbed on the
ladder with the wind in your sails
You came like a comet,
blazing your trail
Too high, too far, too
soon
You saw the whole of the
moon
http://www.ferryfee.com/Bluesky/Eclipse.html
[see eclipse series at link]
Thanks to everbody : )
posted by Alan Larus on
Facebook
The Gift of Gravity
(excerpt)
All that passes descends,
and ascends again unseeen
into the light: the river
coming down from sky
to hills, from hills to sea,
and carving as it moves,
to rise invisible,
gathered to light, to return
again. "The river's injury
is its shape." I've learned no more.
We are what we are given
and what is taken away;
blessed be the name
of the giver and taker.
For everything that comes
is a gift, the meaning always
carried out of sight
to renew our whereabouts,
always a starting place.
And every gift is perfect
in its beginning, for it
is "from above, and cometh down
from the Father of lights."
Gravity is grace.
~ Wendell Berry ~
(The Gift of Gravity)
Web version: www.panhala.net/Archive/Gift_of_Gravity.html
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[The Panhala poems are a
gift of Joe Riley, consider subscribing.]
So you've cut up your
hide and stretched it,
pegged it down to dry with definite,
sharp-pointed desires,
but have you planted any
fruit trees
for the next generation?
Wisdom offered you is
like a ball
thrown at a boundary post,
useless as molasses fed
to a tawny bull
to help it give more milk!
- Lalla
14th Century North Indian mystic
posted to Along The Way
The Sun Interview
Against The Grain: Peter Coyote On Buddhism,
Capitalism, And The Enduring Legacy Of The Sixties
“There is no exact line between inside and outside, or
between self and other. . . . Show me where the world ends and
you begin.”
By David Kupfer
Excerpts:
1)
Kupfer: But your
generation did transform the
Coyote: No, I don’t
think we did. We lost every one of our political battles: We
did not stop capitalism. We did not end the war. We did not stop
imperialism.
I can’t point to real political victory.
Culturally, however, we’ve
changed the landscape dramatically. There is no
city in the
environmental movement, alternative medical practices,
alternative spirituality,
organic-food stores. That is a huge and powerful development that
I think will
eventually change the political system.
Kupfer: So the political
system is the tail on the dog, the last thing to change
in the culture?
Coyote: Politicians are
not leaders; they are followers. They think that,
because they can plunder the public treasury, they are leading.
In fact they are
terrified of the people. The people are a problem for them to
manage, and
when they can no longer manage them, they must follow them, or
oppress
them.
2) Coyote:
I don’t think
theater has ever been a vehicle for radical change. Theater is a
vehicle for deepening knowledge about the human species. I am not
even
sure that the system has to change. People have to change. If
people behaved
with self-restraint, generosity, and compassion, even capitalism
could work.
We are never going to create a system that generates fairness,
equity,
goodwill, and justice. I became a Buddhist in part because I
believe that
change like that has to start internally and be expressed one
person at a time.
It is true that a system can advance or repress certain
attributes of human
behavior, but no set of rules is going to make us perfect.
3)
Kupfer: Did practicing
Zen Buddhism take you inward and away from your
outward activism? How do you reconcile the desire to change
society with the
Buddhist philosophy of accepting reality?
Coyote: The practice of
Buddhism in no way changed my commitment to
political work. I did take about ten years off while I learned to
pursue politics
with less anger and attachment to specific outcomes. There is no
exact line
between inside and outside, or between self and other, so
either-or
dichotomies like “inward versus outward” are not really
descriptive. Show me
where the world ends and you begin. Buddha did not urge people to
“accept”
everything. That’s a colloquial, Western misunderstanding.
He preached a
radical transformation based on what worked. He was the ultimate
social
activist who introduced concepts and practices that have
revolutionized
humankind. He was not a navel-gazer.