What If
Thoughts on beginning a meditation practice
Wednesday, May 9, 2012
Made this for Theo's school auction:
Visible and invisible help. Friend I admire bought it.
Made this book for Dora's school auction:
It's all about what they learned when they became Native American tribe members and had to deal with the first white trader, increasing white settlement, and then forced relocation to reservation land. Here's Dora's page.
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
Accounting for this life, again
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Todos Santos
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Naming
This early morning I wake with that same feeling of unnamed dread I've had before, this time with words: there is a very great grief coming. At first it seems it could be attached to keenly experiencing the sequence of "last times of doing" in this house as it is, as we discuss our plans for rebuilding. I have not lost my very great attachment to things. A house is a big thing.
Quick leap to darker, wider reasons. In fact, a very great grief is here, can be here, every day, every moment. That disappointment, harm, even death may come to my children or others whom I love. The conflict I feel between anything I could possibly do and the great workings of the world--like the death of Bin Laden, the clash of belief and world view that caused the war machine to necessitate his death, the incredible focus and energy that was poured into readying men and materials for such an end. The death, indeed perhaps the life, of any girl and boy in Pakistan, the country in which I was born. In all countries and wrinkles that don't even belong to countries over the face of the earth. All the ways we misunderstand, misconstrue, misapprehend. All the mistakes I have made and will make. All the change that has already come and gone, always. Many of the poems I've learned by heart stream through my mind, watching woods fill up with snow, margaret's goldengrove unleaving, and especially the thrush's ecstatic song shared on the bleakest winter evening.
Friday, April 29, 2011
Receiving...
Is the world speaking through us? Can it speak through the muffling distraction of material possessions, all of our talk, the news, the anguish of war, the cacophony of "entertainment?" A moment of remembering and discovery at the same time. Dissolve the edge between ourselves and that which we think is other. There is no room for trust or lack of trust.
Water skeeters feel the thought of the water, the life of the air, the wood, the water, water, water; they are not close and yet they know when another moves, when the trees move and shake their water to the ground and the whole still water quivers, like the flower petals, still, yet quivering with purity, with color, with white circling messages of love, release, opening, closing, opening. Inside the surface of the water, sky.
The mind is just another sensory organ. Without concentrating on an object, without any form of motive, influence, or compulsion, can my mind give full attention without any exclusion? Meaning is only in the mind. Openness is in everything else.
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
The Sacred Pause
Ajahn Buddhadasa calls these interludes of natural or purposeful pausing "temporary nirvana." We touch the freedom that is possible in any moment when we are not grasping after our experience or resisting it. He writes that without such moments of pausing, " . . . living things would either die or become insane. Instead, we survive because there are natural periods of coolness, of wholeness and ease. In fact, they last longer than the fires of our grasping and fear. It is this that sustains us.