the only time you are alive

You think you will never forget any of this, 
you will remember it always just the way it was. 

But you can't remember it the way it was.
 To know it, you have to be living in the presence of it 
right as it is happening. It can return only by surprise. 

Speaking of these things tells you that there are no words for them
 that are equal to them or that can restore them to your mind. 
And so you have a life that you are living only now, now
 and now and now, gone before you can speak of it,
 and you must be thankful for living day by day,
 moment by moment, in this presence.

But you have a life too that you remember. It stays with you.
 You have lived a life in the breath and pulse and living light of the present,
 and your memories of it, remember now, are of a different life 
in a different world and time. When you remember the past,
 you are not remembering it as it was. You are remembering it as it is.
 It is a vision or a dream, present with you in the present,
 alive with you in the only time you are alive.

~ Wendell Berry

from Hannah Coulter

amazing grace

 

 

 

 

 

 

~ Kraig Kenning

 

 

 

 

 

every precious moment

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

~ Kraig Kenning

 

 

 

lucky mud

God made mud. 

God got lonesome. 

So God said to some of the mud, "Sit up!" 

"See all I've made," said God, "the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars."

And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around. 

Lucky me, lucky mud.

I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done. 

Nice going, God. 

Nobody but you could have done it, God! I certainly couldn't have. 

I feel very unimportant compared to You. 

The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud

that didn't even get to sit up and look around. 

I got so much, and most mud got so little. 

Thank you for the honor!

Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep. 

What memories for mud to have! 

What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met! 

I loved everything I saw! 

Good night. 

~ Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

(Cat's Cradle)

 

 

 

 

gift

 

 

 

 

 

A day so happy.
Fog lifted early I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no man worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man didn’t embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
On straightening up, I saw the blue sea and sails.

 

 

 

 

~ Czeslaw Milosz

from New & Collected Poems

 with thanks to poetry chaikhana

 

 

 

 

 

see the purity of your being

 

 

 

 

In parting, I would like to give you one small piece of advice to keep in your heart. 

You may have heard me say this before, but it is the key point of the entire path,

 so it bears repeating: All that we are looking for in life—all the happiness, 

contentment, and peace of mind—is right here in the present moment. 

 

Our very own awareness is itself fundamentally pure and good. 

The only problem is that we get so caught up in the ups and downs of life 

that we don’t take the time to pause and notice what we already have.

Don’t forget to make space in your life to recognize the richness of your basic nature, 

to see the purity of your being and let its innate qualities of love, compassion,

 and wisdom naturally emerge. Nurture this recognition as you would a small seedling.

 Allow it to grow and flourish. . . .Keep this teaching at the heart of your practice.

 

 Wherever you are and whatever you are doing, pause from time to time

 and relax your mind. You don’t have to change anything about your experience.

You can let thoughts and feelings come and go freely, and leave your senses wide open.

 

 Make friends with your experience and see if you can notice the spacious awareness

 that is with you all the time. Everything you ever wanted is right here 

in this present moment of awareness.

 

 

 

 

~  Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche

from  a letter he left for his students 

 

 

 

 

 

loneliness and a Grandmother’s wisdom

 

 

 

“Sabishii ne.”

At my last dinner before leaving home to live in Tokyo, these words unexpectedly came out of my mouth. In Japan, they’re a common way of expressing feelings of loneliness. Early the next morning I would leave and Grandmother would be alone again. I was sad at the thought of her being by herself, and thought that she might feel as lonely as I did.

But Grandmother surprised me by saying, “That’s okay. I like loneliness.” I thought she was just acting brave. I knew that she had been devastated when we—her daughter, who was her only child, her three grandchildren, including me, and my dad—all left her behind to go to America. But she was fifty years old then; now she was nearly eighty. My American upbringing had deprived me of understanding how Grandmother had learned to find happiness and live a good life in Japan, alone.
One way we embrace loneliness is by internalizing lost loved ones.

The word sabishii means “lonely,” but my grandmother’s way of using it seemed to have a deeper meaning. Perhaps to her it was the human condition to be lonely. So being mindful in moments of loneliness connected her to others, because we all experience this sadness that is part of life. Grandmother’s way of living was based on a mature acceptance of loneliness, of the suffering in existence, and of the impermanent nature of human experience.

Loneliness reminds us that we know love. I saw there was dignity, sacrifice, and service in my grandmother’s way of parting, which freed me to pursue my path.

In the word sabishii, “sabi” represents the loss of what sparkles in us, and the fleeting nature of beauty. Like my grandmother herself, sabi things carry the burden of aging with dignity and grace. Although I didn’t understand her feelings at the time, they made sense to me when I realized that in English the word “sad” comes from the same root as the words “sated” and “satisfied.” This means sadness may actually be a kind of fullness—a fullness of the heart. We feel sad when our heart is full, tender, and alive, as opposed to the frozen state of depression that comes from pushing away our sadness rather than opening to it.

In searching for a deeper understanding of the Japanese sense of loneliness, I discovered its relation to nirvana, the state of perfect quietude, freedom, and happiness. Sabishii expresses not only loneliness, but also mellow stillness. Combined with horobiru, meaning “termination,” it expresses the enlightened state of nirvana in which one is liberated from the repeating cycle of birth, life, and death.

In Japanese, the phrase mono no aware expresses compassion and sadness in our awareness of the transience of all things, which in turn deepens our appreciation of their truth and beauty and elicits a gentle sadness after their passing. The love of the glorious, ephemeral beauty of cherry blossoms is characterized by mono no aware. This compassionate sensitivity is perhaps what my grandmother was describing.
Not alone in the delusion of separateness, I go about my day remembering that I too am living and dying, no different from the way they once were on this earth.

In my twenties I couldn’t see what I see now in my sixties: that loneliness is an inevitable part of the human condition. We try to escape it in so many ways, but when we face and embrace loneliness, our relationship to it shifts. If we engage and befriend loneliness, it can be a natural part of life. If we tell ourselves, don’t be afraid, don’t run from it, there’s too much beauty there, engaging with loneliness can bring us freedom.

One way we embrace loneliness is by internalizing lost loved ones. In a touching scene in The Lion King, the young lion grieving his dead father is told, “He lives in you.” I often have this feeling when I say or do something and it reminds me of my father, grandmother, or some other departed loved one. I have the sense that they live on in me. I’m reminded how my grandmother told me that we would never be apart because she would be in my heart.

We are not alone, but deeply interconnected with others, past and present. And yet we are alone. We are both not alone and alone. Though we search for the magical solution to ending this aloneness, we never find it. Grandmother taught me that acceptance of our pain makes it possible to convert weakness into strength, and we can offer our experience as a source of healing to others lost in the darkness of their own sufferings.

Grandma passed away on February 22 of 2015, and to this day whenever I see the time is 2:22, I imagine Grandma is here. She was 111 and when I see 1:11, I remember her as well. In these moments, I feel the presence of those who have left us. “I am here, for you,” they are telling me. Not alone in the delusion of separateness, I go about my day remembering that I too am living and dying, no different from the way they once were on this earth.

That’s what we’re all doing—loving and losing, coming and going, living and dying. We do what we’re called to do here and then are called away, leaving those left behind with the challenge of making meaning of it all. Though I don’t understand it, I draw strength in trusting the departed are well, still by my side, living on in me. And that I am well too.

 

 

 

 

 

~ Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu

 from Lion's Roar 11/09/2021

 Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu received a doctorate in psychology from Harvard University and trained in traditional medicine in Japan. He designs "heartfulness" learning programs at Stanford University and is the author of eleven books in English and Japanese.

 

 

 

 

optimism and enduring patience

 

 

 

 

 

American Indians continue to suffer from the effects of conquest by European immigrants

 over the past five centuries—an ongoing and pervasive sense of community-wide

 post-traumatic stress disorder. We live with the ongoing stigma of defeated peoples

 who have endured genocide, the intentional dismantling of cultural values, 

forced confinement on less desirable lands called “reservations,” 

intentionally nurtured dependency on the federal government, 

and conversion by missionaries who imposed a new culture on us 

as readily as they preached the gospel. . . .

[Indian peoples] suspect that the greed that motivated the displacement

 of all indigenous peoples from their lands of spiritual rootedness is the same greed

 that threatens the destruction of the earth and the continued oppression of so many

 peoples and ultimately the destruction of our White relatives. 

 

Whether it is the stories the settlers tell or the theologies they develop to interpret those stories,

 something seems wrong to Indian people. But not only do Indians continue to tell the stories,

 sing the songs, speak the prayers, and perform the ceremonies that root themselves

 deeply in Mother Earth; they are actually audacious enough to think that their stories

 and their ways of reverencing creation will some day win over our White settler

 relatives and transform them. Optimism and enduring patience seem to run 

in the life blood of Native American peoples.

 

May justice, followed by genuine peace,

 flow out of our concern for one another and all creation. 

 

 

 

~ George Tinker

from  American Indian Liberation

 

 

 

thank you

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

malaika

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

honour song

 

 

 

heartbreak, loss, and letting go

 

 

 

 

Heartbreak begins the moment we are asked to let go but cannot, in other words, it colours and inhabits and magnifies each and every day; heartbreak is not a visitation, but a path that human beings follow through even the most average life. Heartbreak is an indication of our sincerity: in love relationship, in a life's work, in trying to learn a musical instrument, in the attempt to shape a better more generous self. Heartbreak is the beautifully helpless side of love and affection and is just as much an essence and emblem of care as the spiritual athlete's quick but abstract ability to let go. Heartbreak has its own way of inhabiting time and its own beautiful and trying patience in coming and going.

Heartbreak is how we mature; yet we use the word heartbreak as if it only occurs when things have gone wrong: an unrequited love, a shattered dream, a child lost before their time. Heartbreak, we hope, is something we hope we can avoid; something to guard against, a chasm to be carefully looked for and then walked around; the hope is to find a way to place our feet where the elemental forces of life will keep us in the manner to which we want to be accustomed and which will keep us from the losses that all other human beings have experienced without exception since the beginning of conscious time. But heartbreak may be the very essence of being human, of being on the journey from here to there, and of coming to care deeply for what we find along the way.

Our hope to circumvent heartbreak in adulthood is beautifully and ironically child-like; heartbreak is as inescapable and inevitable as breathing, a part and parcel of every path, asking its due in every sincere course an individual takes, it may be that there may be not only no real life without the raw revelation of heartbreak, but no single path we can take within a life that will allow us to escape without having that imaginative organ we call the heart broken by what it holds and then has to let go.

In a sobering physical sense, every heart does eventually break, as the precipitating reason for death or because the rest of the body has given up before it and can no longer sustain its steady beat, but hearts also break in an imaginative and psychological sense: there is almost no path a human being can follow that does not lead to heartbreak. A marriage, a committed vow to another, even in the most settled, loving relationship, will always break our hearts at one time or another; a successful marriage has often had its heart broken many times just in order for the couple to stay together; parenthood, no matter the sincerity of our love for a child, will always break the mold of our motherly or fatherly hopes, a good work seriously taken, will often take everything we have and still leave us wanting; and finally even the most self compassionate, self examination should, if we are sincere, lead eventually to existential disappointment.

Realizing its inescapable nature, we can see heartbreak not as the end of the road or the cessation of hope but as the close embrace of the essence of what we have wanted or are about to lose. It is the hidden DNA of our relationship with life, outlining outer forms even when we do not feel it by the intimate physical experience generated by it absence; it can also ground us truly in whatever grief we are experiencing, set us to planting a seed with what we have left or appreciate what we have built even as we stand in its ruins.

If heartbreak is inevitable and inescapable, it might be asking us to look for it and make friends with it, to see it as our constant and instructive companion, and perhaps, in the depth of its impact as well as in its hindsight, and even, its own reward. Heartbreak asks us not to look for an alternative path, because there is no alternative path. It is an introduction to what we love and have loved, an inescapable and often beautiful question, something and someone that has been with us all along, asking us to be ready for the ultimate letting go.





David Whyte

from Consolations: The Solace, 

Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

 

 

 

not lose myself

 

 

 

 

 

 When I am not present to myself, 

then I am only aware of that half of me, 

that mode of my being which turns outward to created things.

And then it is possible for me to lose myself among them. 

Then I no longer feel the deep secret pull of the gravitation of love

 which draws my inward self toward God.

My will and my intelligence lose their command of the other faculties. 

My senses, my imagination, my emotions, scatter to pursue

 their various quarries all over the face of the earth.

Recollection brings them home. It brings the outward self into line 

with the inward spirit, and makes my whole being answer the deep

 pull of love that reaches down into the mystery of God.

 

 In order to be recollected in action, 

I must not lose myself in action.

In order to keep acting,

I must not lose myself in recollection.

 

 

 

 

~ Thomas Merton

 from No Man is an Island

 with thanks to Love is a Place

 

the hidden music

 

 

 

 

 

 My heart, sit only with those
who know and understand you.

Sit only under a tree
that is full of blossoms.

In the bazaar of herbs and potions
don't wander aimlessly,
find the shop with a potion that is sweet.

If you don't have a measure
people will rob you in no time.

You will take counterfeit coins
thinking they are real.

Don't fill your bowl with food from
every boiling pot you see.

Not every joke is humorous, so don't search
for meaning where there isn't one.

Not every eye can see,
not every sea is full of pearls.

My heart, sing the song of longing,
like nightingale.

The sound of your voice casts a spell
on every stone, on every thorn.

First, lay down your head,
then one by one
let go of all distractions.

Embrace the light and let it guide you
beyond the winds of desire.

There you will find a spring and
nourished by its sweet waters
like a tree you will bear fruit forever.

 

 

 

 

 ~ Rumi

translation by Maryam Mafi 

and Azima Melita Kolin

art by Tovit Basirtman

 

 

support

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lionesses baby-sit for one another just as house cats sometimes do. . . . 

Elephants appear to make allowances for other members of their herd. 

One African herd always traveled slowly because one of its members 

had never fully recovered from a broken leg suffered as a calf. 

 

A park warden reported coming across a herd with a female 

carrying a small calf several days dead, which she placed on the ground

 whenever she ate or drank: she traveled very slowly and 

the rest of the elephants waited for her. . . . 

 

There appears to be so little survival value in the behavior of this herd,

 that perhaps one has to believe that they behaved this way 

just because they loved their grieving friend who loved her dead baby, 

and wanted to support her.

 

 

 

 

 

~ Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and Susan McCarthy

from When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals