Today I am grateful for spring. We don't get real spring in the desert, but if you are alert when you walk, you can find little treasures.
The weather has been nice the last few days. Soon it will be hell on earth -- but for now, I am grateful for a cool 87 degree day.
What are you grateful for?
Little Pines
Poking up from the ground barely above my knees,
already there's holiness in their coiled roots.
Though harsh frost has whitened the hundred grasses,
deep in the courtyard, one grove of green!
In the late night long-legged spiders stir;
crickets are calling from the empty stairs.
A thousand years from now who will stroll among these trees,
fashioning poems on their ancient dragon shapes?
Our practice should be based on the idea of selflessness. Selflessness is very difficult to understand. If you try to be selfless, that is already a selfish idea. Selflessness will be there when you do not try anything.~Shunryu Suzuki
The Pond in a Bowl, Five Poems
[1]
In old age
I'm back
to childhood pleasures.
A bowl in the ground
Just add water --
it's a pool!
Throughout the night
frogs croaked
till it dawned,
as they did
when I fished
as a child at Feng-k'ou.
[2]
Who says
you can't make a pond
out of a bowl?
The lotus sprig
I planted not long ago
has already grown to full size.
Don't forget,
if it rains
stop for a visit.
Together we'll
listen to raindrops splash
on the green leaves.
[3]
Come morning,
the water brightens
as if by magic.
One moment alive
with thousands of bugs
too small to have names,
Next moment
they're gone,
leaving no trace,
Only the small fish
this way and that
swim in formations.
[4]
Does the bowl
in the garden
mock nature
when night after night
green frogs gather
to prove it's a pool?
If you choose to come
and keep me company
need you fill
the dark with noise
and endless squabble
like husband and wife?
[5]
Say the bright pond
mirrors the sky
both blue.
If I pour
water, the pond
brims.
Let night
deepen
the moon go
how many stars
shine back
from the water!
Start Where You Are~Pema Chodron, Comfortable with Uncertainty
(Again and Again)
Start where you are. This is very important. Tonglen practice (and all meditation practice) is not about later, when you get it all together and you're this person you really respect. You may be the most violent person in the world -- that's a fine place to start. That's a very rich place to start -- juicy, smelly. You might be the most depressed person in the world, the most addicted person in the world, the most jealous person in the world. You might think there are no others on the planet who hate themselves as much as you do. All of that is a good place to start. Just where you are -- that's the place to start.
What you do for yourself, any gesture of kindness, any gesture of gentleness, any gesture of honesty and clear seeing toward yourself, will affect how you experience your world. In fact, it will transform how you experience the world. What you do for yourself, you're doing for others, and what you do for others, you're doing for yourself. When you exchange yourself for others in the practice of tonglen, it becomes increasingly uncertain what is out there and what is in here.
The Road Not Taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear,
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost was born in San Francisco in 1874. He moved to New England at the age of eleven and became interested in reading and writing poetry during his high school years in Lawrence, Massachusetts. He was enrolled at Dartmouth College in 1892, and later at Harvard, but never earned a formal degree. Frost drifted through a string of occupations after leaving school, working as a teacher, cobbler, and editor of the Lawrence Sentinel. His first professional poem, "My Butterfly," was published on November 8, 1894, in the New York newspaper The Independent.
In 1895, Frost married Elinor Miriam White, who became a major inspiration in his poetry until her death in 1938. The couple moved to England in 1912, after their New Hampshire farm failed, and it was abroad that Frost met and was influenced by such contemporary British poets as Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke, and Robert
Graves. While in England, Frost also established a friendship with the poet Ezra Pound, who helped to promote and publish his work. By the time Frost returned to the United States in 1915, he had published two full-length collections, A Boy's Will and North of Boston, and his reputation was established. By the nineteen-twenties, he was the most celebrated poet in America, and with each new book—including New Hampshire (1923), A Further Range (1936), Steeple Bush (1947), and In the Clearing (1962)—his fame and honors (including four Pulitzer Prizes) increased.
Though his work is principally associated with the life and landscape of New England, and though he was a poet of traditional verse forms and metrics who remained steadfastly aloof from the poetic movements and fashions of his time, Frost is anything but a merely regional or minor poet. The author of searching and often dark meditations on universal themes, he is a quintessentially modern poet in his adherence to language as it is actually spoken, in the psychological complexity of his portraits, and in the degree to which his work is infused with layers of ambiguity and irony. Robert Frost lived and taught for many years in Massachusetts and Vermont, and died on January 29, 1963, in Boston.
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Neither Out Far Nor In Deep
The people along the sand
All turn and look one way.
They turn their back on the land.
They look at the sea all day.
As long as it takes to pass
A ship keeps raising its hull;
The wetter ground like glass
Reflects a standing gull.
The land may vary more;
But wherever the truth may be--
The water comes ashore,
And the people look at the sea.
They cannot look out far.
They cannot look in deep.
But when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep?
What follows is the sense I make of Easter from where I am now in my life. This is based, mostly, on the versions of the story contained in the Bible. I'll conclude with my own take on the Church's story.
In many cultures around the world, the cross has been a symbol of the human body. It seems almost appropriate, given the history of the symbol (a history of which the early Christians must have had some vague intuition), that Jesus would shed His body upon the cross so that His Spirit could be freed.
Most importantly, Jesus undermined them through His teachings that the Kingdom of God is within each of us, to be found through introspection and self-knowledge (certainly gnostic in this regard). And further, that we grow closer to the Kingdom of God through compassion and generosity, and through not clinging to egoic desires for wealth and comfort.
