Fat with Blessing

A small green island where one white cow lives alone,

a meadow of an island.

The cow grazes till nightfall, full and fat,

but during the night she panics

and grows thin as a single hair. “What shall I eat

tomorrow? There’s nothing left!”

By dawn, the grass has grown up again, waist-high.

The cow starts eating and by dark the meadow is clipped short.

She’s full of strength and energy, but she panics

in the dark as before, and grows abnormally thin overnight.

The cow does this over and over, and this is all she does.

She never thinks, “This meadow has never failed

to grow back. Why should I be afraid every night that it won’t?”

The cow is the soul. The island field is this world where

that grows lean with fear and fat with blessing.

Lean or fat.

White cow, don’t make yourself miserable

with what is to come, or not to come.

Rumi

Begin

To know what you’re going to draw,

you have to begin drawing.

Picasso

Sunday Quote: What’s needed

Bien commencer amène à bien terminer

A good beginning makes for a good conclusion

French proverb

Wings will be given

You are uneasy riding the body?

Dismount. Travel lighter. Wings will be given.

Be clear like a mirror, reflecting nothing.
Be clean of pictures and the worry that comes with images.

Gaze into what is not ashamed or afraid of any truth.

Contain all human faces in your own without any judgment of them.
Be pure emptiness.

What is inside that? you ask. Silence is all I can say.

Lovers have some secrets That they keep.

Rumi

Complicating things

Dhamma is simple:

Live with love and be aware.
It is only the mind that complicates this teaching and says that it is not enough.

Michael Kewley, Former Buddhist monk, currently teaching courses on Awareness and meditation

Not who we are

The transformation of fear does not mean that we no longer have fearful responses. It means that we no longer believe that those responses are who we are. This is what practice is about: learning to stop believing that our deep-seated reactivity is who we are. Who we really are is much bigger than any of our fear-based conditioned responses. When we can really experience fear, we can see through this false identification, perhaps even glimpsing a vaster sense of Being.

Ezra Bayda, Being Zen