Tag: Present moment

The world goes on

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Another Saturday, another Mary Oliver poem:

Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in  the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-
over and over announcing your place
In the family of things.

Wild Geese, (extract)

The Book of LIfe

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Just flip the pages of anyone’s life book; get beneath the story line, and what do you notice? Changeability, the unpredictable, the unforeseen (good and bad): to recall that, brings forth faith – be open and alert. A human life is also marked by an ongoing quest to find fulfilment – which hasn’t quite arrived (and maybe isn’t even near). Seeing that brings attention back to the present: what do you really want, and where will that be found? It’s never in that ongoing flow of continuity that the Buddha called ‘becoming’ (bhava). What about if the mind stepped out of that, into the immediate openness of an awareness that isn’t craving or dreading becoming anything? When you even review that tide of “now I’m this and I should be that, and I might get there” you realize that this goes on irrespective of circumstance and identity. So there’s nothing intrinsically personal about this life book, and you don’t have to throw it away and get a better one. The advice is to study it from a different viewpoint: it’s written in personal handwriting, but bear in mind and take it to heart, that the marks of change/risk/unpredictability (anicca), of incompleteness and the unresolved (dukkha), and of impersonality (anatta) are universal marks. Through bearing these in mind, there can be a breakthrough to the unconditioned, the secure, the sorrowless, the place of peace. One can step out of the book.

Ajahn Sucitto, Lockdown Means Opening Up

Dance

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Our physical space may be more restricted, but our hearts can still dance

May my ashes, when you have them, friend,

and give them to the ocean

leap in the froth of the waves,

still loving the moment,

still ready, beyond all else,

to dance for the world.

Mary Oliver, Prayer

One breath at a time

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You deal with your shit in Zen by sitting with it. By breathing right into it. You don’t try and ignore it with pleasant thoughts or lofty ideas, and you don’t try and bury it with solutions.

You deal with it, you work with it, one breath at a time.

Gento Steve Krieger, Head monk Rinzai-ji Zen Center, Los Angeles,  Growing Ground

Our schedules….

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I wake clear and rested, light flooding my room. The day seems endless and free.

But making coffee, I notice three bills I haven’t paid and after showering I notice I need a haircut, and since I’ll be out that way, I think I might as well pick up my shirts. But I so want to spend time in the sun. So I think, well, after these errands, I’ll go to the park, and then I deliberate which park will be just right and decide on one forty minutes away. Finally, wanting to make sure there is some fun in all of this, I call a friend and plan to meet her at a movie at six.

Now I have to hurry along to make sure I can get everywhere on time. But, thankfully, while gassing up, I hear a small bird and lift my head just as a cloud opens and the light floods my mind, and I drop all my plans like change on the ground.

I laugh at myself. I can so easily become a slave to a schedule I create.

Not one of these things is necessary today. I drop everything and follow the bird.

Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening

The here ….

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Healing is coming to terms with the actuality of things.

Jon Kabat Zinn