The Way It Slows You Down
Sometimes things don’t go the way you want them to. Sometimes you handle this well. Sometimes you don’t.
It’s helpful to remember it’s not really about feeling comfortable, or successful, or right, or whatever… it’s really about staying present with whatever arises, seeing what leads to suffering, and acting on that.
As best you can.
Disappointment
by Tony Hoagland
I was feeling pretty religious
standing on the bridge in my winter coat
looking down at the gray water:
the sharp little waves dusted with snow,
fish in their tin armor.
That’s what I like about disappointment:
the way it slows you down,
when the querulous insistent chatter of desire
goes dead calm
and the minor roadside flowers
pronounce their quiet colors,
and the red dirt of the hillside glows.
She played the flute, he played the fiddle
and the moon came up over the barn.
Then he didn’t get the job,–
or her father died before she told him
that one, most important thing–
and everything got still.
It was February or October
It was July
I remember it so clear
You don’t have to pursue anything ever again
It’s over
You’re free
You’re unemployed
You just have to stand there
looking out on the water
in your trench coat of solitude
with your scarf of resignation
lifting in the wind.
***
(No, I didn’t lose a job or anything like that. I just got an unwelcome visit from an old, habit pattern.)
Who Could Ever Stand It?
In preparation this Thursday’s “Let’s Talk Dharma” discussion on Enlightenment, I offer this quote from Buddhadasa’s teaching on Nirvana for Everyone:
When causal conditions are not present, mental defilements [greed, hatred, and delusion] simply become extinct. Even though the extinction may be temporary, even thought there is only temporary coolness, the phenomenon has the real sense of nirvana.
Hence, temporary nirvana does exist for for those who have some defilements left; temporary nirvana nourishes all sentient beings.
If defilements were with us day and night without ceasing, who could ever stand it? Living things would either die, or become insane…and then die. One survives because there are periods when the fires of defilements do not burn. Temporary nirvana keeps all of us alive and well, and is a nourishing condition, normal to life.
This Chance
Still more from
To Begin With, the Sweet Grass
by Mary Oliver
4.
Someday I am going to ask my friend
Paulus,
the dancer, the potter,
to make me a begging bowl
which I believe
my soul needs.
And if I come to you,
to the door of your comfortable house
with unwashed clothes and unclean fingernails,
will you put something into it?
I would like to take this chance.
I would like to give you this chance.
Look, and Look Again
Continuing from yesterday’s post with more from
To Begin With, the Sweet Grass
by Mary Oliver
3.
The witchery of living
is my whole conversation
with you, my darlings.
All I can tell you is what I know.
Look, and look again.
This world is not just a little thrill for
the eyes.
It’s more than bones.
It’s more than the delicate wrist with its
personal pulse.
It’s more than the beating of the single
heart.
It’s praising.
It’s giving until the giving feels like receiving.
You have a life–just image that!
You have this day, and maybe another,
and maybe
still another.
***
(doll by Jane Dyer)
Intimate and Ultimate
So I’m thinking, after yesterday’s post, what else can I say about this new relationship I’ve discovered with the breath.
How about this:
from To Begin With, the Sweet Grass
by Mary Oliver
2.
Eat bread and understand comfort.
Drink water, and understand delight.
Visit the garden where the scarlet trumpets
are opening their bodies for the
hummingbirds
who are drinking the sweetness, who
are
thrillingly gluttonous.
For one thing leads to another.
Soon you will notice how stones shine
underfoot.
Eventually tides will be the only calendar
you believe in.
And someone’s face, whom you love,
will be as a star
both intimate and ultimate,
and you will be both heart-shaken and
respectful.
And you will hear the air itself, like a
beloved, whisper:
oh, let me, for a while longer, enter the
two
beautiful bodies of your lungs.
It Was Fun!
I’m back now from the Concentration Retreat and I feel like I need to say something about the experience — because it was significantly different than what I had experienced previously at similar retreats — but the difference was so, well….experiential…..that I don’t know what I can say about it that would convey anything meaningful. Except that the energetic experience of sustaining my attention on the breath began as a feeling of “riding” or “resting” on it, then turning into something more like “dancing” with it, and then finally, a whole lot like “rolling around under the sheets” with it!
So let me just say: It was fun!!!
The Citizens are Mistaken
Note: I leave on Sunday (8/21) for a retreat at Spirit Rock and won’t get home until very late on Aug 30. It will take me awhile to get back to “normal” once I return, so I probably won’t be posting again until Monday, Sept 5. Please check back then.
As part of my getting-ready-to-travel ritual, I have selected a passage (more or less at random) from Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino, to accompany me as I venture out into the world.
I offer it here for your digital traveling pleasure:
Cities & The Sky. 2.
This belief is handed down in Beersheba: that, suspended in the heavens, there exists another Beersheba, where the city’s most elevated virtues and sentiments are poised, and that if the terrestrial Beersheba will take the celestial one as its model the two cities will become one. The image propagated by tradition is that of a city of pure gold, with silver locks and diamond gates, a jewel-city, all inset and inlaid, as a maximum of laborious study might produce when applied to materials of maximum worth. True to this belief, Beersheba’s inhabitants honor everything that suggest for them the celestial city: they accumulate noble metals and rare stones, they renounce all ephemeral excesses, they develop forms of composite composure.
They also believe, these inhabitants, that another Beersheba exists underground, the receptacle of everything base and unworthy that happens to them, and it is their constant care to erase from the visible Beersheba every tie or resemblance to the lower town. In the place of roofs they imagine that the underground city has overturned rubbish bins, with cheese rinds, greasy paper, fish scales, dishwater, uneaten spaghetti, old bandages spilling from them. Or even that its substance is dark and malleable and thick, like the pitch that pours down from the sewers, prolonging the route of the human bowels, from black hole to black hole, until it splatters against the lowest subterranean floor, and from the lazy, encircled bubbles below, layer upon layer, a fecal city rises, with twisted spires.
In Beersheba’s beliefs there is an element of truth and one of error. It is true that the city is accompanied by two projections of itself, one celestial and one infernal; but the citizens are mistaken about their consistency. The inferno that broods in the deepest subsoil of Beersheba is a city designed by the most authoritative architects, built with the most expensive materials on the market, with every device and mechanism and gear system functioning, decked with tassels and fringes and frills hanging from all the pipes and levers.
Intent on piling up its carats of perfection, Beersheba takes for virtue what is now a grim mania to fill the empty vessel of itself; the city does not know that its only moments of generous abandon are those when it becomes detached from itself, when it lets go, expands. Still, at the zenith of Beersheba there gravitates a celestial body that shines with all the city’s riches, enclosed in the treasury of cast-off things: a planet a-flutter with potato peels, broken umbrellas, old socks, candy wrappings, paved with tram tickets, fingernail-cuttings and pared calluses, eggshells. This is the celestial city, and in its heavens long-tailed comets fly past, released to rotate in space from the only free and happy action of the citizens of Beersheba, a city which, only when it shits, is not miserly, calculating, greedy.
Then….
excerpt from
To Begin With, the Sweet Grass
by Mary Oliver
7.
What I loved in the beginning, I think,
was mostly myself.
Never mind that I had to, since some-
body had to.
That was many years ago.
Since then I have gone out from my
confinements,
though with difficulty.
I mean the ones that thought to rule my
heart.
I cast them out, I put them on the mush
pile.
They will be nourishment somehow
(everything is nourishment
somehow or another).
And I have become the child of the
clouds, and of hope.
I have become the friend of the enemy,
whoever that is.
I have become older and, cherishing
what I have learned,
I have become younger.
And what do I risk to tell you this,
which is all I know?
Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love
the world.
It Is Possible
As I posted earlier, the homework assignment for tomorrow night’s “Let’s Talk” Dharma discussion, is to listen to Jack Kornfield’s talk, “Labor of Love — Right Livelihood”. In it, Jack quotes Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859):
“It is possible to have outer liberty and still be enslaved. The time may come when men and women are carried away by the pursuit of wealth and lose all self restraint. In their exclusive anxiety to make a fortune, they neglect their chief business, which is to remain masters of their own life and heart.”
Indeed.
What Returns
I’m getting ready to leave on Sunday for a 10-day retreat at Spirit Rock, which is located near San Fransisco in beautiful northern California, where the land and the climate seem so much like Tuscany, and yet…..
Why California Will Never Be Like Tuscany
by Gary Snyder
There must have been huge oaks and
pines, cedars,
maybe madrone,
in Tuscany and Umbria long ago.
A few centuries after wood was gone,
they began to build with brick and
stone.
Brick and stone farmhouses, solid, fire-
proof,
steel shutters and doors.
But farming changed.
60,000 vacant solid fireproof Italian
farm houses
on the market in 1970,
scattered across the land.
Sixty thousand affluent foreigners,
to fix them,
learn to cook, and write a book.
But in California, houses all are wood–
roads pushed through, sewers dug, lines
laid underground–
hundreds of thousands, made of strand-
board, sheetrock, plaster–.
They won’t be here 200 years from now
–they’ll burn or rot.
No handsome solid second homes for
Thousand-year later wealthy
Melanesian or Eskimo artists and writers
here,
— oak and pine will soon return.
***
(photo: Spirit Rock dormitories)