Go For It!
If you are at all interested in going on retreat, and are available for either a weekend or a full 8 days beginning Sept 5….THIS IS THE RETREAT FOR YOU.
It will be held in the Kansas City area (only 4 hours from St. Louis) and will be led by Spirit Rock/IMS teacher, Shaila Catherine (who specializes in deep concentration practices), and KC Dharma Leader, Phillip Jones (president of Mid-American Dharma).
DON’T LET FINANCES STAND IN YOUR WAY. Reduced Rates starting at $250 are now available, plus additional financial assistance, if needed.
Please help support our efforts to bring nationally recognized teachers to the midwest by attending this retreat!
Click here to learn more and to register. REGISTRATION ENDS AUG. 22.
It Does Just Fine
Tonight’s KM group will move on to Chapter 20 in Joseph Goldstein’s Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening. The title of the chapter is Material Elements, Feelings, and Perceptions and in it he writes about that most-difficult-to-disucss aspect of the Buddha’s teachings…the empty, selfless nature of all phenomena (or “non-self”).
To this end, he quotes a wonderful poem by Nobel Prize-winner, Wislawa Symborska:
View with a Grain of Sand
We call it a grain of sand,
but it calls itself neither grain nor sand.
It does just fine, without a name,
whether general, particular,
permanent, passing,
incorrect, or apt.
Our glance, our touch means nothing to it.
It doesn’t feel itself seen and touched.
And that it fell on the windowsill
is only our experience, not its.
For it, it is not different from falling on anything else
with no assurance that it has finished falling
or that it is falling still.
The window has a wonderful view of a lake,
but the view doesn’t view itself.
It exists in this world
colorless, shapeless,
soundless, odorless, and painless.
The lake’s floor exists floorlessly,
and its shore exists shorlessly.
The water feels itself neither wet nor dry
and its waves to themselves are neither singular nor plural.
They splash deaf to their own noise
on pebbles neither large nor small.
And all this beneath a sky by nature skyless
in which the sun sets without setting at all
and hides without hiding behind an unminding cloud.
The wind ruffles it, its only reason being
that it blows.
A second passes.
A second second.
A third.
But they’re three seconds only for us.
Time has passed like a courier with urgent news.
But that’s just our simile.
The character is invented, his haste is make believe,
his news inhuman.
Today I/Me/My….
Today I am getting ready for the arrival of my friend, Jill, who is coming from Singapore, and for the party I am giving in her honor — a reunion of the book club I used to host, of which Jill was a member.
We’ll be party-ing and reunion-ing, but also discussing a book I selected, which I’ve found inspiring (but also distressing): The Folded Clock, by Heidi Julavits. (I posted previously about it here.)
The book has 92 short chapters, each headed by a date (but not listed in chronological order), and each beginning with “Today…”
For example:
June 21. Today I wondered What is the worth of a day?
March 3. Today my friend asked me, “Am I crazy?”
July 29. Today I was reading The Men’s Club, by a California writer, now dead, named Leonard Michaels.
July 18. Today, or rather tonight, my husband and I will be watching “The Men Tell All.”
August 2. Today I was stung by a wasp.
Of course, there’s much more to each chapter/day than just that one sentence. Each “today” is an opening to what turns out to be quite compelling little narrative essays — mental ramblings, beautifully crafted — which overlap, reflect and sometimes reshape each other…and which we, as readers, hold together in our minds as the “I” of the one who is doing the telling.
Which is how we do it, too, for ourselves. We create a sense of our “self” by telling the “story” of our “self” — to our “self.” (That’s what that near-constant monologue that’s going on in our heads is doing.)
Ask yourself this: Who is saying all that stuff you find yourself thinking? Who’s listening to it? And who’s believing it?
I Love You, Mother Earth!
A plug today for my Fair Shares CCSA (Combined Community Supported Agriculture) and for their new partnership with Urban Buds: City Cut Flowers, which is owned and operated by Miranda Duschack (on the right) and Karen “Mimo” Davis. Together they grow specially cut flowers and keep honey bees on their one-acre urban farm in the Dutchtown neighborhood of St. Louis!
The flowers are grown without harmful chemicals and with the use of Integrated Pest Management techniques, cover crops, compost, minimal tillage, and drip irrigation. They are grown in the field, in a high tunnel, and in a heated glass greenhouse.
And….they’re beautiful!
Tell Mother Earth you love her. Support local agriculture. And get yourself a bouquet!
Hints and Guesses
A conversation at lunch today about fortunate and unfortunate circumstances, about children and family and the frailty of aging parents…has left me tender — and in awe — at the mystery of what it means to be alive. So I turn once again, to poetry.
For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observation, discipline, thought and action.
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is
Incarnation.
— from Four Quartets, by T.S. Eliot
What Furthest Eludes
This is the poem that speaks to me today:
A Person Protests to Fate
by Jane Hirshfield
A person protests to fate:
‘The things you have caused
me most to want
are those that furthest elude me’.
Fate nods.
Fate is sympathetic.
To tie the shoes, button a shirt,
are triumphs
for only the very young,
the very old.
During the long middle:
conjugating a rivet
mastering tango
training the cat to stay off the table
perserving a single moment longer than this one
continuing to wake whatever has happened the day before
and the penmanships love practices inside the body.
Mirabai: On Being
My very first Dharma teacher (and my very, VERY dear friend and mentor), Mirabai Bush, was featured on Krista Tippett’s radio program: On Being, a week ago Sunday (7/19).
I hesitate to say anything about Mirabai because whenever I do, I always end up saying something that sounds so way over the top..and yet, it doesn’t even begin to come close to what an extraordinary human being she is…and what an amazing effect she has had on my life. Let me just say that I love her. And I am loved by her. But in a very unusual, non-personal kind of way. (I told you…it’s hard to explain.)
Anyway. When you get a chance, listen to her interview here.
10 Questions
DHARMA MOVIE NIGHT TONIGHT
We’ll be showing 10 Questions for the Dalai Lama, a 2006 documentary that asks: How do you reconcile a commitment to non-violence when faced with violence? Why do the poor often seem happier than the rich? Must a society lose its traditions in order to move into the future?
The film includes a look back at the spiritual leader’s history and an exploration of the city of Dharamsala, India, where he now lives in exile. Watch trailer here.
Show starts tonight at 7:00pm at a private home inKirkwood. If you want to join us, contact me by email here.
5 Ways
I listened to another excellent talk last night, this one by Akincano Marc Weber, in which he outlined five ways the Buddha offered to deal with distracting or obsessive thoughts….the ones that come either while we’re meditating or while we’re just trying to live a good and peaceful life! (Listen to the talk here)
5 Ways to Deal with Obsessive Thoughts:
#1. If it’s possible, just ignore them.
#2. “Fight fire with fire”…by replacing intrusive thoughts with more useful/helpful/wholesome thoughts.
#3. Remind yourself that you’ve “been to this movie…and know how it ends.”
4. Undermine the power of the thought (or emotion) by making fun of it or exaggerating it or giving it some kind of ridiculous persona.
#5. As a last resort, apply “brute force.” (Sometimes you just have to tell your mind to SHUT THE F@%K UP!)
Not Who You Are
Last night I listened to a great talk by Phillip Moffitt, in which he pointed out the difference between being identified with an emotion (or thought, feeling, or mind state) and being characterized by it. It’s one thing to feel sad, for example, and quite another to feel that you ARE sad.
It’s not just a trick of semantics. It’s the difference between being able to experience sadness (or rage, anxiety, confusion, etc.) and being overwhelmed by it.
Phillip explains this much better than I can. Listen to him here.