Let none through anger or ill-will
Wish harm upon another.
Even as a mother protects with her life
Her child, her only child,
So with a boundless heart
Should one cherish all living beings;
Radiating kindness over the entire world:
Spreading upwards to the skies,
And downwards to the depths;
Outwards and unbounded,
Freed from hatred and ill-will.
- "Karaniya Metta Sutta: The Buddha's Words on Loving-kindness"
translated from the Pali by The Amaravati Sangha
"Holiness comes wrapped in the ordinary. There are burning bushes all around you. Every tree is full of angels. Hidden beauty is waiting in every crumb.”
This morning I heard this on the radio.
I went and crossed Robot That Does Dishes off my Christmas list.
In it's place I put: Alash and Bela Fleck Singing Christmas Song Together.
And then I crossed that off because it happened, and I heard it.
Poster wrote: "This is a blend of the English Christmas carol 'What Child Is This?' and the traditional Tuvan song Dyngyldai."
As swimmers dare to lie face to the sky and water bears them, as hawks rest upon air and air sustains them, so would I learn to attain freefall, and float into Creator Spirit’s deep embrace, knowing no effort earns that all-surrounding grace.
Sometimes I open a book of poems and see what I am given.
Today I opened Why I Wake Early, by Mary Oliver, and was given this:
Logos
Why worry about the loaves and fishes? If you say the right words, the wine expands. If you say them with love and the felt ferocity of that love and the felt necessity of that love, the fish explode into many. Imagine him, speaking, and don’t worry about what is reality, or what is plain, or what is mysterious. If you were there, it was all those things. If you can imagine it, it is all those things. Eat, drink, be happy. Accept the miracle. Accept, too, each spoken word spoken with love.
I found this leetle book at a garage sale called Living the Simple Life. The book, that is. The garage sale could have been titled, "Selling all my shtuff so I can try to live the simple life here do you need some VHS tapes and old ski boots how about a wicker bird cage?"
The leetle book is by Elaine St. James and it chronicles tiny steps she took to get to a more simplified version of now.
Number 26 is titled The Need To Make Wise Choices:
Since we have time for only a limited amount of stuff, we need to choose wisely what stuff we're going to allow to take up that time. Since we only have a limited amount of time to spend or engage in leisure activities, we need to choose our friends and activities wisely.
i thank You God for most this amazing day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today, and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay great happening illimitably earth)
how should tasting touching hearing seeing breathing any–lifted from the no of all nothing–human merely being doubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my ears awake and now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
I love love loved this article by Martin Rogers about the US soccer player who scored the game winning goal last night.
He dreamed it!
As dreams go, the one John Brooks had on Saturday night was pretty darn improbable. Brooks, a back-up central defender who wasn’t expected to see playing time in this World Cup and who rarely ventures out of his own half of the field, dreamed that he would come on as substitute and score the winning goal against Ghana.
On Monday night, somehow, against all odds and with the United States on the ropes, that is exactly what he did.
At 6-foot-4, the German-born 21-year-old has height on his side, but even so, you could scarcely have picked a more unlikely goalscorer to make the critical blow on a night of remarkable drama such as this.
Humans are inescapable storytellers, and we can hold many stories at the same time. The elasticity of the human mind not only is capable of this but seems to welcome the chance.
I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.
"Maybe the journey isn't so much about becoming anything.
Maybe it's about un-becoming everything that isn't really you
so you can be who you were meant to be in the first place."
The film Once is being performed as a Broadway musical. I re-watched it this month---it's an Irish film and according to sparkly shamrocks everywhere this is an Irish month---and was led back to the haunting and beautiful music that came from Marketa Irglova and Glen Hansard. Together, they were part of The Swell Season. Apart, they are doing different things musically. Her first song in this recording gave me the chills. It's titled We Are Good.
While eating King Cake---of which I still don't fully understand the origin or meaning, but it's delicious, therefor tradition----my family and I talked of Lents passed. I told my daughter how some people use Lent to give up something, while others focus on doing something new, creating a new habit. I was leaning toward doing something new, until she threw a challenge down: peanut butter, she said. "You should give up peanut butter."
I thought of how I have it every day, at least once a day. And how I see peanut butter as entirely neutral. Not good, not bad. My use is moderate and therefor it needs no adjustment. I decided, on the basis of experiment rather than sacrifice, to take the challenge. That because I have it every day and because it is neutral, and because I felt a little kick-up of "I don't want to", I'll give up peanut butter, just to see.
She came up with what she wanted to give up, which was school, and then she came up with a more viable thing to give up, and then we talked about how on Easter, we could dive into that which we'd spent time without.
I wondered aloud how I'd feel about peanut butter after going 40 days without. "Maybe I won't even like it anymore," I said. "Maybe my tastes will change and peanut butter won't be so interesting to me."
"Yeah," she said. "Like instead of peanut butter, you might like tater tots."
Now I'm curious to see if an absence of peanut butter will translate into a love of tater tots. Only one way to find out.
"I had about three or four years of this, where nothing was really working for me. This was my Hemingway-if-Hemingway-had-never-been-to-a-war-and-was-working-as-a-tech-writer-and-was-actually-sort-of-a-wimp phase. All these stories had titles like “In Parking Lot K,” “A Hard Rain Is Coming” or “In the Employee Cafeteria, Across from Employee Relations.” It was about the time our second daughter was born, and I was getting a little desperate for some power. In that desperate mode, all of my South Side of Chicago impulses came back, and I started simply trying to be funny."
As good as "In Parking Lot K" sounds, I'm glad he failed at writing conventionally.
Gus burst into my room and shouted, 'I have wonderful news!' and I was like, 'I don't really want to hear wonderful news right now,' and Gus said, 'This is wonderful news you want to hear,' and I asked him, 'Fine, what is it?' and he said, 'You are going to live a good long life filled with great and terrible moments you cannot even imagine yet!”
"My partner, Bruce Tribbensee, and I worked a day job together. During lunch we would go out and complain about our boss....
We went out to lunch and made a list of things that sucked. One of the things that I thought sucked, as a writer, was sending out stories to magazines.
Our initial idea was to create a social network, where everybody was either a writer or a publisher. Writers could find organizations that were looking for particular pieces.
The plan was to move into art, then music. We would just be this creator, publisher social network. We called it SubmishMash.
We named the company after something we thought sucked. That is like naming shoes after the sound they make stepping into dog crap."
---Michael Fitzgerald, in a great interview where he waxes on the benefits of living in Montana and the uncomfortable importance of keeping your butt in the chair.
Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.
"Telling our stories is holy work."
---Reverend Nancy Lane, Ph.D.
"Owning our story can be hard, but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it....only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light."
---Brene Brown
Repetition
"Experience isn't interesting till it begins to repeat itself---in fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience."
---Elizabeth Bowen
"Repetition is not failure.
Ask the waves, ask the leaves, ask the wind.
There is no expected pace for inner learning. What we need to learn comes when we need it, no matter how old or young, no matter how many times we have to start over, no matter how many times we have to learn the same lesson. No one really likes this, of course, but we deal with our dislikes in the same way, again and again, until we learn what we need to know about the humility of acceptance."
---Mark Nepo
Compassion
"I don't believe compassion is our default response. I think our first response to pain---ours or someone else's---is to self-protect. We protect ourselves by looking for someone or something to blame. Or sometimes we shield ourselves by turning to judgment or by immediately going into fix-it mode."
---Brene Brown
"When we practice generating compassion, we can expect to experience the fear of our pain. Compassion practice is daring. It involves learning to relax and allow ourselves to move gently toward what scares us."
---Pema Chodron
I receive a lot of forwarded emails from my mom. She will correct me to say, "A few." And she will quantify exactly how many are in a few, how many are in several, and whether my grammar is correct. It usually ain't. (Hi, Mom.)
So fun so fun so fun.
Some of these emails are political, some are religious, but the best ones are titled I THOUGHT SHE WOULD LIKE THIS and include a video of puppies interacting with lions in a seemingly natural way. These are for me to show to my daughter.
Today's email was titled WE WERE ALL HOME SCHOOLED and at the bottom, was a quote unrelated to the actual email. Sort of like getting a video of a lion and a puppy playing, and at the bottom it might say, "God Bless America."
Anyway, I liked the quote. It went:
"Faith is not about everything turning out ok. It's aboutbeing ok, no matter how things turn out."
