Training ourselves in these techniques [to develop patience] when we are not upset or in a tense situation is important. Just as we drive around an empty parking lot in drivers’ training to get used to the accelerator, brakes, and steering wheel before going on the highway, so we begin to practice in a tranquil environment, not a conflict situation. —Thubten Chodron
Excerpted from an email to a friend:
I dreamed of you last night. The dream started off focusing on us being amidst some revolutionary chaos—the perfect setting for an [A.] dream, of course. It was kind of like September 11th, looking for missing friends, trying not to get split up from people, etc. As the dream progressed we were together for a few weeks and when we’d go to sleep at night we’d sleep next to one another quite peacefully despite everything that was going on. Oh, and I also remember you taking me to some lefty place where revolutionaries met up to eat and that at the end of the dream when we needed to escape I attempted to commandeer a horse for us but I was unsuccessful and rather pissed off as someone was driving a team of six horses and thus had a minimum of four more than they really needed and I felt it wasn’t very kind to refuse to share. ;)
Take The I.D. Project’s Responsible Consumption Pledge with a comment over at their site:
- I pledge to reduce my consumption of disposable items for the next 30 days.
- I pledge to focus specifically on one or more items of my choosing, such as plastic bags, to notice and work mindfully with the momentum of my habits.
- Remembering that everything in the world is connected, I pledge to do my best to be aware of the damage caused by lack of attention and careless convenience.
- Knowing that it’s impossible to cause zero harm, I pledge to maintain a sense of humor about my actions as I practice, while still working to limit the negative impact of my consumption choices on myself, others, and the planet we all share.
Had I the time, I’d write an open letter to my heart as if she were a separate entity. Maybe I’d even sit her down across from me, look her into the eye, or the aorta, or whatever part of her might meet my gaze. Words might fail me so I’d have to take my time, collect my thoughts…I might even just stare at her softly for a moment, hoping that she could simply intuit what I’d I’d like to express until the compulsion to speak overrode my fear of not knowing where to begin. I’m sorry, I’d tell her. I’m really sorry that things didn’t work out as you had expected, as you had hoped. It’s okay, honey. You don’t need to feel bad about having been caught in the ambush of hope—that’s why they call it an ambush, baby. It’s tricky and it happens to all of us at some point or another. I know you got caught there, that learning to hope was your version of attempting to give up hopelessness. Again, it’s okay. So what if you overshot your target? Working on giving up hopelessness was a good thing.
I know that it’s hard for you to remember, but you chose to be born into a family that wasn’t really a family and you chose to form a family of your own that wasn’t really a family [on some kind of karmic level]. You have your reasons, even if you no longer remember those reasons. They’ll come back to mind at some point or another. For now, just try to enjoy the ride. It’s okay. Really. I swear.
And you do have a family—your non-family-family, the ones scattered across the country like stars in the sky. Of course they all have families of their own, but that’s okay, too.
I know you’re scared but you have the wisdom to know when to be selfless and when to be selfish. You can hit the target dead on. The capacity is within you with your every beat. Keep pumping. Stay open. I’ll protect you, I promise.
I came home from work yesterday afternoon to find this work of art depicting a rather large dragon resting on my bed:
The Dragon’s Digestive Tract (Norbu: 2009)
(My apologies for the picture quality. Mobile phone photography and Microsoft Office Picture Manager can only take me so far today and I wanted to increase the contrast so that the details were more obvious if not discernable.)
Later that evening I had an opportunity to discuss the work with the artist as we rode the subway uptown together. “I loved your dragon,” I mentioned, initiating my interview, “I’m curious, though, what made you decide to draw in details such as the stomach?”
“Because that was the assignment.”
“Oh really? What exactly was the assignment?” I further queried.
“To draw the digestive tract, of course,” he stated as matter of fact. (Apparently this should have been obvious but interpreting art has never been my strong suit. Sometimes a dog is just a dog, yo’.) “I had to add the saliva glands and everything.”
“You’re the only one that drew a dragon, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” he replied, “Everyone else drew humans.”
Do you imagine the universe is agitated?
Go into the desert at night and look out at the stars.
This practice should answer the question.The superior person settles her mind as the universe settles the stars in the sky.
By connecting her mind with the subtle origin, she calms it.
Once calmed, it naturally expands, and ultimately her mind becomes as vast and immeasurable as the night sky.—Lao Tzu
As charming as many of you found all that white space, the girl is back online. Now if I could bring myself to dissect the six years of posts I have backed up in a Movable Type .csv export …essentially all that I have left from the crash that led me to WordPress in the first place.
Speaking of WordPress, these changes are not pretty. It looks like a few things are out of alignment (perhaps the developers didn’t test Chrome?) and it looks utterly bleak. So bleak, in fact, that the aesthetic evokes in me a rather falling ashes Schindler’s List sort of feeling.
Quote excepted from Gr8fulTed’s TOTD:
The Buddha taught only the middle way, and mindfulness is nothing but the middle way. It is neither an intense practice nor can it be done without effort. It must be done with balance. —Buddhadasa Bhikkhu
I absolutely love this quote shared recently in an entry over at One City - Population: Everyone:
This seminar is on shunyata, although we are quite uncertain what shunyata actually is. It seems that shunyata means not that, not this. So we shouldn’t have a discussion at all. If it’s not that, not this — what else? We could sit around and scrounge up something to discuss, but it seems to be insignificant, totally irrelevant. —Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
Child on Porch (Eudora Welty: 1936)
Eudora Welty was another artist I was lucky enough to see at the Museum of the City of New York last month. I can’t remember if the image above was included in the exhibition or not, but the NY Times web site once again has a slide show of images that were definitely in the show.
You might have noticed that I’m trying to keep better track of artists that have affected me in some way. It’s hard for me to keep their names and titles of their work in mind these days. It was so much easier when I was forced to discuss them until my ears bled or painstakingly write about them in a paper that I could only understand while the ideas were still fresh in my mind. In the absence of the trials and tribulations of university study, however, these notations will have to do.