Life for me right now is good. I returned from two months of intensive practice in Sri Lanka and Malaysia. My health is OK. I even went to the gym yesterday. Yet stuff comes up. Not because of anything in particular. I’m sitting here typing this and I sense some uneasiness, some anxiety, perhaps a
Meditation shows me my burdens were mostly imagined. But even imaginary ones can carry real emotional weight. I remember this cartoon I saw perhaps 20 years ago while waiting at a doctor’s office. A woman and a man are sitting together at a coffee shop in some urban setting. The man looks over and says:
Good poetry can show intricacies of meaning and feeling easily lost. This is why I trust the vision of poets and consider good poetry as mindfulness. The Zen teacher Sobun Katherine Thanas in a book which was published not long after she passed a few years ago, wrote: I have come to realize that our
Meditation turns special moments on their head. It turns out we don’t need special moments to savor the openness of experience. Are you familiar with the Calvin and Hobbes cartoons? One of my favorites is when Calvin trips and falls down a flight of stairs, landing on his rear and looking confused. Then he stands
Despite all that is wrong, I can still take delight in a moment of well-being. News stories are not the conversation starters they used to be. In the day, I could fill an awkward gap by saying “Guess what I heard on NPR this morning?” I don’t use that line anymore. These are intense times.
Good poems, for me, are often potent teachings on how to live this precious life we are given. Over the years I have been moved to tears reading poems. There is one poet in particular I keep coming back to, the Japanese poet Ryōkan Taigu, who lived from 1758–1831. Ryokan, as a Google search tells me,
Folks who meditate in order to feel better often find the opposite. Eventfully they see that it’s the letting go of the wanting of happiness, that actually brings it! I can begin to answer by sharing a haiku I recently found: Since my house burned downI now have a better viewof the rising moon. This
We open little by little into the warmth and tenderness of our own essential vulnerability. Despite all that’s wrong in the world, at times I surrender and trust that I can be of some benefit by staying awake for it all, but non entangled, yet connected by a caring heart. The line from a poem