Springtime musings

Beauty and grace.

So many beings in the universe love us unconditionally.  A bird song can express joy, beauty, and purity, and evoke in us vitality and love. The trees, the water, and the air don’t ask anything of us; they just love us. Even though we need this kind of love, we continue to destroy these things. We should try our best to do the least harm to all living creatures.

We humans think we’re intelligent, but an orchid, for example, knows how to produce symmetrical flowers; a snail knows how to make a beautiful, well-proportioned shell. Compared with their knowledge, ours is not worth much at all. We should bow deeply before the orchid and the snail and join our palms reverently before the butterfly and the magnolia tree. The feeling of respect for all species will help us to recognize and cultivate the noblest nature in ourselves.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh, The World We Have

Because

Me and my solar eclipse shadows.

A woman who cuts her hair is about to change her life.
― Coco Chanel

A Monday meander: Understanding

Relaxing by the woodstove.  (Izzy)

Cats are connoisseurs of comfort.

~James Herriot, James Herriot’s Cat Stories

I have lived with several Zen masters — all of them cats.

~ Eckhart Tolle

This tape will self destruct in five seconds

This morning just before sunrise.

My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive.

~Maya Angelou

A very long life?

Wave breaking on the shore at the Point yesterday evening.

One of the reasons that old age is so disconcerting to many people is that they feel as if they’re stripped of their roles. As we enter old age and face physical frailty, the departure of children, retirement, and the deaths of loved ones, we see the lights fading, the audience dwindles, and we are overwhelmed by a loss of purpose, and by the fear of not knowing how to behave or where we now fit in this play. The Ego, whose very sustenance has been the roles it played in the public eye, becomes irate, despairing, or numb, in the face of its own obsolescence. It may harken back to roles in its past to assert itself, but these strategies bring only more suffering as the Ego fights a losing battle.

As we learn to distinguish between our Egos — marked by our mind and thoughts — and the witnessing Soul — who’s not subject to them — we begin to see the opportunity that aging offers. We begin to separate who we are from the roles that we play, and to recognize why the Ego clings as it does to behaviors and images that no longer suit us. Stripped of its roles, the Ego is revealed as fiction. But for the person without a spiritual context, this is pure tragedy, for seekers of truth who are aware of the Soul, it is only the beginning.

Rather than wonder what new “role” we can invent for ourselves in the world then, the question that concerns us might be better put this way: How can we, as aging people, make our wisdom felt in the world? By embodying wisdom. We can find a happy balance between participation and retreat, remembering that while it is our duty to be of service if possible, it is also important that we prepare for our own journeys into death, through contemplation, quiet time, and deepening knowledge of ourselves.

~ Ram Dass

Meanwhile

Waking up the sky.

A bird calls
announcing the difference
between heaven and hell.

~ Dogen Zenji

The changing season and Walktober

Hearts and flowers in the corn.

Language wakes up in the morning. It has not yet washed its face, brushed its teeth, combed its hair. It does not remember whether or not, in the night, any dreams came. The light is the plain light of day, indirect — the window faces north — but strong enough to see by nonetheless.

Language goes to the tall mirror that hangs on one wall and stands before it, wearing no makeup, no slippers, no robe. In the same circumstances, we might see first our two eyes, looking back at their own inquiring. We might glance down to the two legs on which vision stands. What language sees in the mirror is also twofold — the two foundation powers of image and statement. The first foundation, image, holds the primary, wordless world of the actual, its heaped assemblage of quartzite, feathers, steel trusses, re-seamed baseballs, distant airplanes, and a few loudly complaining cows, traveling from every direction into the self’s interior awareness. The second foundation, statement, is our human answer, traveling outward back into the world– our stories, our theories, our judgments, our epics and lyrics and work songs, birth notices and epitaphs, newspaper articles and wedding invitations, the infinite coherence-makings of form. All that is sayable begins with these two modes of attention and their prolific offspring. Begins, that is, with the givens of experienced, embodied existence and the responses we offer the world in return.

Let us return to the morning bedroom, to the moment when language awakens to rise, looks outward, looks inward, asks its one question: “What might I say?” What does it mean when the answer arrives through the gaze of a Muse, that is, in the form we think of as art?

~Excerpts from “Language Wakes Up in the Morning: On Poetry’s Speaking,” a chapter in Jane Hirshfield’s book Ten Windows: How Great Poems Change the World