Am I the sun inside me?
~ Kazim Ali, from “Dear Rumi,” The Far Mosque
Notes:
I was racing back home from the computer store, busily doing my errands, trying to get things done. I noticed a restaurant and shopping center to my right, on the freeway. I’d been curious about this place for almost a year. Today, instead of driving by, I turned off the highway and pulled into the parking lot. I spent the next three hours browsing through the stores filled with antiques, trinkets, and gourmet foods. Then I enjoyed a leisurely dinner—a juicy hamburger and a chocolate malt—at the restaurant before returning home. The stores had always been there; I’d always driven past. Today I stopped, satisfied my curiosity, and enjoyed myself.
It’s easy to spend our lives working toward a goal, convinced that if we could only get there, we’d be truly happy then. Today is the only moment we have. If we wait until tomorrow to be happy, we’ll miss out on the beauty of today.
Have your plans. Set goals.
Let yourself be happy now.
~ Melody Beattie, from “Be Happy Now” & More Language of Letting Go
Photo Credit
It’s a blank screen.
At the bottom of the iPhone, there’s a Start arrow symbol: >
Below the arrow, is a timer.
09:00.
My finger hovers over the arrow. Oh, for God sakes DK, it’s only 9 minutes. How difficult can this be?
P: “As we get started, settle yourself in a comfortable position.” Her voice is soothing. Or seductive? Jesus, DK, focus.
The Pacifica app’s headline: “Reduce Stress. Feel Happier.” “Apple’s Best of 2017…psychologist designed tools for mindfulness meditation, relaxation, and mood/health tracking.” Only you DK, only You, can get anxious in front of a Meditation exercise designed to reduce the same.
P: “Sit on a chair or a cushion on the floor…If you feel comfortable doing so, close your eyes…” (Long Silence)
This pilgrimage isn’t to Mecca, not to the Wall in Jerusalem, and not with Him upstairs. But a prayer to the new God. My palms cradle my Smartphone, and the glowing screen feeds me. I was off on the last leg of David Rome‘s journey: As we grow from childhood to adolescence to adulthood, eventually our most fundamental relationship becomes the inner relationship with ourselves. [Read more…]
Waking up in the morning
I vow with all beings
to be ready for sparks…
I vow with all beings
to let the pain and surprise
slow me down to this step,
this step.
~Robert Aitken, from “Zen Vows for Daily Life”
Notes:
This is the central tension of Springsteen on Broadway: the self we feel doomed to be through blood and family versus the self we can—if we have the courage and desire—will into existence. Springsteen, as he reveals here, has spent his entire life wrestling with that question that haunts so many of us: Will I be confined by my DNA, or will I define who I am? … “Yeah…,” Springsteen says when I sit down with him a couple weeks later and tell him it seems the essential question of his show is “Are we bound by what courses through our veins?” He looks off to his left into his dressing-room mirror… It’s into this mirror and toward these talismans that Springsteen often gazes when he is answering my questions. He’s a deep listener and acts with intent. He has a calm nature and possesses a low, soft voice. He has a tendency to be self-deprecating, preemptively labeling certain thoughts “corny.” He smiles easily and likes to sip ginger ale. Sometimes before telling you something personal, he lets out a short, nervous laugh. Above all, he speaks with the unveiledness of a man who has spent more than three decades undergoing analysis—and credits it with saving his life…
Springsteen’s first breakdown came upon him at age thirty- two…On a late- summer night, in remote Texas, they come across a small town where a fair is happening. A band plays. Men and women hold each other and dance lazily, happily, beneath the stars. Children run and laugh. From the distance of the car, Springsteen gazes at all the living and happiness. And then: Something in him cracks open. As he writes, in this moment his lifetime as “an observer . . . away from the normal messiness of living and loving, reveals its cost to me.” All these years later, he still doesn’t exactly know why he fell into an abyss that night. “All I do know is as we age, the weight of our unsorted baggage becomes heavier. . . much heavier. With each passing year, the price of our refusal to do that sorting rises higher and higher. . . . Long ago, the defenses I built to withstand the stress of my childhood, to save what I had of myself, outlived their usefulness, and I’ve become an abuser of their once lifesaving powers. I relied on them wrongly to isolate myself, seal my alienation, cut me off from life, control others, and contain my emotions to a damaging degree. Now the bill collector is knocking, and his payment’ll be in tears.”
~ Michael Hainey, from The Mind is a Terrifying Place. Even for Bruce Springsteen. (Esquire, November 27, 2018)
The god of dirt
came up to me many times and said
so many wise and delectable things, I lay
on the grass listening
to his dog voice,
crow voice,
frog voice; now,
he said, and now,
and never once mentioned forever
~ Mary Oliver, from “One or Two Things” in New and Selected Poems: Volume One
Notes:
“One day when Buddha was walking with his disciples he pointed to the ground with his hand and said, “It would be good to erect a sanctuary here.” — Book of Serenity, Case 4
“…One day I ran across a single line in a thick book that made it all simple. It told the original meaning of the word paradise before it became a mythical ideal, imaginary and unattainable. Before it pointed somewhere else. The word paradise originally meant “an enclosed area.” Inside the word are its old Persian roots: pairi-, meaning “around,” and diz, “to create (a wall).” The word was first given to carefully tended pleasure parks and menageries, the sporting ground of kings. Later, storytellers used the word in creation myths, and it came to mean the Eden of peace and plenty. Looking at it straight on, I could plainly see. Paradise is a backyard. Not just my backyard, but everyone’s backyard. Teeming with weeds, leaves, half-dead trees, moles, mosquitoes, mud, dust, skunks, and raccoons. With a novice gardener and a reluctant groundskeeper.
Like the entire world we live in, bounded only by how far we can see. I began to garden. I got scratched, tired, and dirty. I broke my fingernails and ruined my shoes. I yanked out what I could have kept and put in more of what I didn’t need. I pouted and wept, cursing the enormity of the task. I was resentful and unappreciative. But when I ventured afield, sidelined by things that seemed much more entertaining or important, I always came back to this patch of patient earth. Time after time I realized that everything I want or need —the living truth of life, love, beauty, purpose, and peace —is taught to me right here, no farther away than the ground beneath my feet.”
~ Karen Maezen Miller, from “Prologue: Paradise” in “Paradise in Plain Sight: Lessons from a Zen Garden”
Photo: Mark Benbenek
Tuesday.
10 a.m., I’m heading for a morning meeting in Manhattan.
I exit Grand Central station onto Madison, and head down 47th.
Light mist turns to a sprinkle.
Then drizzle.
Then, Wow! Rain in sheets.
Sidewalks are filled with Suits, morning shift shop workers, and tourists, loitering. Umbrellas spring open, mushroom caps blossoming in a time lapse video.
Walker in middle of sidewalk, sheltered with a giant golf umbrella. He does not shift left or right. His umbrella clips me in the shoulder as I try to pass, tipping his umbrella into mine, rain soaks my pant leg.
Really?
Walkers, giggling, three a breast, each carrying an umbrella. I tuck into a store front to let them pass.
Seriously people?
Walker, approaches me directly ahead. Mid sized umbrella. I walk on right side (This is America!) He refuses to shift lanes to his right. I slide left to avoid him, and dodge oncoming foot traffic – glaring at him as he passes.
Hey Man from UK, Etiquette! Drive on the right side of the road!
Walker, dead ahead, 10 steps. Smartphone and umbrella in his left hand, cigarette in the other. I slide between him and the building on the right, when he lifts his cigarette, the embers catching my coat. I jam my umbrella into his to brush off the ash, and he’s jostled into another walker. He shouts “Excuse me!” as I pass. I glance back. Cigarette hanging from his mouth. Light build, short. A Ferret. But who’s judging?
I smile, shake my head, turn my back to Ferret and keep walking, my right hand scanning my coat searching for the burn hole.
I stand at the stop light and wait, lifting my face to the sky. The rain has let up. The Walk sign turns, I step off the curb onto the crosswalk. I don’t see the puddle pooling in front of the street drain. My foot sinks into the cool, filthy, rain water which fills my right shoe.
Damn it@!*$
I limp into the building. The wet sole of my shoe squeals with each spongy step on the marble floor. The wet sock and foot slide back and forth inside the shoe.
I step into the elevator. Breathe DK. Breathe. Amazing. You’ve managed to work yourself up into a full lather in a 12-minute walk across town. You’re Elmear McBride’s Magnificent:
“Magnificent, somehow. To give in. Wreck yourself so completely. The beauty of it.”
Photo: Metro.US
Some days are like this:
you can’t move.
Can’t be moved.
What growth there is, is imperceptible.
A slow efflorescence.
— Thomas Centolella, from “Setsubun”, in Terra Firma
Notes:
I discovered that in the early part of the morning a mist hovered in the hollows of the estate and the grass was wet with dew. There was a smell in the air of bonfires, the land already preparing for autumn…The morning welcomed me and I felt lighter, more confident, walking with my head up, ready for anything.
– Claire Fuller, Bitter Orange (Tin House Books, October 9, 2018)
Notes:
And only the enlightened can recall their former lives;
for the rest of us, the memories of past existences
are but glints of light, twinges of longing, passing shadows,
disturbingly familiar, that are gone before they can be grasped,
like the passage of that silver bird on Dhaulagiri.
~ Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard
Notes:
Some moments become enchanting with the addition of words,
others are completely killed if you try to describe them.
It’s the difference between a tiny bird flittering above your open palm
and a closed fist crushing wings.
Notes:
lest we would sift it down
into fractions, and facts
certainties
and what the soul is, also
I believe I will never quite know.
Though I play at the edges of knowing,
truly I know
our part is not knowing,
but looking, and touching, and loving,
which is the way I walked on,
softly,
through the pale-pink morning light.
-Mary Oliver, from “Bone” in “Why I Wake Early”
Notes:
Now the sun begins to swing down. Under the peach-light,
I cross the fields and the dunes, I follow the ocean’s edge.
I climb, I backtrack.
I float.
I ramble my way home.
~ Mary Oliver, “Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches” in West Wind: Poems & Prose
Notes: Poem via The Hammock Papers. Photo: Laurence Demaison. Related Posts: It’s been a long day
I pause under that summer tree, the one that feels like a friend, as my dog wonders why we’ve stopped. She was trotting in such rhythm. But when this still, I wonder what part of me, way down, remains untouched by dream or memory? What drop of being remains out of reach of the opinions of others? When up close, each thing reveals its shimmer. And it’s the unexpected closeness that holds everything together. The light spreads across my dog’s face, her eyes so devoted to wherever I want to go.
Can I be this devoted to the pull of life?
~ Mark Nepo, from “Speechless” in Things That Join the Sea and the Sky: Field Notes on Living
Notes:
I remember how [the sparrow] felt
When I got my hand, and how it burst
that hand open
when I took it outside, a strength
that must have come out of hopelessness
and the sudden light
and the trees…
— Stephen Dunn, from “The Sudden Light and the Trees,” in Landscape at the End of the Century
Notes:
7:28 a.m. Boarding time: 7:52 a.m. Amtrak to Philadelphia. Rocky Balboa. Eagles. Flyers. Liberty Bell. Cheesesteak Sandwiches.
I’m waiting at the Stamford train station, sitting on a hardback plastic seat. So hard, you could substitute it for Kevlar. Lower back, displeased with status. I shift, restless.
To my left and across, two men, middle aged, hard hats on floor, work boots, unshaven – sit and discuss his work injury…hurt so bad…Percocet…Morphine…Floating. Both chuckle.
Across from me, large man, head bobbing, mouth gaping, asleep.
Passengers pass by through the automatic doors to Tracks 2 & 4. The doors hiss, at each open and close.
My eye spots movement below. A centipede. (And I’m not interested in you Entomologists out there telling me that it’s not a centipede. Where’s the 100 feet? We’re going with Centipede.)
Back to my Friend.
His legs are flailing. Turtle on its back, issuing an SOS distress signal. I watch it struggle for a few minutes and then turn away. I flip through emails.
Can’t focus. Distracted. Anxious…must be Centi’s anxiety transference. “Help me DK!”
I look around to see if anyone is watching. Then when I’ve established the coast is clear, I reach down and gently try to flip him. He sees a Giant: Danger! He rolls into a tightly, tucked black ball.
I grab my iPhone recognizing that there’s a story here. I’m 9 snaps in. Fuzzy shots. Too far away. Too close. Blurry. I look up and see the Percocet Boys are now watching. What’s that Idiot Suit doing?
I wait for him to unravel, my head is down, eyes are locked in. Please, unravel, and do so with 100 feet down.
I wait. [Read more…]
Everyone wants you to be Atlas,
to shoulder it all. Even the voice in your
head insists you are behind. But I’ve seen
the light in you, the one the gods finger
while we sleep. I’ve seen the blossom open
in your heart, no matter what remains to
be done. There are never enough hours
to satisfy the minions of want. So close
your eyes and lean into the Oneness that
asks nothing of you. When the calls stack,
answer to no one, though you receive them
all. Just open your beautiful hands, born with
nothing in them. You have never been more
complete than in this incomplete moment.
~ Mark Nepo, The Myth of Urgency in The Way Under the Way: The Place of True Meeting
Notes: Quote via mindfulbalance.org. Photo: Laurence Demaison (via see more). Related Posts: It’s been a long day
When silence reaches an ultimate point,
the light penetrates everywhere.
— Hsuan Hua, The Chan Handbook: Talks About Meditation
Notes:
A certain day became a presence to me;
there it was, confronting me – a sky, air, light:
a being. And before it started to descend
from the height of noon, it leaned over
and struck my shoulder as if with
the flat of a sword, granting me
honor and a task. The day’s blow
rang out, metallic – or it was I, a bell awakened,
and what I heard was my whole self
saying and singing what it knew: I can.
~Denise Levertov, “Variations on a Theme By Rilke” in “Denise Levertov: The Poetry of Engagement”
Notes:
Live & Learn 
