Every morning a new arrival...

Abandoning ones nafs:
We are guests here and we are stewards. We are transient and we are liminal. We are never alone and yet such effort must be made to maintain connection...

There will be no lengthy introduction for today's post. Rumi was a 13th c. Persian poet whom I adore. I have been reading through a collection of his poems on and off all day today and have settled on a single piece of his for today's post.

Read it once, perhaps twice, and if you feel joy, maybe a third time...

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

— Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks

In honor of the upcoming Thanksgiving... gratitude

I woke up today. I am grateful for the chance I have again to make the best of a day. If I should fail to meet my or others' expectations, I will hopefully get another chance tomorrow to again, wake up, and feel grateful...

Every day, think as you wake up: Today I am fortunate to have woken up. I am alive. I have a precious human life. I am not going to waste it. I am going to use all my energies to develop myself, to expand my heart out to others, to achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all beings. I am going to have kind thoughts towards others, I am not going to get angry, or think badly about others. I am going to benefit others as much as I can. --The Dalai Lama

At times today I have felt desire. I have so many desires. I think the good news is that I have few needs, and none are unmet. I am grateful for my wellbeing and an awareness of my desires...

When you are discontent, you always want more, more, more. Your desire can never be satisfied. But when you practice contentment, you can say to yourself, 'Oh yes – I already have everything that I really need.' -- The Dalai Lama

At mealtime my family expresses gratitude for the day and what is before us. I am grateful for my friends, and family and the tremendous prosperity that surrounds me...

The creatures that inhabit this earth – be they human beings or animals – are here to contribute to the beauty and prosperity of the world. The food we eat, the clothes we wear, have not just dropped from the sky. This is why we should be grateful to all our fellow creatures. --The Dalai Lama

I have been reading from David Whyte's Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words. His meditation on gratitude is particularly excellent. The emphasis is mine. I am grateful for wise men like Whyte and the Dalai lama to point out the things the good and positive people all around me have been telling me for years...

Gratitude is not a passive response to something we have been given, gratitude arises from paying attention, from being awake in the presence of everything that lives within and without us. Gratitude is not necessarily something that is shown after the event, it is the deep, a-priori state of attention that shows we understand and are equal to the gifted nature of life.

Gratitude is the understanding that many millions of things come together and live together and mesh together and breathe together in order for us to take even one more breath of air, that the underlying gift of life and incarnation as a living, participating human being is a privilege; that we are miraculously, part of something, rather than nothing. Even if that something is temporarily pain or despair, we inhabit a living world, with real faces, real voices, laughter, the color blue, the green of the fields, the freshness of a cold wind, or the tawny hue of a winter landscape.

To see the full miraculous essentiality of the color blue is to be grateful with no necessity for a word of thanks. To see fully, the beauty of a daughter’s face in the mountains, of a son’s outline against the sky, is to be fully grateful without having to seek a God to thank him. To sit among friends and strangers, hearing many voices, strange opinions; to intuit inner lives beneath surface lives, to inhabit many worlds at once in this world, to be a someone amongst all other someones, and therefore to make a conversation without saying a word, is to deepen our sense of presence and therefore our natural sense of thankfulness that everything happens both with us and without us, that we are participants and witness all at once.

Thankfulness finds its full measure in generosity of presence, both through participation and witness. We sit at the table as part of every other person’s world while making our own world without will or effort, this is what is extraordinary and gifted, this is the essence of gratefulness, seeing to the heart of privilege. Thanksgiving happens when our sense of presence meets all other presences. Being unappreciative might mean we are simply not paying attention.  --David Whyte

On dealing with my FaceBook feed since last Tuesday...

So on this Sunday I wish to climb upon my soapbox and will finish with an appeal. No clever writing, links to song lyrics, nor allusions to favorite poetry. No pretty pictures, nor witty nuggets of wisdom from my favorite authors and thinkers. Just a realist's opinion that might seem optimistic and perhaps naive to some...

The world has never been as good as it is now. I know it does not feel that way. I know those who hurt today, or who were hurting yesterday, or even those who will hurt more tomorrow, will cry "optimist" and ignore my claim. But here is my thesis: The world is a hard place; it is not good enough yet for us to not fight harder than ever before for further improvement; BUT it IS better than ever before...

Fewer cops are being assaulted and killed today than 30 years ago in America. Knowledge and new developments are being enjoyed by a population with the highest levels of literacy in human history. Violent crime is on a 30 year downward trend. More people have access to better health care than ever before (globally). Extreme poverty is on a steady decline world wide. Fewer people will be directly affected by the violence of war as a percentage of the population than ever before...

Sigh. The environment IS suffering from 7 billion of us consuming. But we have never been better poised to mitigate the damage as it becomes ever more a necessity to do so. Good god, the inventions that our children have yet to invent will astound us! Our awareness of the world's suffering has never been so great (thank you Facebook and cell phones and 24-hour cable news coverage, and internet). But it is our awareness only that makes things seem worse and out of control...

So this past week we were all surprised by the elections. Ok, Michael Moore was not surprised, but the rest of us, conservative and liberal alike, were shocked. And the news is filled with reports of protests, riots, racial graffiti, and worse. The uncertainty of the next steps is driving people to extremes and the debate on FB has stopped. The name calling continues and there is a lot of "see I told you so" from both sides. The misleadingly edited videos and inaccurate memes are damaging our ability to debate real and hard truths. It has become a full time job to just sort through the misdirection and smoke that all sides are offering in their mis-guided passion...

I do not wish to ask people to come together and sing a round a camp fire; that would be absurd. What would be helpful is to acknowledge that we are the same people we were last week. We have work to do. We have deeply divided values and interests and perspectives in this country and we need to figure out how to strive for excellence so we can continue to be a positive force for ourselves, for our communities, and for the world. It starts with a heathy home. And in America health comes from spirited and passionate debate, from hard conversations which even cause us to walk away at times, but we must remember to return for more. It does not come from holier-than-thou-hand-to-the-face rhetoric...

So my appeal is this. Please stop posting anything other than the message that we WILL be ok. It will take work, as all great things that matter do. The sun did come up today; water ran out of my faucet; and I am hear to listen, argue, debate, and change. It will NOT be easy, but I am willing to continue to put opinion and freedom ahead of all else and I AM willing to fight for that, no matter the cost. I am hoping the few friends and acquaintances who read this and got this far in today's inglorious post will consider only adding forward moving noise to the web-sphere. Truth and hope. These things are not naïveté and they matter. This is my appeal...

Thank you.

-peace & compassion
-peter

A Buddhist Un-still life... alone

1. Once upon a time, forever now,  there was a short-haired monkey with long braids who lived at the edge of a desert near the flatlands where the big water meets the broad sky amidst the tall trees of the jungle in the highlands of the craggy plateau. Now you might imagine that the certitude of this space was fantastical in its nature, and there, you might be correct in your disbelief of the thought required to accept that which is most certainly ambiguous...

2. That is to say, quite circuitously, nothing is as it seems to be; and all that is, is a function of its proximity to that which isn't—in its being—there...

3. Now "all great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town," but this isn't great literature, nor is it even much of a story, and it isn't even about a man... therefore our primate of discussion will neither travel nor be visited in this moment... for no destination is distant to him (as he is there already), and no stranger will come to visit him (as all who might arrive are not strangers, and as he is already present despite being a stranger to himself)...

4. The monkey is alone and he is afraid. He does not know his fear and so is happily, spastically, hyper-ly reflective in his calm tranquility of speedy unaware introspective being...

5. He runs about his clearing, visiting with all those who are not there and chattering away to each in their own tongue, babbling and cheetering while waving his hands—with elegant opposable thumbs—about the sky as if painting something profoundly mundane in the air with pigments of his own imagination...

6. The monkey is not aware of the fear of being alone that lingers in his hairless core, as his self-awareness is tied to his self-compassion. If he were to place thought to this, he would realize a deep reluctance to being left to himself in that jumbled clearing of mind...

7. It is a noisy life of seclusion in the cluttered no-space where the chorus sings voicelessly to the monkey—who would seek peace if he were only able to grasp the no-monkey nature of his non-monkey mind. "For a solitary life to flourish...aloneness asks us to make friends of silence." And the monkey chatters away waving his hands until he becomes exhausted with the volume of the lack of other-sound...

8. And then, in that tiredness, in an instant of immense improbability the self-condemned monkey stumbles upon the random idea of non-monkey-ness and chooses to swim. He dives deeply into he nearby pool to drown out the cacophony of silence. And there in the pressure of the depths—a clamorously muffled murky green—choosing replaces sentencing and the silence mingles with the chatter. The monkey-fish emerges from the settled sediment-less waters and settles himself upon a nearby white lotus... prepared to sit in the stillness and watch his monkey-mind alone. Ah, the lotus, though! He seems to fit upon it as if it were fashioned to be just so... (and yet we know that too to be just perception, as fit is more in the mind than in reality)...

•. And the monkey sits fitted with the lotus in the silence. And to describe that fit, upon the lake, seated in the afternoon light, in the space between the extremes, while connected to everything and nothing (all at once and in succession) would defy words, save one, right. And the monkey, aware, raises his head, lets loose a quiet squeak of immense contentment and peace, and he lowers his eyes to gaze upon nothing in its perfection...