Many of us don’t allow ourselves to be relaxed. Why do we always try to run and run, even while having our breakfast, while having our lunch, while walking, while sitting? There’s something pushing and pulling us all the time. We make ourselves busy in the hopes of having happiness in the future. In the sutra “Knowing the Better Way to Live Alone,” the Buddha said clearly, “Don’t get caught in the past, because the past is gone. Don’t get upset about the future, because the future is not yet here. There is only one moment for you to be alive, and that is the present moment. Go back to the present moment and live this moment deeply, and you’ll be free.”
How do we liberate ourselves in order to really be in the here and the now? Buddhist meditation offers the practice of stopping. Stopping is very important, because we’ve been running all our lives, and also in our previous lives. Our ancestors, our grandfather, our grandmother were running, and now they continue to run in us. If we don’t practice, our children will carry us in them and continue to run in the future.
The shamans believe that long ago, in the invisible world, the blueprint of creation was drawn. Chaos was returned to order, into the cosmos, through the actions of Earthkeepers who were able to dream new worlds into being.
I’d like to be rid of this darkness. To unwrap the cocoon. Get busy… But I have the sense lurking inside that there’s a mystery unfolding in the darkness that can’t come any other way.
Little by little we move in joy. We can learn by watching our small children. It grows geometrically. The entire earth becomes enraptured. Here, now, in these very bodies, we do this. This is my vision.
Let yourself become moving poetry.
–Rumi
Don’t move the way fear makes you move. Move the way love makes you move.
Your eye has not strength enough to gaze at the burning sun, but you can see its burning light by watching its reflection mirrored in the water.
So the reflection of Absolute Being can be viewed in the mirror of Not-Being, for nonexistence, being opposite Reality, instantly catches its reflection.
Know the world from end to end is a mirror; in each atom a hundred suns are concealed. If you pierce the heart of a single drop of water, from it will flow a hundred clear oceans; if you look intently at each speck of dust, in it you will see a thousand beings. A gnat in its limbs is like an elephant; in name a drop of water resembles the Nile. In the heart of a barleycorn is stored a hundred harvests. Within a millet-seed a world exists. In an insects wing is an ocean of life. A heaven is concealed in the pupil of an eye. The core at the center of the heart is small, yet the Lord of both worlds will enter there.
~ Mahmud Shabistari (Persian Sufi poet 14th c.)
The Mirror, from The Secret Rose Garden,
transl. by Florence Lederer
Waxing Moon toward Full Blue Moon– 7.23.15, Anchorage, Ak
The July moon is considered to be the fullest moon of the year. This one will be a Blue Moon– the last one until January 2018. I feel its pull and willingly ride upon its energy.
