two slogans

TWO SLOGANS stayed stuck in my mind yesterday. The first slogan: “Obsessing about getting what you want and avoiding what you don't want does not result in happiness.” It’s from Pema Chodron’s compassion box, which includes a book and a stack of cards to use as daily mantras. The second slogan, an advertisement for greasy convenience store pizza:

japanese plums

THE JAPANESE PLUMS were so orange, so ripe, but the lowest branches drooping over the gate had already been picked clean. Only a tantalizing cluster at the tip of a high branch — beyond my reach, I imagined, even with a running leap. I tried anyway. I’d just finished a twenty-minute walking meditation, and I was feeling in the zone.

gentleness

A BLIZZARD of thoughts and emotions swirls around each of us, obscuring the true nature of mind, but if we learn to sit tall and let the blizzard happen around us, and if we do this over and over, we come to know the blizzard for the emptiness it is, and we begin to see through the snow clouds in which we've become ensnarled.

space & the ice cream van

"When the space element is balanced in us, there is room for life;

whatever arises can be accommodated."

~Tenzin Wangyal

As if the constant HAMMERING and SAWING every day for the past two months weren't enough, an old busted-up ice cream van would come and park in the middle of it all and BLAST the most horrible noises. The tune wasn't anything I recognized, a cross between JOHN JACOB JINGLEHEIMER SCHMIDT and SHE'LL BE COMING ROUND THE MOUNTAIN, with a lot of CAR HORNS, WHISTLES and HAND CLAPS thrown in, repeating in an infinite loop. And between each repeat, the recorded voice of a woman saying HELLO. Then the song would start up again. Of all the noises — the HAMMERS, the NAIL GUNS, the POWER SAWS, the BEEPING SOUNDS the big trucks made when they went in reverse, the WHISTLES, the CAR HORNS, the HAND CLAPS — it was that single spoken HELLO that sent me over the edge.

tea and crumping

Went to Dripping Springs, Texas yesterday (just west of Austin) to lead two Peaceful Habits groups at a brain injury rehab center there.

the opposite of umbrella

photo: jetheriot

WHEN YOU FEEL a painful emotion, your instinct is to recoil. It's painful, so you pull away.

     But it's exactly at the moment when an emotion is most repugnant that you have the greatest opportunity to know it. The suffering is in the resistance — like when it drizzles, and we armor ourselves with unnecessary umbrellas. We recoil from the rain before it has even touched us. To learn to close the umbrella, to relax, to let the water find your face — it wasn't as bad as you thought it was going to be, was it? — that's the way forward. You feel it. You let it happen. You walk through the rain of it.

the first wednesday

photo: jetheriot

It takes only a few minutes for a meditation instructor to teach a person the mechanics of meditation: how to sit, how to bring the mind to the breath, etc. That's not what our first Wednesday together is about. Today the lesson is rhythm.