Hiroshi Yamazaki, The Sun is Longing for the Sea (1978). Thank you, invisiblestories.
When you go abroad, don’t turn around at the frontier.
Pythagoras
Keep death always before your eyes.
—St. Benedict: The Rules: Chapter 4.47
One reason why Christian tradition has always steered me away from preoccupation with reincarnation has not so much to do with doctrine as with spiritual practice. The finality of death is meant to challenge us to decision, the decision to be fully present here now, and so begin eternal life. For eternity rightly understood is not the perpetuation of time, on and on, but rather the overcoming of time by the now that does not pass away. But we are always looking for opportunities to postpone the decision. So if you say: “Oh, after this I will have another life and another life,” you might never live, but keep dragging along half dead because you never face death. Don Juan says to Carlos Castaneda, “That is why you are so moody and not fully alive, because you forget you are to die; you live as if you were going to live forever.” What remembrance of death is meant to do, as I understand it, is to help us make the decision. Don Juan stresses death as the adviser. Death makes us warriors.
—Brother David Steindl-Rast from LEARNING TO DIE, PARABOLA, Volume 2, Number 1: Death.
Photograph: Stephen Weiss, MD, portrait of Brother David Steindl-Rast, Mt. Saviour Monastery, Elmira, NY
(Source: parabola-magazine)
Sit for a short time; then take a break, a very short break of about thirty seconds or a minute. But be mindful of whatever you do, and do not lose your presence and its natural ease. Then alert yourself and sit again. If you do many short sessions like this, your breaks will often make your meditation more real and more inspiring; they will take the clumsy, irksome rigidity, solemnity, and unnaturalness out of your practice and bring you more and more focus and ease.
Gradually, through this interplay of breaks and sitting, the barrier between meditation and everyday life will crumble, the contrast between them will dissolve, and you will find yourself increasingly in your natural pure presence, without distraction.
Then, as Dudjom Rinpoche used to say: “Even though the meditator may leave the meditation, the meditation will not leave the meditator.”
–Sogyal Rinpoche. Rigpa: Glimpse of the Day
We cannot, of course, do away with our all-too-human tendency to discriminate between “us and them.” But so long as we remember that “they,” the others, are essentially like us—especially in our human aspirations and limitations—we can see through the differences and recognize that we are all part of a much larger cosmic process of evolution. From this perspective, our ordinary sense of identity is simply an obstacle to seeing a reality in ourselves that is beyond form.
―Stephen A. Grant: ENDING THE BEELZEBUB WARS: BEYOND “US AND THEM”: A plea for harmony within the Fourth Way from the new summer issue of Parabola: “Heaven and Hell.”
Image: A Hubble Space Telescope photo of the planetary nebula NGC 2818, one of few planetary nebulae in the Milky Way residing inside a star cluster.
via: parabola-magazine.
A lifetime may not be long enough to attune ourselves fully to the harmony of the universe. But just to become aware that we can resonate with it - that alone can be like waking up from a dream.
David Steindl-Rast courtesy of my dear friend, Whiskey River.
Matisyahu | “Running Away + Beatbox Freestyle” (Bob Marley Cover)
Rod McKuen and Anita Kerr and San Sebastian Strings | “The Gypsy Camp” from the album, The Sea.
I’ve come to the house of the Immortals:
In every corner, wildflowers bloom.
In the front garden, trees
Offer their branches for drying clothes;
Where I eat, a wine glass can float
In the springwater’s chill.
From the portico, a hidden path
Leads to the bamboo’s darkened groves.
Cool in a summer dress, I choose
From among the heaped piles of books.
Reciting poems in the moonlight, riding a painted boat…
Every place the wind carries me is home.
—Yu Xuanji. Taken from Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women (New York: Harper Collins, 1994); all poems are in English versions by Jane Hirschfield.
This poem appearared in Gazing on the Truth by Jane Hirschfield in PARABOLA, Volume 19, Number 4: Hidden Treasure.
Photograph by Weiferd Watts.
From parabola-magazine.
