What we really have to share is not any spiritual treasure we imagine we have stored up, but our poverty, our common human situation, our inability to know.
–Tracy Cochran, from THE NIGHT I DIED: A brush with death leads to a glimpse of Light, from the new summer issue of PARABOLA: “Heaven and Hell.”
Photograph: Ernst Haas, The Cross, NYC, 1966
What does it mean to find the Middle Way? Not in the sense of picking up a book on Buddhism or contacting a teacher, but in ourselves and in our lives. There is always a draw to act, a restless wish to move, to create, to do something. And there is also a wish to submit–and I’m not talking about depression or being a mouse or some unwholesome slavish quality here but to a wholesome impulse to be still and know a greater wholeness–to bear witness to greater life.
There are always two different currents operating in most of us–a push outward and a pull inward and upward, up out of this worldly mess. Yet sometimes, when we sit down to meditate or walk in nature or otherwise try to be very aware of what is happening in the present moment, we can find an attitude and an attention that can embrace all the disparate parts of ourselves, including that irreconcilable push-pull. Sometimes, we can be actively quiet inside–passively active, embracing and observing and delving into what we are like and what life is like. This is the Middle Path: it is that vibrant attention that can be medium–that can stay between those opposite pulls, that can unite our thoughts and feelings and sensations–parts that have so little in common they haven’t spoken to each other in years.
—an excerpt from “Happy Medium” by Tracy Cochran at the Parabola Editors blog.
(Source: parabola-magazine)
“According to the great Zen master Dogen, the path to awakening and liberation is not a line but a circle. When we sit down to remember the light of mindfulness, when we sit down to meditate or otherwise seek to awaken to what is truly abiding, we are joined by the Buddha and awakened ones from ancient times. I felt enormously supported on retreat, and I began to wonder if the Buddha’s rediscovery of the path might not have been an extraordinary act of remembering that came to benefit beings in all times.”
—Tracy Cochran: “Finding the Path,” from Parabola, Volume 36, No 4., Winter 2011: “Many Paths, One Truth.” Painting by Emma Tapley, GREENBELT, OIL ON CLAY PANEL, 40” x 60”, 2010. See more of her work in the Winter Issue.
From parabola-magazine.
Among the tasks or “yogi jobs” a participant can volunteer for during silent retreats at the Insight Meditation Society, a major Buddhist meditation center in rural Massachusetts, the most resonant in every sense is the role of bell ringer. Before dawn and before every meditation session during the day, the bell ringers walk through the halls of a rambling brick building that was once a Jesuit seminary, striking a bronze bell that is held suspended by a thick strap. I remember being curled in bed in the dark in a solitary cell of a room, hearing it resonate deep and low in the distance, cutting through my dreams like a fog horn. As the “awakener” progresses on his or her appointed rounds, layer upon layer of reverberations build up. He or she literally strikes a chord that touches the heart—at least this heart–filling one with a longing to be part of a greater life, a life that you feel sure was lived by other beings in other times.
When I hear the sound of bells like the one at the meditation center, I remember that the great Zen master Dogen taught that spiritual practice is a circle. When we turn away from the pull of our ordinary habits, seeking the vibrant silence under the words, we join all the great beings from all times who came to show us the way. I remember the contemporary Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hahn striking an enormous bowl-shaped bell, saying “listen to the sound of the bell calling you to your true home…”
—Tracy Cochran from the PARABOLA Editors blog.
“I also thought of a scene Lillian Firestone shares in The Forgotten Language of Children. She describes a trip to an Onondaga Reservation, in upstate New York, to attend a PowWow or general assembly of tribes where visitors were tolerated. There, Firestone met Henry, a tall, tanned Micmac from the Shubenacadie reservation in Nova Scotia, who asked Firestone in a kindly way “why you people want us to be like you?” Firestone invites Henry to talk to the children she is chaperoning and he gives them a glimpse of another way of being, in which words don’t count for much and the greatest gifts are not things. He described being taken away from his parents at 8-years-old, forced to go live in a big Catholic orphanage in Quebec, basically because it was standing empty.
“’Now before they take me away,” he said, ‘my Mom and Dad, they want to give me a present, but they are poor and they got nothing to give. So they take me 100 miles away from Shubie in the forest and they leave me there and they say, ‘Son, find your way home.’”
It was all his parents had to give, Henry explained to the incredulous children, and it was intended to him a feeling of competence, of being safe in the midst of the unknown…”
—from Tracy Cochran’s latest offering on the editor blogs.
Love this story, thank you parabola-magazine.
Celia Gerard
Campo, 2010
charcoal, graphite, and casein on paper
38 x 38 inches 43 x 43 inches framed
From Sears Peyton Gallery
“…In the afternoon, full of the sense that there was everything to be gained by leaving my winter-imposed solitude and seeking out the work of others–and work by living humans, not museum pieces–I drove down to Manhattan. Braving the icy wind off the Hudson and the sense that I don’t know anything about art, I walked around the art galleries of Chelsea. I came to a full stop at the show “Regions of Unlikeness” by the artist Celia Gerard at the Sears Peyton Gallery. Gerard’s abstract, geometical works in black and white have the power of making a viewer stay. “It’s amazing how they unfold,” said my friend, and I agreed. The triangles, spheres, and cones open into landscapes and unknown worlds in deep space. What is really uncanny about the works is that they unfold the viewer, waking up the energies in the body and opening the mind and heart. I felt like I could see and feel the ongoing search in the work, and it had the effect of calling to search along with the artist. Gerard’s work woke me up, yet made me feel very concentrated and still, like looking inside a vast crystal or up at a mountain, or inside myself. It gave me a feeling of nostalgia for places I have never travelled, a longing for a quality or state that is still unknown yet essential…home.
“I want to unfold/ I don’t want to stay folded anywhere/ Because where I am folded,/ There I am a lie….” These lines by Rilke echoed through my head as I drove home from Manhattan last night, and this morning when I woke.”
—Tracy Cochran “Regions of Unlikeness” @The Editors blog.
(via parabola-magazine)
Photograph: The “Endurance,” Midwinter, 1915/1922: Silver gelatin photograph: Shackleton’s Antarctic Expedition 1914-1917; “The Photographs of Frank Hurley,” 2001, p133: “‘Ice breakers, pressure centre, 1st August 1915’, wrote Hurley in his Green Album. Often used to illustrate various expedition accounts, this photo is usually titled “Almost Overwhelmed.” Provenance: From an album of Antarctic photographs presented by Hurley to Archdeacon John Bidwell in 1922. Josef Lebovic Gallery.
“…I spoke about the ordeal of the British polar explorer Ernest Shackleton, which is described by Shackleton in the rich new “Suffering” issue of Parabola (which you should definitely check out!).
Shackleton’s ship Endurance was crushed in the ice in Antarctica in 1915. He and his men weathered an Antartic winter on the ship until it broke apart; then they lived on the ice; then they moved to isolated Elephant Island. After a year and facing another winter, Shackleton decided to place himself and five others in a small open boat for a perilous journey throught hurricane-swept waters to the whaling stations on South Georgia Island, nearly eight hundred miles distant. When they did hit land, which was a miracle in itself since they were navigating by stars and intuition, they hit the opposite end of the island. Near death, Shackleton and three others had to march for thirty-six hours over unnamed mountains, through freezing waterfalls. But they all made it, and all of Shackleton’s men were saved!
Why tell this story in a meditation group, much less include it in the “Suffering” issue of Parabola? It illustrates that there is something besides desire, aversion, or spacing out and being oblivious. Sometimes when conditions allow, we can in Shackleton’s words “pierce the verneer of outside things.” Shackleton reported sensing another presence walking with them, and the other men later reported to the boss that they had sensed the same. Sometimes, in great stillness, we can sense this invisible accompanying presence, this greater awareness. At such moments, there can be a new possibility for us–a new spaciousness blooms inside us. We aren’t just pulled along by a desire for what is pleasant and pleasing to the ego or an aversion to pain and what is unpleasant. I’ve heard this third possibility called the ability to serve. It is characterized by clarity and it can descend on us like a kind of grace and allow us to fulfill even arduous obligations in a freely chosen kind of way. I think when we sit down on our meditation cushions, when we pray, when we contemplate in nature, when we lovingly fulfill our obligations even when we don’t want to–all those times when we notice what is and how we are-yet go on–we are practicing allowing this kind of spaciousness to appear.”
—an excerpt from Tracy Cochran’s latest offering: “The Stillness of Snow” @Parabola Editors blog.
From parabola-magazine.
The poet John Keats described this state of openess and preparedness for the advent of extraordinary in the midst of the ordinary “negative capability.” He defined this as “when a man is capable of of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” What might support such a state?
Thank you for drawing attention to this, astroinquiry.
(Source: frederickwoodruff)
“Sitting there on that rocky shore thanks to the generosity of my friend, I glimpsed how every moment is determined by conditions, forces, mysteries that are ever out of our field of attention,no matter how sincere we are in cultivating awareness. I glimpsed how no matter how much we seek to know, to love, to be with life, what we can know is always partial in every sense of the word. Clinging to certain stories, elevating and cherishing a particular independent “I” — well, that’s missing what is really happening. The breath of the life force is moving through us. It does not belong to us but links us with our ancestors and with all beings. Stop grasping at knowing and open to the unknown. Moment by moment, Ruach moving over the Deep.”
An excerpt from a new post by Tracy Cochran at Parabola Editors blog.
from parabola-magazine
“…But what I glimpsed in her was how moments of being present can grow by dedicated practice into moments of Presence. Who we really are is not an isolated individual on an isolated journey but a being who is an inextricable part of a greater and perfect Whole, a greater living Presence. Like any living being, this Presence is always in movement, never static. The intricate, interconnected Mystery of it All, the real Truth, can never be reduced to thought (even a Great Thought). It can only be received like grace by a mind that includes the heart and body. We are meant to participate in the Truth, to contribute our particular lives to the workings of the Whole.”
- an excerpt from Tracy Cochran describing her meeting with Gina Sharpe, a longtime dedicated student and teacher of Vipassana meditation and Theravada Buddhism, in her blog post, “A Beautiful Mind.”
from parabola-magazine
