Suffering comes when you try to hold on to continuity

Fierce Grace: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8zFeZbVPnc

Ram Dass, (born Richard Alpert on April 6, 1931), is an American contemporary spiritual teacher, and author of the seminal 1971 book Be Here Now. In this video, he is old, has had a stroke and is trying to come to terms with it in the context of his own spiritual journey.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ram_Dass

Renovation of Stupas at Sanniti

The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) has decided to take up the much awaited restoration and reconstruction of the majestic stupas and other monuments found at the Buddhist site at Sannati in Chitapur taluk in Gulbarga district.

http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-karnataka/article1136158.ece

 Some photos here, these are volunteers who are helping to document the site - https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150239161739004.341449.503189003

Cleaning up Bangalore, Bin by Bin

So here's the bin I sponsored for the Ugly Indian, on St. Mark's Road. (http://www.theuglyindian.com - see my earlier post),

Can you also sponsor a bin to make Bangalore a cleaner place? Or pass this mail on to friends in Bangalore?

Sponsorship cost:

Option 1: Rs 1000 (Installation + 100 days maintenance).
Option 2: Rs 1500 (Installation + 1 year maintenance)

See this video on how BBMP empties these bins regularly as part of their daily rounds, and how people are actually using these bins: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97tlirAM8hs 

What  I like most about this anonymous group is their professionalism, their willingness to answer all your doubts convincingly, within 24 hours, and their realistic optimism.  I absolutely love their sense of humour too!

Send  a mail to theuglyindian@gmail.com if you want to sponsor a bin/want to clear doubts. They will ask you for the money only after they have installed the bin and observed it for a few days to make sure the cleaning process is taking place. Online transfer and checks are possible. You can also choose your bin from the locations available.

So could you sponsor a bin? Actions do speak much louder than Facebook Likes :)

Thank you.

Real

And then there are fresh green leaves growing in your garden. Things that are tangible and real and beyond doubt.

Kitchen Garden: http://noodlesandmangopickle.blogspot.com/search/label/Kitchen%20Garden

And Oats recipes: http://noodlesandmangopickle.blogspot.com/search/label/Oats

And I love her

Bike song, from another life.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaJIQmIei14


The Beatles, 'And I love her'

Storm

"Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you.

So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That's the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.

An you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You'll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.

And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about."

Haruki Murakami  'Kafka on the Shore'

Unfathomable

….The idea that one person’s mind is accessible to another’s is just a conversational illusion, just a figure of speech, an assumption that makes some kind of exchange between basically alien creatures plausible, and that really the relationship of one person to another is ultimately unfathomable. The effort of fathoming what is in another’s mind creates a distortion of what is seen.”

Page 293, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M Pirsig

Poetry

"To lovers, even their first names are poetry."

'The Monster loves his Labyrinth: Notebooks', Charles Simic


Ultimo Tango a Parigi video: http://www.myspace.com/tiagobenzinho (scroll down)

Retirement

You are usually the first person to cross the traffic signal when the light turns green. While the rest of them are still in that glazed trance caused by staring too long at the red light, you have already crossed half the distance across to the other side. Quick reflexes? Restlessness? For you "have promises to keep and miles to go before you sleep"*?

Today a young man beats you to it. You feel so happy. Finally there is someone else to lead the way. They are getting the idea. You can now hope to retire as the Leader of Signal-crossings, the Breaker of the Waiting-stupor.

Finally you can grow old, grow old, and wear the bottom of your trousers rolled.... **



* Robert Frost, 'Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening'
** T.S.Eliot,   'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'

Bearhug

Griffin calls to come and kiss him goodnight
I yell ok. Finish something I'm doing,
then something else, walk slowly round
the corner to my son's room.
He is standing arms outstretched
waiting for a bearhug. Grinning.

Why do I give my emotion an animal's name,
give it that dark squeeze of death?
This is the hug which collects
all his small bones and his warm neck against me.
The thin tough body under the pyjamas
locks to me like a magnet of blood.

How long was he standing there
like that, before I came?

Michael Ondaatje

The End of Summer

Heady sweet jackfruits disappearing from the streets, cart by cart.

Someone was bound to notice sooner or later :)

Sir Isaac Newton, renowned inventor of the milled-edge coin and the catflap!"

"The what?" said Richard.

"The catflap! A device of the utmost cunning, perspicuity and invention. It is a door within a door, you see, a ..."

"Yes," said Richard, "there was also the small matter of gravity."

"Gravity," said Dirk with a slightly dismissed shrug, "yes, there was that as well, I suppose. Though that, of course, was merely a discovery. It was there to be discovered." ...

"You see?" he said dropping his cigarette butt, "They even keep it on at weekends. Someone was bound to notice sooner or later. But the catflap ... ah, there is a very different matter. Invention, pure creative invention. It is a door within a door, you see."

Douglas Adams

A huge, empty museum

"Sometimes I feel like a caretaker of a museum -- a huge, empty museum where no one ever comes, and I'm watching over it for no one but myself."

"I wrote a huge number of letters that spring: one a week to Naoko, several to Reiko, and several more to Midori. I wrote letters in the classroom, I wrote letters at my desk at home with Seagull in my lap, I wrote letters at empty tables during my breaks at the Italian restaurant. It was as if I were writing letters to hold together the pieces of my crumbling life."

"If something came out of the deal, it couldn’t make things any worse for us than they already were, I thought. But I couldn’t have been more wrong. Hell has no true bottom."
 
Haruki Murakami

Adrift

"Here's what I think, Mr. Wind-Up Bird," said May Kasahara. "Everybody's born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person from the inside. I have one too, of course. Like everybody else.

But sometimes it gets out of hand. It swells or shrinks inside me, and it shakes me up. What I'd really like to do is find a way to communicate that feeling to another person. But I can't seem to do it. They just don't get it.

Of course, the problem could be that I'm not explaining it very well, but I think it's because they're not listening very well. They pretend to be listening, but they're not, really. So I get worked up sometimes, and I do some crazy things."


The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami

........................................................................................................

"Sometimes I feel so - I don’t know - lonely. The kind of helpless feeling when everything you’re used to has been ripped away. Like there’s no more gravity, and I’m left to drift in outer space with no idea where I’m going.’ 

Like a little lost Sputnik?’ 

I guess so."

Sputnik Sweetheart, Haruki Murakami

"It's our hands that give us our humanity"

And then a friend sends this, in reply to the previous post, Hands:

"I was once on a national US news special in my role as a military officer. In the broadcast clip, I was typing on my Mac laptop. All it showed was my hands, but friends all over the country recognized them. I found that interesting but baffling.

One of my friends, whose wife is a physician, went on to elaborate that when his wife's medical class dissected cadavers, the hardest task -- the most psychologically upsetting for the students -- wasn't dissecting faces. It was hands. He offered, "It's our hands that give us our humanity."

Learning to draw in art school as an adult, we had to draw a huge study of our own hands. I saw my father's hands in my finished product. It was very moving.

Then my stepfather was a friend of Carlotta O'Neil, Eugene's wife and widow. She remarked on Eugene's death moment that she looked down and would ever remember how beautiful his hands were..."