The only Zen

"The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there."

Robert M Pirsig

For those of us who never quite recovered from 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance':

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1951397,00.html

Being in the driving seat

"In the middle ages, in England, when you met a very poor person, that person would be described as an unfortunate. Literally someone who has not been blessed by fortune, an unfortunate. Nowadays, particularly in the United States, if you meet someone at the bottom of the society, they may unkindly be described as a loser. There's a real difference between an unfortunate and a loser. That shows 400 years of evolution in society, and I believe, in who's responsible for our lives. It's no longer the gods, it's us. We're in the driving seat.

That's exhilarating if you are doing well, and very crushing if you're not. It leads in the worst cases, in the analysis of socilogists like Emile Durkheim, it leads to increased rates of suicide. There are more suicides in developed individualistic countries than in any other part of the world. And some of the reasons for that is the people take what happens to them extremely personally: they own their success, but they also own their failure.

Alain De Botton: A kinder, gentler philosophy of success

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/alain_de_botton_a_kinder_gentler_philosophy_of_success.html

Confronted by Chrysanthemums

For his morning tea
A monk sits down in utter silence,
Confronted by chrysanthemums.

Basho

Photo: Buddhist temple, Nanjing

Economic Localization, the need of the hour?

The Economics of Happiness: a documentary film about the worldwide movement for economic localization.

Site: http://www.theeconomicsofhappiness.org/

Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/TheEconomicsofhappiness

"The Economics of Happiness' describes a world moving simultaneously in two opposing directions. On the one hand, government and big business continue to promote globalization and the consolidation of corporate power. At the same time, all around the world people are resisting those policies, demanding a re-regulation of trade and finance—and, far from the old institutions of power, they’re starting to forge a very different future. Communities are coming together to re-build more human scale, ecological economies based on a new paradigm – an economics of localization.

We hear from a chorus of voices from six continents, including Vandana Shiva, Bill McKibben, David Korten, Samdhong Rinpoche, Helena Norberg-Hodge, Michael Shuman, Zac Goldsmith and Keibo Oiwa. They tell us that climate change and peak oil give us little choice: we need to localize, to bring the economy home. The good news is that as we move in this direction we will begin not only to heal the earth but also to restore our own sense of well-being. 'The Economics of Happiness' challenges us to restore our faith in humanity, challenges us to believe that it is possible to build a better world."

Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to the end of love: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ki9xcDs9jRk&feature=share

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic 'til I'm gathered safely in
Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove
Dance me to the end of love, dance me to the end of love

Oh let me see your beauty when the witnesses are gone
Let me feel you moving like they do in Babylon
Show me slowly what I only know the limits of
Oh dance me to the end of love, dance me to the end of love....

Leonard Cohen

Sumbody tutched me on the sholder

Rain

A teacher asked Paul
what he would remember
from third grade, and he sat
a long time before writing
'this year sumbody tutched me
on the sholder'
and turned his paper in.

Later she showed it to me
as an example of her wasted life.

The words he wrote were large
as houses in a landscape.
He wanted to go inside them
and live, he could fill in
the windows of 'o' and 'd'
and be safe while outside
birds building nests in drainpipes
knew nothing of the coming rain.

Tender Spot, Selected Poems, Naomi Shihab Nye

Asking for Directions

We could have been mistaken for a married couple
riding on the train from Manhattan to Chicago
that last time we were together. I remember
looking out the window and praising the beauty
of the ordinary: the in-between places, the world
with its back turned to us, the small neglected
stations of our history. I slept across your
chest and stomach without asking permission
because they were the last hours. There was
a smell to the sheepskin lining of your new
Chinese vest that I didn't recognize. I felt
it deliberately. I woke early and asked you
to come with me for coffee. You said, sleep more,
and I said we only had one hour and you came.

We didn't say much after that. In the station,
you took your things and handed me the vest,
then left as we had planned. So you would have
ten minutes to meet your family and leave.
I stood by the seat dazed by exhaustion
and the absoluteness of the end, so still I was
aware of myself breathing. I put on the vest
and my coat, got my bag and, turning, saw you
through the dirty window standing outside looking
up at me. We looked at each other without any
expression at all. Invisible, unnoticed, still.

That moment is what I will tell of as proof
that you loved me permanently. After that I was
a woman alone carrying her bag, asking a worker
which direction to walk to find a taxi.

Linda Gregg

Walking down the line

Boulevard of Broken Dreams, by Green Day: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWNRUVMboq4

I walk a lonely road
The only one that I have ever known
Don't know where it goes
But it's only me, and I walk alone

I walk this empty street
On the boulevard of broken dreams
Where the city sleeps
And I'm the only one, and I walk alone

...I'm walking down the line
That divides me somewhere in my mind
On the border line of the edge
And where I walk alone

*Photo from Google Images

December

"I stood on the library steps holding my books and looking for a minute at the soft hinted green in the branches against the sky and wishing, as I always did, that I could walk home across the sky instead of through the village."

Shirly Jackson

Ludovico Einaudi

http://www.myspace.com/ludovicoeinaudispace

Primavera: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmxFAT581T4

Blue Willow: Persephone Falling

“Depression is hidden knowledge.”
—James Hillman

You think it will never happen again.
Then one day in November it does, the narrow,
dusty boards of the trapdoor you fell through
twenty years before, cracking apart, a black grin
opening its toothless mouth, darkness seeping out
to fill the dead cornfields rattling around you.
That sound’s back in your head again—
like angry bees or static or rubber bands
breaking. And beneath it a distant hum
you remember being scared was voices
till the doctor explained it was your own brain,
working overtime to understand its disordered signals.

And meanwhile, every sadness on NPR is yours—
from the African country where 30% of the childbearing
women have AIDS, to the Appalachian mother
who sells her great-grandmother’s Blue Willow china
for fifty bucks to feed her kids, to your own
mother, who dies again every autumn, something
wrong when she didn’t come home for Thanksgiving
the way she promised, the torn-sheet dinner napkins
you’d embroidered—“M” for “Mommy”—with ordinary
thread, wrapped in tin foil under the bed, melancholy’s
blue index finger pressed into your forehead, choosing
you for its team. Where it seems you must play for life,

Only Normal

"Nothing is more useful or fitting than to be a normal human being; but the very notion of a "normal human being" suggests a restriction to the average - as does also the concept of adaptation. It is only a man who, as things stand, already finds it difficult to come to terms with the everyday world who can see in this restriction a desirable improvement: a man, let us say whose neurosis unfits him for normal life.

To be "normal" is a splendid ideal for the unsuccessful, for all those who have not yet found an adaptation. But for whom it was never hard to gain successes and to accomplish their share of the world's work - for them restriction to the normal signifies the bed of Procrustes, unbearable boredom, infernal sterility and hopelessness.

As a consequence there are many people who become neurotic because they are only normal, as there are people who are neurotic because they cannot become normal. For the former the very thought that you want to educate them to normality is a nightmare; their deepest need is really to be able to lead "abnormal" lives."

Page 47, 'Modern Man in Search of a Soul', Carl Gustav Jung

Can you understand?

Can you understand being alone so long
you would go out in the middle of the night
and put a bucket into the well
so you could feel something down there
tug at the other end of the rope?

Jack Gilbert, 'The Abandoned Valley'

Precious

In Passing

How swiftly the strained honey
of afternoon light
flows into darkness

and the closed bud shrugs off
its special mystery
in order to break into blossom:

as if what exists, exists
so that it can be lost
and become precious

Lisel Mueller

Rapture

"People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive."

Page 1, 'The Power of Myth', Joseph Campbell