Exhale

"Bhikshu, empty your boat! It will go faster." - 'The Dhammapada'

Yoga stresses a lot on the act of exhalation. On emptying. On letting go. For we tend to exhale less efficiently than we inhale.

We want to keep, to store, to hold. We think possession, owning, keeping - spells safety, security, happiness.

And we learn, again and again; that it does not.

Positive news. Happy Stories. Unsung Heroes.

The Better India
Positive news. Happy Stories. Unsung Heroes.
http://www.thebetterindia.com/about/

"On a day to day basis we have been reading the Indian newspapers and magazines. Almost all of them devote their prime space to negative stories. Stories of murder, arson, scandals and gossip. However, we found that hidden inside, in the deep annals of these publications are the happier stories. Stories, to use a cliched phrase, that kindle your heart and tell you that all is not lost.

The Better India is an attempt to bring out those happy stories, those unsung heroes and heroines, those small good deeds, and showcase them to the world. Over here, you will be able to read about the incremental progress being made by the industrious people of this country, the developments happening on the social and economic front. We hope that by showcasing these here, we might be able to inspire at least one amongst you, the readers, to do something that leaves an impact. Small or big. But, an impact.

The spirit of The Better India is kept alive by Anuradha Parekh and Dhimant Parekh, a Bangalore based couple."

Use Google Reader to keep track of updates to this site - www.google.com/reader

To My Son's Girlfriend

I'm tempted to ask
what you see in him.
Although you probably
see the good that I see
I wonder if you realize
how much he is my handiwork,
or which of the qualities
you daydream about in class
are the ones that I take pride in,
his cordiality, for example,
or love of silliness.

It's uncomfortable for me
to think of anyone else
loving him the way I do,
possessing him in a way
that only his mother and I
have ever possessed him,
and I can't deny being jealous,
not so much reluctant
to share or relinquish him
as resolved to remind you
that he's been around
longer than your love,
under construction if you will,
and that each cute trait
or whatever occurs to you
when you hear his name
I feel proprietary about,
like a woodworker
who makes a table
intending to sell it
but prays that no buyer
will recognize its worth.

"To My Son's Girlfriend" by Michael Milburn, from Drive By Heart. © Word Press, 2009.

Rough Road

From this cd that a Rasta man recommended to me in an under-the-staircase, hole-in-the-wall, Marley-curio-and-possibly-dope shop in Kensington Market, Toronto, one zero-degree Spring evening in April 2006...

Warrior King: Rough Road

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tp_RwpWCM90

Actions result in other actions

"I’m majoring in physics and see many parallels between physics and Buddhism. I like how Buddhism is very logical. Karma is like physics—actions result in other actions.”

Lisa Kolde

http://www.volunteerglobal.com/blog-100329-guest-post-welcome-to-the-jungle-of-peace

Purple to Red

After the pink and the yellow, now the purple - and the beginnings of the red, announcing impending May. A flower calendar I follow.

Yesterday, though the tear-drop tree was still covered with dense foliage, and did not show any signs of flowering, noticed a few white flowers on the ground beneath. Aha. I am waiting. The suffocating heat will give way to the rain, and then there will be white tear-drop carpets in the morning, white against black tar.

Hands

My grandfather grew up holding rags,
pounding his fist into the pocket
of a ball glove, gripping a plumb line
for his father who built what anyone
needed.

At sixteen, wanting to work on
his own, he lied about his age
and for forty-nine years carried his lunch
to the assembly line where he stood
tightening bolts on air brake after
air brake along the monotonous belt.

I once asked him how he did that all
those years. He looked at me, said,
"I don't understand. It was only
eight hours a day," then closed
his fists.

Every night after dinner
and a pilsner, he worked some more.
In the summer, he'd turn the clay,
grow tomatoes, turnips, peas,
and potatoes behind borders
of bluebells and English daisies,
and marigolds to keep away the rabbits.

When the weather turned to frost,
he went to the basement where,
until the seeds came in March,
he made perfect picture frames, each
glistening with layers of sweet shellac.

His hands were never bored. Even
in his last years, arthritis locking every
knuckle, he sat in the kitchen carving
wooden houses you could set on a shelf,
one after another, each one different.

"Hands" by Jack Ridl, from Broken Symmetry. © Wayne State University Press, 2006

The youngest

At the orphanage where you go to give your old clothes, little boy walks in, while you are talking to the nun. "Our youngest kid", she says. Orphan. No father, mother abandoned him and ran away with someone. He comes and shakes hands with you, at the nun's behest.

And stays and looks at you while you talk to her. She says that he wants to go out, he's always stuck inside, and too young for school. People keep promising him that they'll take him out, and they don't. And they can't let him go with outsiders.

He doesn't say a word, just sticks to the wall. Watches you with those blank eyes, while you go away, too.

Pushkin

The old cat sleeps
in the newly arrived sun. One more spring
has come his way
dropping a solar bath
on failing kidneys, old cat bones.
I check for the rise and fall of breath.

Once he stalked hares
across the yard, tracked down
chicken hearts with split-lentil eyes.
Fearless, disinterested, a poseur, a demideity.
He and the dog are strangers still
after years of eating side by side.

I remember times of wailing
into my couch, alone
and utterly baffled by life,
when suddenly a cat
would be sitting on my head.

Last week I pulled him snarling
from under a chair in Dr. Bacon's office,
held him while she examined his dull coat,
felt his ribs. Pressed where it hurt.
Eight pounds of fur and bone and mad as hell
but "He's certainly less anxious in your lap,"
she murmured, astonishing me.
I had no idea. Old cat, old friend,
have I reached some place inside,
added to your life
as you have to mine?

"Pushkin" by Marjorie Kowalski Cole, from Inside, Outside, Morningside. © Ester Republic Press, 2009.

Kalyanamitta

From 'Letters from Burma' by Aung San Suu Kyi:

"During the hectic days of late May and early June, when a series of critical political events were triggered off by the arrests of the NLD members elected to parliament, a stream of foreign correspondents came to find out how we were coping with the situation. One of them commented on the fact that we did not appear to be unhappy. "U Tin U is smiling broadly and U Kyi Maung is cracking jokes, " he said. "Why are you not in a state of distress? Isn't the situation rather grim?" I suppose some would have seen the situation as grim, but to us, it was just another challenge; and the knowledge that we were facing it together with proven friends was simple reason for good cheer.

A doctor once recommended thinking happy thoughts as a most effective remedy for diverse illnesses. Certainly one of the happiest of thoughts is one's friends; old friends with whom you have shared youthful dreams of an ideal world, new friends with whom you are striving to achieve a realistic version of that ideal. It is comforting to know that friends you have not met for several decades, leading secure lives in countries where their rights are protected by the law, care as much for your welfare now as they did in the days when the Beatles were young and you argued over Dag Hammerskjold's Markings.

...According to the teachings of Buddhism, a good friend is one who gives things hard to give, does what is hard, bears hard words, tells you his secrets, guards your secrets assiduously, does not forsake you in times of want and does not condemn you when you are ruined. With such friends, one can travel the roughest road and not be defeated by hardship. Indeed, the rougher the path, the greater the delight in the company of kalyanamitta, good and noble friends who stand by us in times of adversity."

Page 132, 'A Friend in Need'

Continuity

"Darwinian evolution tells us that we are incipient compost: assemblages of complex molecules that - for no greater purpose than to secure sources of energy against competing claims - have developed the ability to speculate. After a few score years, the molecules disaggregate and return whence they came. Period. 

 As a gardener and ecologist, I find this oddly comforting. I like the idea of literal reincarnation: that the molecules of which I am composed will, once I have rotted, be incorporated into other organisms. Bits of me will be pushing through the growing tips of trees, will creep over them as caterpillars, will hunt those caterpillars as birds. When I die, I would like to be buried in a fashion which ensures that no part of me is wasted. Then I can claim to have been of some use after all. 

 Is this not better than the awful lottery of judgement? Is a future we can predict not more comforting than one committed to the whims of inscrutable authority? Is eternal death not a happier prospect than eternal life? The atoms of which we are composed, which we have borrowed momentarily from the ecosphere, will be recycled until the universe collapses.

This is our continuity, our eternity. Why should anyone want more?"

 'A life with no Purpose', George Monbiot

And to merge with the earth must be the end of all separateness.. Humus

Once upon a time in Rajasthan

http://www.munnaontherun.com/2010/02/once-upon-time-in-rajasthan.html

Walking a Songline

"Imagine a beginning, when man and woman first named the world. A "Songline" or "Dreaming Track" in the Australian outback can still be walked, perhaps by the Arrernte or Pintupi or other Aboriginal peoples, and for them, it is nothing less than creation, the world sung into existence by naming all plants and animals and the landscape itself.

Reaching back at least 40,000 years, a singer can find his or her way along the ancient path of one of the "Ancestors" retracing a Lizard Dreaming, or a Kangaroo Dreaming, or a Rain-Maker Dreaming, refreshing existence and "singing up the land".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2010/mar/07/david-vann-aborigines-songs-legends-past-future

The old storybook

http://www.munnaontherun.com/2010/03/old-storybook.html

Naming my Daughter

"In the Uruba tribe of Africa, children are named not only at birth but throughout their lives by their characteristics and the events that befall them."

The one who took hold in the cold night
The one who kicked loudly
The one who slid down quickly in the ice storm
She who came while the doctor was eating dessert
New one held up by heels in the glare
The river between two brothers
Second pot on the stove
Princess of a hundred dolls
Hair like water falling beneath moonlight
Strides into the day
She who runs away with motorcycle club president
Daughter kicked with a boot
Daughter blizzard in the sky
Daughter night-pocket
She who sells sports club memberships
One who loves over and over
She who wants child but lost one.
She who wants marriage but has none
She who never gives up
Diana (Goddess of the Chase)
Doris (for the carrot-top grandmother
she never knew)
Fargnoli (for the father
who drank and left and died)
Peter Pan, Iron Pumper
Tumbleweed who goes mouths without calling
Daughter who is a pillar of light
Daughter mirror, Daughter stands alone
Daughter boomerang who always comes back
Daughter who flies forward into the day
where I will be nameless.

"Naming My Daughter" by Patricia Fargnoli, from Necessary Light. © Utah State University Press, 1999.