My friend K, whom I love and respect for her very self and for her sustained peace activism, had this attached to an email yesterday:
Rev. Howard Thurman (1899-1981): “Don’t ask what the world needs. Rather ask — what makes you come alive? Then go and do it! Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
So good I wanted to re-share everywhere.
For me “untitled” as the “title” of a work of art means that the image speaks for itself and that to name it would be to bind the viewer from access to a “pure” and open response of his/her own.
In the yoga philosophy much is made of the fact that any attempt to describe mystical (for want of a better word) experience already veils or distorts the experience and that which has been experienced.
Sometimes, then, I show what I cannot say in words, recognizing that the camera, too, alters and separates the viewed and the viewer.
Jnanam bandaha, by the way, is the second sutra in the Siva Sutras and means roughly, knowledge is bondage. Later in the text, we are also told that knowledge alone liberates. It is a delicious paradox for contemplation.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
For those of us living fully in our modern material world, as I am, it is important to think not so much about denying ourselves things or giving them up, but rather, seeing how we can make shifts to living more lightly. One of my heavy impacts on the environment is computer usage. Right now, I have on my work computer, my home laptop, and my Blackberry.
All of you who are reading this blog are doing so via computer or by a personal device with web access that requires battery charging. I’d hazard a guess that most of these portable computers are not being powered by sun and wind. I am still waiting for Pepco to come and change the meter to hook up my newly installed rooftop solar panels to the grid, and I don’t have a solar charger for the Blackberry.
One thing I thought I could do to help make enjoying this way of connecting have less impact on the environment would be to go carbon-neutral. In the world of plastic, the ideal is don’t use, reuse, repurpose, recycle. In the world of electricity, it is don’t use, use from better sources, off-set. With respect to my blog, I am choosing to use the necessary electricity, but go solar with my house, buy electricity from a source that uses offsets (Clean Currents) for that electricity that is in excess of what the solar panels will provide, and I’m choosing to offset this blog’s impact based on readership through the Carbon Fund.
My friend Dan posted some interesting thoughts about democracy on his blog. He is writing in the context of the Unitarian Universalist community, but the thoughts are equally applicable to our lives as citizens. The thoughts on democracy also for me highlighted what is really meant in the Bhagavad Gita about “actionless action.” To embody our spiritual practice in the way we live our lives, we serve to our best ability out of love, out of delight in acting, out of a sincere joy in serving, but we do not get attached to a particular outcome.
The texts speak of the siddhis–beings with great powers from the steady dedicated fire (tapas) of practice (sadhana).
One of these powers is bi-location — that of being able to be in two places at once. A friend and fellow practitioner once said to me that I shouldn’t want to be able to bi-locate. What that is called, she said, is schizophrenia.
The resting in two places at once that I think we do want, is always to be able to rest in the vast, peace-filled, and gracious space of meditation while we are fully going about the daily business of living.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
“Life is extremely inventive; it always finds the means to prove to you that you are still a little rigid and tense, still projecting somewhat, still expecting a little, still somewhat vulnerable, and it is this constant dialogue with reality that keeps you from mistaking yourself for a master.” Daniel Odier, Desire, The Tantric Path to Awakening.
Whatever you might think is mastery or whomever a master.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
Watching traffic blocked, standing hands over ears having to wait to cross the street as an ambulance races in an emergency gives us the opportunity to b grateful that this time it is not for us and also that the emergency workers are there if we need them (so long as we can remember them in our societal budget priorities). It is also an opportunity to respond from the highest, to be reminded to offer love and healing instead of responding with annoyance at the minor disruption in our path.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.