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    Coincidence or Correlation (and Overnight Cinnamon Apple Oatmeal)

    ByElizabeth

    On my way to and from work, I watched the buds and blooms–some brown, some bravely hanging on, some withering around the edges and starting to wilt; the cherries–mostly in bud or just starting to open–that haven’t fully blasted yet, will do so by the end of the cold period following the storm.

    I’ve seen years when the cherry blossoms were torn from the trees at their lushest by a violent storm coming through with a cold front and and years when a spring snow added to the blossoms and years when the blossoms were well before or after the parade.  I haven’t seen a year in my over 30 years here, where the blossoms just died from a weirdly early false spring followed by a winter storm with bitter cold.  I am sure it is just coincidence and not correlation that this sorry withering of the loveliest part of Washington spring happened this at this particular time.

    In the meantime, I am certain that I will need to go out first thing in the morning to shovel and then will need to turn on my computer and go to work.  I’m sure I will find the snow (when I am not thinking about the impact on flowering and fruiting perennials), even the shoveling, invigorating and somewhat enjoyable.  To provide nourishment that takes into account the extra exercise and how the shoveling time will impact my usual morning routine, tonight after washing up, I put up overnight apple oatmeal.  Into the slow cooker went a couple of diced apples, a handful of raisins, steel cut oats, cinnamon, a bit of butter, and a dash of salt.  When I wake up, It will smell something like apple crisp, and it will be just the thing to fuel snow shoveling.  With the extra, I will make muffins for later in the week.

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    Worrying (and the kanchukas)

    ByElizabeth

    This morning, woken by the purring cat from an anxious dream in which I was not doing enough to make things better (I am not making this up), my first thoughts were of escalating war in Afghanistan and deepening economic crisis at home.  It felt almost strange and abstract to be worrying about these things from my warm comfortable bed.

    I think worrying can have a positive place in our lives.  If we just get worried or anxious about things and get trapped in not doing or growing or reaching (both inward and outward) for a sense of connection and spirit, then worrying will cloak or limit us.  If we recognize worries as showing us limitations, then we can use them to grow and change and spur us to action.

    After the 25 tattvas describing the physical world and our being and understanding of the world that correspond in both the classical and Kashmir Shaivist systems, are Kashmir Shaivism’s six kanchukas — cloakings or coverings.  The kanchukas are niyati (limitation of place), kaala (limitation of time), raaga ( attachment), vidya (limitation of knowledge), kalaa (limitation of action), maya (illusion of individuality/manifestation).

    From a tantric perspective, experiencing ourselves as thinking, individual beings in the manifest world, constrained by time and space, only binds us if we think that is all we are.  If we get completely entangled in these constraints, then our sense of spirit is cloaked, just as if we get stuck in worrying, instead of using worries as a spur to work for change, we become miserable.

    I meditate and practice asana, as taught by my teachers, to reveal the restraints of physical being as only part of my being.  Spiritual practice can serve to enable us to experience freedom of heart and mind, to bathe in the bliss of the essence of ourselves that is universal and unconstrained by the limitations of individual manifestation.  The point of these practices not to escape our individual selves or to gratify them (that would still be “cloaked”), but to find the strength and stability to serve better and to work for a world in which all beings have an equal chance to seek the spirit and experience the bliss of connection.

One Comment

  1. Just lovely. Thank you for a nurturing time yesterday– and I did find out the name of the weed: it’s called Purple Deadnettle.

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