Snowy Day Walkabout
Mostly I stayed inside baking, and I also went to a holiday party with delicious food and wonderful music-making. It was good to get some fresh air and exercise in between.
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Murtis Around Town
When is garden statuary merely a decorative object and when is it a murti–an object of devotion, a representation of some aspect of the divine? It may well seem different for the artist, the person who chose its location, and the viewers.
Would you have a different reaction if this angel was on the grounds of a church? What about a temple? A national park? Your workplace? A sculpture museum?
What My New Smart Phone Is Teaching Me About Yoga
I spent nearly three hours talking with tech support just to get the phone authorized. And once that was accomplished, the guy helping me also was unable to figure out how to transfer my contacts from the old phone to the new. Last night, on the second full day, I opened every item in settings just to learn about this piece of technology and found another way to transfer contacts than tech support had tried. Hooray! I didn’t have to enter them manually one by one.
So it’s like this: no matter how brilliant a system, if I didnt learn how to use it, I wasn’t going to get any benefits. The more I studied and practiced, the more I would be able to use it in a way that enhanced my daily life. Although a teacher is necessary, it takes our own thorough, steady, and attentive practice to empower ourselves and expand our limits.
I had thoroughly resigned myself to typing. Now I will have more time to figure out how to resize photos. That may feel less urgent. It’s busy at work, and the garden, yoga mat, meditation cushion, library, and beautiful weather call me to them.
Signs Around Town (and a Tantic Philosophical Conundrum)
I haven’t photographed the t-shirt with the statement “it’s all good” to go with the sign below “needs work,” but I would need to if I wanted to show the apparent philosophical tangle of tantra.
The tantric texts do tell us that it is all good; more accurately, they tell us that all is divine and perfect, and that we are just an element of the “all.” It is hard to believe that when we can see suffering and bad behavior (including some of our own) all around us.
The tricky thing about the declaration that all is divine is that it does not mean that there is no work to be done. The work, though, is not to fix ourselves or what is wrong or bad. Rather, the work (sadhana) is to study so that with discrimination (viveka) we can determine what is out of alignment and causing our own suffering or contributing to suffering of other beings and move towards and unveil the perfection and fullness that we are.
It is sort of like finding a great treasure that has been neglected and misused out of ignorance or carelessness at a yard sale. It takes knowledge to recognize that the cheap, discarded thing is a treasure and skill and effort to restore its intrinsic worth.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
