Signs Around Town (at the Paw-Paw Festival)


This bumper sticker (on an enormous black SUV with suburban plates) is likely intended to have only a message about the current wars in which the US is engaged. I wholeheartedly support the sentiment at that level.
What if we took it at other levels? What if we applied it to spiritual-religious practices? We could interpret this as suggesting that we honor the great teachers who have gone before us, invite religious observance and spiritual practice to heal ourselves and others, and dissolve notions of differences among religions and spiritual practices as bases for conflict. How many wars between countries or civil wars would end if saw unity while still honoring difference in this regard?
Perhaps most cogent for the yogi: what if we thought of the exhortation in terms of our own personal practice? It would be an invocation to honor our ancestors, heal the wounds of our family and upbringing (samskaras), and release inner conflict. This is, I think the point of practicing (whatever the style of practice) so that true peace can abound.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
I woke this morning with an intense awareness of a friend who left his body several years ago. That he and others who are no longer physically present in my life are so very much a part of my present consciousness leads me to a fuller awareness of the dance of life and consciousness. Nataraja.
I didn’t leave the house for the third day in a row. I wonder whether I will ever again go to India or Spain or Italy or England.
I found these puppets earlier this year at the little flea market that has sometimes been at Dupont Circle on Sundays. I recognized them as Indian and was told that they came to the United States from Tamil Nadu in the 1960s with one of the original owners of Kramer Books, who had lived in India as a child.
