Shadow and Light
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Extreme Pink
A friend who was a skilled gardener whose taste in gardening ran to the subtle and quiet (think Vita Sackville-West’s all white garden at Sissinghurst), used to tease me for my attraction to lush, tropical blooms.
There is a time and place for everything in this world–the quiet and demure, the loud and outrageous.
The wider range we can appreciate, and the better we can know the optimal use and place for things, the better we will flow and dance and integrate into the joyous possibilities in the fabric of being.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
Good Morning, Moon
As the nights get longer and colder and darker, it can be very tempting to hibernate. It is not a bad thing to focus more on the indoor things, but for health and happiness make sure to get out and soak up some light every day.
The moon just past full greeted me this early morning as I headed for the metro to ride up to Silver Spring to assist at the therapeutics workshop with the wonderful Todd Norian who has come to visit and make offering to our community. Seeing the moon over the vivid trees made me glad I had a reason to get out of the house extra early on a Sunday morning.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
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.
An Opportunity
That there were just three
Perfectly ripe strawberries
Gave rise to an exquisite
Opportunity to practice
Mindful eating.
To enjoy the sun on my back and the weight of the berries in my hand as I picked them.
To linger with their delicate, promising scent.
To enjoy their shape, the patterns of the seeds, the ripe redness.
To taste each one as if it were the only one.
