Mirror Pond on Mount Taibo in Shanxi

The water and my mind have both settled down
Into perfect stillness.
Sun and moon shine bright in it.
At night I see in the surface
The enormous face of my old familiar moon.
I don't think you've ever met the source of this reflection.
All shrillness fades into the sound of silence.
But now and then a puff of mist floats across the mirror.
It confuses me a little
But not enough to make me forget to forget my cares.

Hsu Yun

(1839 - 1959)

Morality is not something that you must force upon yourself; it is your natural quality. Therefore, first and foremost, cultivate morality. Only then will divinity blossom in you. The entire world will prosper when man adheres to morality. Wherever you are, whatever you do, consider morality as the basis of your life. Morality alone grants true and lasting reputation. You can earn divine grace and happiness only when you cultivate morality.

~Baba

- BABA

In my dreams:

I almost died three times.

First, I was driving along an overpass as my car lost control; I was forced onto the guard rail and eventually over it. Miraculously, I grasp hold of the rail and watch as my van plummets toward the ground.

Second near death was another car accident. This time, however, I am flung into tree tops and I fly Tarzan style until I am safe.

The third car crash, I am near a beautiful river with spring flowers and I glide happily, knowingly, to my near death death experience.

Am I grasping at life? Do I fear death or do I go towards death with elated spirit?

"At the moment of death, our state of mind is all-important. If we die in a positive frame of mind, we can improve our next birth, despite our negative karma. And if we are upset and distressed, it may have a detrimental effect, even though we may have used our lives well. This means that the last thought and emotion that we have before we die has an extremely powerful determining effect on our immediate future. This is why the masters stress that the quality of the atmosphere around us when we die is crucial. With our friends and relatives, we should do all we can to inspire positive emotions and sacred feelings, like love, compassion, and devotion, and all we can to help them to "let go of grasping, yearning, and attachment."

~Sogyal Rinpoche

I massaged a woman recently who had the words Carpi Diem tattooed on her rear.

Seize the day!

photo by Marko Beslac

We encountered the house of realization,

We encountered the house of realization, we witnessed the body. The whirling skies, the many-layered earth, the seventy-thousand veils, we found in the body.

The night and the day, the planets,
the words inscribed on the Holy Tablets,
the hill that Moses climbed, the Temple,
and Israfil's trumpet, we observed in the body.

Torah, Psalms, Gospel, Quran --
what these books have to say,
we found in the body.

Everybody says these words of Yunus
are true. Truth is wherever you want it.
We found it all within the body.

Yunus Emre

Yunus Emre is considered by many to be one of the most important Turkish poets. Little can be said for certain of his life other than that he was a Sufi dervish of Anatolia. The love people have for his liberating poetry is reflected in the fact that many villages claim to be his birthplace, and many others claim to hold his tomb. He probably lived in the Karaman area.

His poetry expresses a deep personal mysticism and humanism and love for God.

He was a contemporary of Rumi, who lived in the same region. Rumi composed his collection of stories and songs for a well-educated urban circle of Sufis, writing primarily in the literary language of Persian. Yunus Emre, on the other hand, traveled and taught among the rural poor, singing his songs in the Turkish language of the common people.

Yesterday I bought a dream journal. It is beautiful with rainbow threads and light blue pleather. My dreams have been remarkable (to say the least) and I felt like recording them would be helpful in self-reflection. First off, I have a new appreciation for the vast genius and creative enormity of our subconscious minds. I might have to call it our super-conscious minds. Our ability to create magical works of art, or music or poetry is infinite. How many times a night so I lay dormant while my mind creates these elaborate scenarios to clue me in, just a little bit, to the makings of my reality.

This week I dreamed about my deepest fears of abandonment, of death and annihilation, of my inner child. Last night, I was in a large house and scrambling to close all the windows because a killer 'fog' was trying to get in. This 'fog' as it were, was dependent upon my thoughts and feelings. If I had a pleasant or uplifting thought, the fog would be less deadly. The house was floating through the sky and I watched as a almost Eastern European landscape emerged under the fog. When I awoke, I read this:

"Buddha sat in serene and humble dignity on the ground, with the sky above him and around him, as if to show us that in meditation you sit with open, skylike attitude of mind, yet remain present, earthed, and grounded. The sky is our absolute nature, which has no barriers and is boundless, and the ground is our reality, our relative, ordinary condition. The posture we take when we meditate signifies that we are linking absolute and relative, sky and ground, heaven and earth, like two wings of a bird, integrating the skylike deathless nature of mind and the ground of our transient, mortal nature."

I had the feeling that the 'fog' was representative of the quality of my mind; I must focus on staying positive, clear and grounded.

There is no reason to hide from something that you alone are controlling. Mind control.
At least that is my interpretation for today.

When I consider the virtue of abusive words,

(from The Shodoka)

When I consider the virtue of abusive words,
I find the scandal-monger is my good teacher.
If we do not become angry at gossip,
We have no need for powerful endurance and compassion.
To be mature in Zen is to be mature in expression,
And full-moon brilliance of dhyana and prajna
Does not stagnate in emptiness.
Not only can I take hold of complete enlightenment by myself,
But all Buddha-bodies, like sands of the Ganges,
Can become awakened in exactly the some way.

Yoka Genkaku (Yongjia Xuanjue)

Taken

First, you must let your heart
be broken open
in a way you have never
felt before,
cannot imagine.

You will
not know if what you are
feeling
is anguish or joy,
something predestined
or merely old wounds
flowing once more,
reminders of all that is
unfinished in your life.

Something will flood into
your chest
like air sweetened by
desert honeysuckle,
love that is too
strong.

You will stand there,
very still,
not seeing what this is.
Later, you will not remember
any of this
until the next time
when you will say,
yes, yes, I have known this before,
it has come again,
just as your eyes fold under
once more.

Dorothy Walters 2006

Soul And The Old Woman

What is the soul? Consciousness.

The more awareness, the deeper the soul, and when such essence overflows, you feel a sacredness around.

It's so simple to tell one who puts on a robe and pretends to be a dervish from the real thing.

We know the taste of pure water.

Words can sound like a poem but not have any juice, no flavor to relish.

How long do you look at pictures on a bathhouse wall?

Soul is what draws you away from those pictures to talk with the old woman who sits outside by the door in the sun.

She's half blind, but she has what soul loves to flow into.

She's kind; she weeps.
She makes quick personal decisions, and laughs so easily.

-- Mathnawi: VI: 148-50 Version by Coleman Barks "The Soul of Rumi" HarperSanFrancisco, 2001

Waking

Even the man who is happy
glimpses something
or a hair of sound touches him

and his heart overflows with a longing
he does not recognize

then it must be that he is remembering
in a place out of reach
shapes he has loved

in a life before this

the print of them still there in him waiting

Kalidasa (350? - 430?)

When the Day came --
The Day I had lived and died for --
The Day that is not in any calendar --
Clouds heavy with love
Showered me with wild abundance.
Inside me, my soul was drenched.
Around me, even the desert grew green.

~Kabir

Happy Valentines Day.

Today I woke up. Instead of saying to myself "I am going to meditate" I said "I am going to breath."

For all the cures, inspirations and affirmations that may help on our journey, I found this one to be most helpful: be here now. Rather than worry about the day, the week, the month, I vow to stay (as best as I can) in the present moment.

May all beings be free of anxiety and may the Gods bless New Mexico with no more snow.

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don't open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down the dulcimer.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

~Rumi

Painting by Carlos Paez Vilaro
(my newly discovered favorite artist from Uruguay)

If you earn the wealth of pure love, you become the richest person in the world. He who is contented is the richest man in the world and the one who has many desires is the poorest man in the world. Today, man is filled with desires from top to toe. As long as one has desires, one can never be happy and peaceful. Give up desires and see for yourself how much love and bliss you get. The bliss you experience will be far superior to all the happiness you have experienced before. All the bliss is within you. But you are imagining that it is outside. What is outside is only the reflection, reaction and resound of what is within you.

~Baba

- BABA

Karma is not fatalistic or predetermined. Karma means our ability to create and to change. It is creative because we can determine how and why we act. We can change. The future is in our hands, and in the hands of our heart.

Buddha said:

Karma creates all, like an artist,
Karma composes, like a dancer.

~Sogyal Rinpoche

How hard it can be to turn our attention within! How easily we allow our old habits and set patterns to dominate us! Even though they bring us suffering, we accept them with almost fatalistic resignation, for we are so used to giving in to them. We may idealize freedom, but when it comes to our habits, we are completely enslaved. Still, reflection can slowly bring us wisdom. We may, of course, fall back into fixed repetitive patterns again and again, but slowly we can emerge from them and change. Last night I dreamed that I got drunk. This led to feelings of guilt and anguish as I tried to explain my behaviors to my family. My Mom, in particular, was in distress. It has been a year since I let go of that habit. Still, my subconscious persists. I see this dream as a means to reflect on the true nature of an abusive habit: guilt, anguish, distress...add that to powerlessness, numbness and attachment. It is a blessing that we are able to change. It takes strength, persistence and sometimes support, and... it is always worth it!

"Not Here"

There's courage involved if you want
to become truth. There is a broken-

open place in a lover. Where are
those qualities of bravery and sharp

compassion in this group? What's the
use of old and frozen thought? I want

a howling hurt. This is not a treasury
where gold is stored; this is for copper.

We alchemists look for talent that
can heat up and change. Lukewarm

won't do. Halfhearted holding back,
well-enough getting by? Not here.

-- Version by Coleman Barks
"The Soul of Rumi"

In our minds, changes always equal loss and suffering. And if they come, we try to anesthetize ourselves as far as possible. We assume, stubbornly and unquestioningly, that permanence provides security and impermanence does not. But in fact impermanence is like some of the people we meet in life - difficult and disturbing at first, but on deeper acquaintance far friendlier and less unnerving than we could have imagined.

~Sogyal Rinpoche

The moon shines in my body...

The moon shines in my body, but my blind eyes cannot see it:
The moon is within me, and so is the sun.
The unstruck drum of Eternity is sounded within me; but my deaf ears cannot hear it. So long as man clamours for the I and the Mine,
his works are as naught:
When all love of the I and the Mine is dead, then the work of the Lord is done.
For work has no other aim than the getting of knowledge: When that comes, then work is put away.

The flower blooms for the fruit: when the fruit comes, the flower withers.
The musk is in the deer, but it seeks it not within itself: it wanders in quest of grass.

~Kabir

Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, who has kept us alive, and has preserved us, and enabled us to reach this time.

Thou Livest!

Thou livest, but not from determined time or known epoch.
Thou livest, but not with soul or breath, for Thou art soul of the soul.
Thou livest, but not as the life of man that is like vanity, its end in moths and worms.
Thou livest, and whoever attains Thy secret will find eternal delight --
"and eat, and live for ever."

~Solomon ibn Gabirol

Praying

It doesn't have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don't try
to make them elaborate, this isn't
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.

~Mary Oliver

Snow can wait, I forgot my mittens
Wipe my nose, get my new boots on
I get a little warm in my heart when I think of winter
I put my hand in my fathers glove

I run off where the drifts get deeper
Sleeping beauty trips me with a frown
I hear a voice you must learn to stand up for yourself
Cause I cant always be around

He says when you gonna make up your mind
When you gonna love you as much as I do
When you gonna make up your mind
Cause things are gonna change so fast
All the white horses are still in bed
I tell you that Ill always want you near
You say that things change my dear

Boys get discovered as winter melts
Flowers competing for the sun
Years go by and I'm here still waiting
Withering where some snowman was

Mirror mirror wheres the crystal palace
But I only can see myself
Skating around the truth who I am
But I know, dad, the ice is getting thing

Hair is gray and the fires are burning
So many dreams on the shelf
You say I wanted you to be proud
I always wanted that myself

Lyrics from Tori Amos: 'Winter'