Nonaligned faith and practice in the present
This morning, our crippled elderly cat would not eat.
In recent years we’ve nursed this 16-year-old through one crisis after another, always watching him rebound to his usual, sweet, attention-demanding self. Now he’s on shots for arthritis and extensive intervertebral disc degeneration.
He gets around with a hind end that stumbles and flops. The vet says the palliative shot keeps him from feeling pain, but I imagine that he is doing more physical damage every time he moves—especially when he
…Until this morning I was
fixed
on boxing things
collected over decades.
Fragile, heavy, old, purchased, given,
all stuff from other moments.
…
There isn’t really an end
to this.
Coasting forward or
drifting sideways or back,
We never reach a goal.
It’s a matter of equilibrium,
homeostasis.
It’s not
a matter of
getting to enlightenment,
Stop wasting
time
being
consciousness.
“You”
does not
exist.
It is a path
of illusory
linear time
through the
sphere
of
Creation
which
is
all
at
Many of us are chronically distressed by the suffering we see around us. It confronts us in the 24/7 news cycle, in social media, in what we pass on the street every day. We live with a longing to be rid of the pain and guilt that we experience in witnessing all of this suffering.
That longing drives us to cast about for things to do that would “fix the problem.” We try and we urge others to try political
…Originally published on Quaker Universalist Conversations (1/1/17).
I had a dream a few days ago, one of those rare wholly unambiguous dreams. It was a flying dream, but that’s not the relevant feature, just a plot device.
I was returning home to an upper floor of a six-story apartment building. Flying over the roof, I saw that the whole surface was filled
You don’t know what will happen if you go down that road. That’s why you should go there.
Why do what you have already done?
The world never changes, and it is never the same. Each step opens a new door to the same old life. Infinite variations on the same thing.
Remember
…Nothing new.
Except perhaps that the the circumstances are more extreme than they have been since I lost my counseling career.
There is this.
…The fixed idea that we have about ourselves as solid and separate from each other is painfully limiting. (35)
Bodhichitta is our heart—our wounded, softened heart…. The more you look, the more you find just a feeling of tenderness tinged with some kind of sadness. This sadness is not about somebody mistreating us. This is inherent
…As long as we’re caught up in always looking for certainty and happiness, rather than honoring the taste and smell and quality of exactly what is happening, as long as we’re always running away from discomfort, we’re going to be caught in a cycle of unhappiness and disappointment, and we will feel weaker and weaker.
Instead of asking ourselves, “How can I find security and happiness?” we could ask ourselves, “Can I touch the center of my pain? Can I
On what turned out to be the last day of my mother’s life, when Alzheimer’s Syndrome was ending her body’s ability to breathe independently, nursing staff called me early in the morning to say she was not keeping food down.
As I said hello to her, Mom looked up at me with that fierce eagle eye we’d come to know during her last years. The look was challenging yet had a glint of longing in it. She may no longer
…
…