A little song of four reminders with music by Adam Moes. This song is about how to make the best out of our human life, and Adams Ukulele and his unassuming devotion is a winner. It melts away self-importance and self-aggrandizement, paving the way for true spirituality.
As the lord of heart and mind, He wears gold earrings shaped like sea-dragons. His dragon-patterned brocade robe is turquoise. His sash is pale red like an early winter moon. In his right hand he holds a white lotus on which stands a crystal Vajra; In his left a silver bell. He sits on a glowing golden throne. beneath the rainbow-colored parasol of complete fearlessness, which is vast as the sky.
I’d been dreaming. Something about that dream made me feel like I was soaked with joy. Not joy like kicking it at a party. Joy all through me. Every muscle loosened, like during the night I’d set something heavy down I’d been carrying my whole life. It felt important. But Buddha? Really? Who would ever have thought that this black girl from the East Bay would be meditating and dreaming about Buddha?
By having studied, I’ve only filled my empty head.
By doing prostrations, I’ve only ruined my fragile knees.
By making offerings, I’ve only fallen further into poverty.
Now, without logic or consequence, sight, sound, smell, taste and touch, shine. Free from the limits of perceiver, perception or consciousness. This is the all-encompassing radiance of the cosmic mirror.
Early on in my studies I had encountered concepts and approaches to what is generally known of as Color Therapy. Theories and research that indicate that color itself could heal and does. I learned also that many of the minerals that are used in traditional healing and herbalism were the very minerals used to create the colors in the glass.
This art is my personal passion, the place where I can loose myself in the space where there never was a person, the ownerless and groundless dimension of life in each single moment. There is no entrance fee and no ticket to the art exhibition in daily life. There is no frame around each picture of this exquisite display.
Sometimes I get mislead,
The path or by my own head;
Sometimes I cry,
The truth or because of the truth of lies…
Among my favorite writers, especially during my younger years as a freelancer in Asia, was John Blofeld, whose books helped inspire my early interest in Buddhism and Taoism and fired my imagination with colorful visions of life in China before the communist revolution swept away traditional culture there.
A thunder has risen inside my mind. My breaths are intermingled with each other, I am frozen, stunned, speechless, shattered. I am victorious, yet lost to myself, standing powerless and vulnerable, I am reflection as well as the mirror, shimmering, sparking and reflecting. What intoxication is that?
In 1991 in Beijing, one of my Chinese colleagues at the Beijing Airbase English Academy asked me: “do you know what teacher, laoshi, 老师, means?” I knew that yes was the wrong answer. I said no. He said it means father. From this ancient word, morphed in meaning as roshi in Japan, I began to understand the nature of my connection to Kobun.
Each day, carve a moment to reflect, to find the vast, blue stillness within you. Don’t trip on the obstacles. There is a part of you that knows the way. Just nod and follow. Each time you return here, You will receive a radiant and warm welcome. You’ve been awaiting your own arrival, quietly preparing with attentiveness and love.
Passages of an empty hourglass, reflected in a receptacle of water, rippleless still. A crystal visage mollycoddled by dense clouds apparition. A wintry ice-glazed chill. That kills with matricidal harm, woe of hearts as shattered remnants, calm not the anxious calamity of death.
Sad it is to see,
Sad it is to hear,
Sad it is to not be able to free,
Sad it is to seek, that which is but everywhere.
Deepen the stability and ease the body offers with awareness of the body in the body Sense the movement of the mind from the palms… Read More »CENTERED
Three contemporary Hungarian artists, Balint Szombathy, Aniko Robitz, and Minyo Szert have been exploring the worlds hidden within the surface of perceptual phenomena. In very different ways, using fixed images derived from photographic and telephotographic processes, they uncover and give us new and very different worlds.
Imagine my incoherent thoughts when in a small meeting of Buddhist-minded individuals on the second floor of a café in a small upstate NY town we hear a friend coming along, telling us that they in fact are ordained as Dudeist Priests.
The world smells worse in some places than others but everyone’s going to get at least a little bit of stank while living here. We also get exposed to vast reservoirs of knowledge and kindness, but that’s not the subject of this page or two. The subject at hand is the other side of that coin, the lower aspect of humanity that everyone runs into.
You know your holy place. Your field, tree, chapel, cushion, cathedral, mat, temple or ocean wait for you. Go there often, without any agenda. And let your heart sing the lullabies of its longing to keep itself awake.
A Quiet Collision of Verse and Image by Deborah Anne Quibell & Kimberly Poppe.
The human world is cracking up. A century of warfare, genocide, destruction and want has severed men and women from their roots.
They have no forbears, no folkways or culture, no past. Money has shredded all other values. The young wander in a phantasmagoria of luxurious diversions, violence, intoxication, constant novelty and hopelessness.
