“One lives as one can…”
Today: cleaning out fires, chopping logs, laundry, signing off on our roof work and then maybe a 5k run later. It’s cold but the sun is shining and I’m grateful to be able to just do what needs to be done.
Not integrating and assimilating traditional ancient wisdom into the ordinary reality of your own lived experience would seem to be completely missing the point.
The closest I came to an esoteric or so-called spiritual experience when I was a child was when, from time to time, I would contemplate on the universe having no end, that it simply went on forever – infinite/ eternal time and space. I would have a powerfully vertiginous sensation in my body, whatever thoughts I had leading up to the experience dissolved and I was left, just for a moment, hanging… nowhere. It felt like I had disappeared and there was just… everything. And then shortly after I would resolve back to the relative finite world of meaning and certainty. Every time this happened I distinctly remember saying to myself: ‘That was weird.’
Another variation on the same theme.
“Just being alive is enough.”
— Shunryu Suzuki
The absurdity of accumulating and hanging onto items, things, stuff…
I love Joan Tollifson.
Flipboard’s new Surf app is all very nice now but it will just turn to shit, like Flipboard did, when the ads start showing up.
If anyone is looking for a unified timeline app that supports a multitude of sources then I highly recommend the new Reeder app.
It looks great, it just works and there’s not an ad in sight! Win, win and win.
Consciousness and phenomena are so intertwined, interdependent and co-emergent as to be indistinguishable from each other – effectively the same. Not two. Yet not one either.
“Suffering doesn’t disappear from life, it disappears into life.”
— Barry Magid, Ordinary Mind Zendo.
Being/ life is exactly what it is, exactly what it appears to be in each moment and yet we have no idea what it is.
“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves."
— Alan Watts
Feet to the fire
The more one learns about the great spiritual traditions in tandem with examining the raw phenomenology of one’s own direct experience the more it becomes apparent that we’re all meditating on and contemplating the same ungraspable sense of aliveness, of being, of simply ‘what is’. Just this.
SUERZA
n. a feeling of quiet amazement that you exist at all; a sense of gratitude that you were even born in the first place, that you somehow emerged alive and breathing despite all odds, having won an unbroken streak of reproductive lotteries that stretches all the way back to the beginning of life itself.
Another saturated morning
“It is in the nature of political bodies always to see the evil in the opposite group, just as the individual has an ineradicable tendency to get rid of everything he does not know and does not want to know about himself by foisting it off on somebody else. Nothing has a more divisive and alienating effect upon society than this moral complacency and lack of responsibility, and nothing promotes understanding and rapprochement more than the mutual withdrawal of projections.”
Words always fail. Sometimes beautifully, sometimes catastrophically.
So. What a weekend. We had workmen doing repairs on the roof last week that didn’t get finished and it rained like crazy all weekend. Suffice it to say the roof leaked and we had water running down our bedroom walls. I spent a good deal of the weekend in the roof space with sheets and buckets and towels. Oh and I nearly went insane. The good news is the roofers are back so fingers crossed they get us watertight today.
The restless, seeking mind settles when it realises there’s nothing to find.