And then a scholar said, ‘Speak of Talking.’
And he answered, saying:

You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts;
And when you can no longer dwell in the solitude
of your heart you live in your lips, and sound
is a diversion and a pastime.

Is that not interesting, to be at peace with your thoughts?

So often practice is misunderstood as getting rid of thoughts, to replace ‘bad’ thoughts with ‘good’ ones. Or indeed to get rid of them all together. The basic delusion is that ‘I am my thoughts’. Then follows, if my thoughts are bad, I’m bad. There is a world of difference however between dwelling in thoughts and dwell in the solitude of your heart. Thoughts are not excluded, you are at peace with your thoughts.

Take a look at the whole poem why not.

The winds in this part of the country were so strong many of the New Year civic celebrations were cancelled. Not so many fireworks out there and not so many casualties to deal with in the Accident and Emergency Departments in the North of England either.

We welcomed in the New Year with a ceremony, one of my favorites, with the wind and rain lashing against the windows as we sat in meditation during the evening before the ceremony. Brrr! Over in Newcastle a reader and his friends went out for a meal in China town where this Hotei was found. Hotei is very prominent in Chinese Buddhist temples and is regarded as being the Bodhisattva Maitreya.

For years we celebrated the festival for Maitreya, the Buddha to come, on the first day of the year. Now since my teachers death we remember her as it was her birthday. It was my mothers too, she would have been 99 this year. I thought they would live for ever. And in certain way I was right!

When the above was written in my book of scriptures I could not have been more miserable. At the time I knew a lot about mist and very little about sun. It was one of those times of wall to wall pain, on all levels. The Mountain remained, in the background. For one thing I’d broken my leg and not known I’d done it. My leg hurt, I hurt. A few days into the new year I was able to get to a hospital for x-rays. Quickly my leg was encased in a plaster cast and I was on crutches, for six weeks.

It was only a little slip on a frozen bank – my ankle turned – I heard a slight click. Yep! the doctor said happily. People can fall off a roof or out of a tree and not break anything. It’s the little slips and trips that, more often than not, result in major fractures. Isn’t that just the way of things. You make a mistake and you think you are in big trouble and you are not. You let slip an ill timed word or three and you are dead in the water.

At the time I viewed the above text through a haze of unhappiness. I didn’t appreciate it, as now. Seven years latter, seeing this text, remembering the turn of the millennium and how things were at the time, I started to silently repeat a well worn mantra. Uh! That was the very worst New Year of my entire life. But I stopped mid sentence, changed my mind and decided not to continue.

It is possible to change one’s mind –

And, no matter what, always the Mountain remains.

Now it is here, Happy New Year!