Category Archives: Daily Life

If You Have a Teenager in The House, Or If You Don’t – Read On

The following comes at the end of a commencement speech to graduate aged youngsters. I recommend reading the whole transcript, several times.

I know that this stuff probably doesn’t sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational. What it is, so far as I can see, is the truth with a whole lot of rhetorical bullshit pared away. Obviously, you can think of it whatever you wish. But please don’t dismiss it as some finger-wagging Dr Laura sermon. None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness – awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: “This is water, this is water.”
The Guardian newspaper

Adapted from the commencement speech the late David Foster Wallace gave to a graduating class at Kenyon College, Ohio.

David Wallace will be remembered during a ceremony at Berkeley Buddhist Priory tomorrow morning.

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Giving With Empty Hands

This letter speaks of tea-n-chats the author and I occasionally had after evening meditation on Fridays during my tenure as the temporary Prior in Edmonton, Canada 2005-06. Such conversations are not limited to priory life. I continue to enjoy them – here in the Bay Area, this morning, in a back garden, with cats and lush foliage and melon and strawberries and (of course) fine conversation.

Rev. Mugo,
Those Friday night teas in Edmonton changed my life. You gracefully showed me the path out of my suffering when you were here and I’m continually glad for your on-line teaching. I think the light started to come on when you directed me INSIDE my head to notice my dissatisfaction (and all the feelings/actions that grew from it). I had to stop blaming, resisting, and start accepting.

I’m meeting more people now that I have a new job. — Did I tell you I have a new job? Well, I do. — I’m meeting more people and I’m seeing something that makes me smile. I’m seeing myself the way I was, mirrored in so many people around me. This makes me feel like I’ve moved on from the old me because I’m seeing how much I’ve changed. [There’s still lots of ego in that last sentence!] It also reassures me because I understand how connected we all are: we all suffer, we all experience delusion.

The new job: adult speech-language pathologist. Traveling to small, prairie towns seeing people in hospitals, long-term care facilities, or their homes. Stroke, illness, disease, or just plain getting old.

I came across a beautiful idea yesterday. Some people in the end stages of dementia (like Alzheimer’s) become as they were when infants. Long dormant reflexes return, revealed as the final layers of conscious life are peeled away. Rub a finger on an innocent cheek and the person will turn toward the finger like a infant looking for a breast.

The thought of this fills me with wonder! Birth returns at death. The phrase no birth, no death comes to mind although I’m still not quite sure what to do with it.

The square bracket comment (also in italics) in this note shows my current fascination: all the unconscious ways I reinforce this card castle I call me without even thinking. The koan (spiritual question): how to remove myself from the situation? Or can I? Or should I?

Dear Michael,
Thanks so much for taking the time to write and for your permission to publish, with edits, as a posting rather than a comment. I benefited greatly from our chats, as you know. Our mutual interest in language, words, giving expression and communication generally left us with much to talk about. Wonderful.

We each bring something unique, ourselves, to the table. Which obviously includes everything we believe ourselves to be, and not be. You could say we are the ornamentation of conversation and human concourse generally. Correctly understood, to allow ones unique colouration to show, to allow oneself to be coloured, to become coloured by others – is a gift. It is possible to truly give in this way because one knows that the self, as we imagine it to be, is actually much much bigger. And is content. That’s giving with empty hands or selfless giving.

You are right to be aware of unconscious ways I reinforce this card-castle. That is best achieved by not criticise or labelling what comes to light. In fact that’s what cements the illusion of the card-castle.

BTW – Originally I’d edited out your bracketed sentence. No, I thought, that thought is redundant. Of course I put it back in as you refer to it later. It’s still redundant though. I’d recommend editing out such thoughts from your thoughts all together. How’s that for a Friday evening at the kitchen table?

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Ending, Beginning, Returning

BlencathraLakeDistrict.jpg
Photograph taken from Blencathra, the forth highest mountain in England.

As the time comes closer to leave North America and return to the North of England my mind has been turning to the green uplands, especially the fells of the Lake District, Cumbria. So it was especially heartening to receive an email from my monastic walking companion who’s been awalkin’ where I first saw, and fell permanently in love with, high rocky places.

I look forward to traipsing the moors with you again, which will probably be even more fun than the dream walk I made yesterday. I climbed the 4th (correction – 18th highest) highest mountain in England!! – in the Lake District. It was blummin’ foggy up there (2800 ft) but well worth it (the climb).

Tomorrow is a traveling day. First sliding down through the verdant mountains to Redding and then slithering through the liquefying heat of the Sacramento Valley to the Bay Area.

Before that journey there will be goodbye’s to the community here at Shasta. It’s customary when visiting a Buddhist ‘establishment’ to offer incense and make (three) bows at the main altar and again when leaving. The formality of such occasions helps to bring to the fore the beginingless and endlessness of practice. And the endlessness of bowing, of gratitude.

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For The Love of Cats

My time in North America is coming to a close. Here at Shasta for just a short time I’ve re-connected with old sangha friends and made new ones too. I’m so grateful to all for the wonderful greetings-and-meetings-and-tea’s-and-meals-and-conversations-and new animal friends and a parting with an old animal friend too.

While waiting for the tea to brew at a home this afternoon I spotted this verse on a kitchen counter. It comes from the children’s book The Cat Who Went to Heaven. The words were read at a funeral for the family cat who died recently. Considering my continuing interest in the Okesa, the sewing of it and the deeper meaning, as well as my close association with a number of cats over the past months, I thought it fitting for today’s offering.

This is too great a mystery
For me to comprehend.
The Mercy of the Buddha
Has no end.
This is too beautiful a thing
To understand:
His Garments touch the farthest
Grain of sand.

The story is based on an old Buddhist folk tale, and is a highly symbolic work dealing with the concepts of Buddhism and warnings about the attachment to the pursuit of material gain.

This post is dedicated to Rosemary and to the group of feral cats she feeds each evening.

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With The Ideal Comes The Actual

Ian in Australia reflects on learning how to make hospital corners, and then on how not to make hospital corners.

In this hand you have the theory, and in this hand the practice, and in the difference of their unfolding we make the beds our patients lay in.

Yes indeed. As we say in one of our scriptures, with the ideal comes the actual. When in the hands of our betters the transition from the innocent following of procedures to the full-on reality of the actual can be testing, or as we say good training!

Reflecting, years later, on the painful teachings coming from our seniors can be inspiring of our deepest respect, and gratitude. Especially for their patience and for their enlightened sense of humour.

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