Category Archives: Overcome Difficulties

Memorial Day

Everyday is a new beginning. Treat it that way. Stay away from what might have been, and look at what can be.

Class motto of the graduating class at Columbine High School, Colorado. A number of students from this class were killed April 20th 1999 in the Columbine High School massacre.

“I was really touched with what the students chose as their class motto. Pretty amazing for seventeen and eighteen year olds.” Thanks to Jack for bringing this massive tragedy into the light.

It is Memorial Day here in the US. We held a ceremony in which we remembered those killed in wars, we sang scriptures and invocations and offered merit.

Let us remember those killed at Columbine, in peace time.

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Love Your Liver

Without the liver there is no life! Therefore: love your liver and treat it well. Source.

Liver_Sonnet.jpg
First published in the May edition of HepCBC Newsletter
It was inspired by the following poem.

Ode to the liver
There, inside, you filter and apportion
you separate and divide,
you multiply and lubricate
you raise and gather
the threads and the grams of life…

from you I hope for justice:
I love life: Do not betray me! Work on!
Do not arrest my song.
Pablo Neruda

May is Hepatitis C awareness month. Let us not forget.

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Home is Where your True Heart Is

Two Jade readers, both called Anne, have articles in the Spring edition of our Order’s Journal. The first Anne speaks of the benefits of staying at Throssel outside of retreat times.

And now, after more times spent there when no retreats are running, the (admittedly, self imposed) lines between Throssel and my home have started to blur as the amount of more ‘ordinary’ experiences at the Abbey interweave with my life in my town, and Throssel seems not only my spiritual home–as it always was–but just like where I live day to day–my home.

The other Anne writes about her journey from the onset of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME) through to her life in Mt. Shasta and her association with Shasta Abbey.

Sometimes I just go over to the Abbey grounds, walk down to the stupa and sit. Or I do some little inconsequential errand that takes me over there, so can feel the difference between the silence of living alone in town and the deep quiet of a spiritual community training together. Underneath my surface unrest, a part of me is deeply content with what is, when self is willing to acknowledge it. “Separate,” one of the monks once said, “but not alone.”

Spare a thought for Anne in America who is having a nasty flare up of symptoms at the moment. A thought for her dog Lily too is appreciated.

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Sitting Buddha

In order to make the Dharma accessible to those who have visual impairments, the following downloads of Sitting Buddha by Rev. Master Daishin Morgan, Abbot of Throssel Hole Buddhist Abbey, are available. This short book is an introduction to Zen Buddhism and sitting meditation (zazen) as practiced at Throssel. Please click on the links for each of the twelve chapters. (No file is bigger than 40k.) These files are for personal use only and should not be redistributed without checking with the guest department at Throssel Hole Buddhist Abbey.
Throssel Hole Buddhist Abbey

I found out about this recent upload via a Twitter site I stumbled upon yesterday. Isn’t it interesting how information is networked around the world and, in this case, lands back to it’s source here at Throssel. Having discovered this new download and who uploaded it I nipped down the corridor to question the monk responsible. What makes a download accessible, and for who in particular? Light briskly shone upon the matter.

Apparently Screen Readers are not able to read PDF files as accurately as DOC ones. A new world of website accessibility has now opened up before me. Already I know of at least two people who find it difficult to read the text on Jade Mountains. I’d like to do all that’s possible to ease the struggle.

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Before and After Death

Here is a must see set of portraits of life before and after death. The photographs are on show in an exhibition that opened at the Welcome Collection in London on 9th April.

At the heart of journalism there is, or always should be, a desire to illuminate a subject worthy of examination. This project succeeded in throwing some light on to the subject that is perhaps most worthy of examination, and certainly most obscured, in human experience: the great mystery of death itself. And it’s a mystery of equal significance wherever in the world you’re clicking your mouse.
Guardian Unlimited – News Blog

While in London on Tuesday I met an old sangha friend and loyal reader of Moving Mountains. He now lives and works in Singapore. By a happy set of coincidences we fetched up in the same town at the same time. We met, he and his partner and I at the British Library for afternoon tea. (What a splendid place). If I were in London I’d make a point of viewing these photographs. Simply viewing them on-line is a meditation.

Like Great Western Trains and the London Underground my visa application is suffering from severe delays. Thankfully I’m not suffering severely from the delay, although I’ll not be leaving these shores as soon as I’d thought.

Thanks to Julius for sending me the link.

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