Well, what do you make of this! Stunning to think that we too can erect walls which have no substance, within which it is so easy to remain. Even with the lure of squeaky toys to entice us!
Walls Of Illusion
Category Archives: Teachings
Well Being – Video Talk by Matthieu Ricard
Matthieu Ricard on the habits of happiness. What a wonderful talk, full of charm and profundity. Also a huge number of comments worth reading are tumbling down the page after the video window.
Free Day?
That’s what my diary told me today was going to be. A Free Day! And it has been a free day, a freewheeling kind of day. Ending now with the Jade blank page which I’ve not been filling for the last few days. Sorry about that.
Sunday found me with a group in Hebden Bridge for a day of sitting together. I’m not sure what happened to time though. The day seemed so spacious with more sittings and gathering times than there would normally be on a day retreat. There even seemed to be time to spare. Anyway….
There was an altar in the room where we sat. And as is customary there was a vase with flowers. They were three daffodils. A bud. An opening bud. A fully opened blossom. Showing the step-by-step, unfolding, aspect of practice within sequential time, simultaneously with the all-together aspect. The not bound by time. Perhaps it was the teaching of the flowers that had the day so oddly spacious. Anyway…..
On the altar, as well as the flowers there was a Buddha image. I remember it was white/cream and highly detailed. Earlier in the day this image came in an email. Hojyo Taashi is a well known paper folder and I hope she or he will not mind me publishing this image. It has to be the very best example of this Origami project. I wish I could say I’d be folding one of these on my next free day, but I’ll most likely be doing what I did today. Free wheeling. Anyway……
Origami Buddha on a lotus by Hojyo Takashi
You can download previously published articles on Home Altars on the Obc Journal website.
Thanks to those who made Sunday a memorable one. Thank you for your generosity.
When Making And Taking A Phone Call
When I am about to make a phone call I pause. Sometimes I dial and sometimes I don’t. I don’t because I get the decided sense that now is not the time or the urgency of the call simply passes. What ever the prompt I follow it, for the most part. At other times I’ll find myself drawn as if by a magnet to phone somebody. Unplanned and with no apparent reason, I phone them. Quite often I’ll catch the person I’m calling at a really good time, which is always gratifying. Or perhaps that person was about to phone me! This method is not universally applicable nor 100% reliable.
So communicating by phone, even just the matter of to dial or not to dial is something of an art and a matter of divining if it is good to do. Calling for train times and other utilitarian reasons for using the phone is obviously straight forward. Or so one might think.
In hospitals for example there are many high value calls. Utilitarian ones. This is nurse X, patient B has moved to ward 67. Impacted Nurse, in his blog post Phone etiquette for medical staff there is advice on making and taking calls in hospitals. The basic etiquette can be applied anywhere.
I am proud to see that Ian of Impacted Nurse still lists Jade Mountains, under Non Medical.
With Confidence – Speak!
If they could speak what stories they might tell. Confidences on sunny day walks. Tears and laughter – children playing – adults booted and gloved, gossiping. Soft clouds of vapour issuing forth on a chilly afternoon. Words harsh, whispers and shouts enter alike the walls ancient ear.
Moss holding a secret spoken in confidence, last century perhaps. Don’t breath a word of this, she whispered. And the moss grew in a spiral and the wall remained still. And silent.
If walls had eyes! Peeping out through elegant moss-lashes. Watching the passing by. Fashions change. Sheep and cows have been ever thus. But we know walls don’t have eyes. Right?
On the field side, unconcerned. Indifferent sheep feed. What they say is anybodies guess! The wall has heard it all before…many times.
At the end of the day what’s the message in this whimsy post? Well I have been thinking lots about confidence, and confidences and confidentiality. All linked together. And in the end my thoughts on this subject tend to alight on two old fashioned words, honour and respect. Here is my favorite quote on the matter.
‘Respect for others begins by not ignoring their words.’
Elias Canneti
From: ‘The Torch in My Ear’
And I continue that quote thus;
Honour others by not repeating their words. Thoughtlessly.