Andrew has a new post titled Looking at Everything. It’s for anybody who has ever wanted to change the world, to do something about it. Where it is ones own particular wish and way to make the world a better place.
I know where I started out with it, and I know where I am with it now. Action not optional, acceptance essential.
Recent postings on Jade Mountains have got me reflecting quite a lot on how we can be driven by influences that end up being not good reasons for doing things.
I guess that everyone is different, but up there for me in these influences there are the things that other people think I should be doing; then there are the habitual patterns; and then there are the things that in some way I personally feel I should be doing – and here I find it gets tricky.
It seems that there is often some deep hurt or sadness inside us that makes us want to help or heal or somehow change the world and put it to rights. I am (often deeply) disturbed by the question What am I doing about it– where the it can be whatever we personally are drawn to, which for me has included the abuse, prostitution and trafficking of children; decimation of ancient forest, woodland and wilderness; the pain and suffering of members of my – quite extended – family.
Letting go of this disturbance and the craving to help seems to need an honest and direct looking at what is driving us. And sometimes what we need to look at triggers a deep hurt and even a sense of despair. Not looking somehow leaves the hurt and despair driving us, and yet the looking can be heartbreaking. I was once told by a senior monk that yes, it could be heartbreaking and actually sometimes it had to be – the breaking made an opening for the compassion to flow through us.
And from this it seems to me now that there can be a move not so much to grand heroic initiatives and world changing grand plans but rather to small acts of kindness. The horizon of our concern comes down to the personal, direct and immediate – I spend time with my family, I go and work or just be in the woodland, I try to respond as best I can to whatever calls for help come to me.
Then the feeling of the need to justify my actions can be seen as one of those distractions I find to pull me away from what is right in front of me, and yes, this can sometimes be because I am frightened or hurt by what I think is right in front of me.
Fungi is the taxonomic kingdom including yeast, moulds, smuts, mushrooms, and toadstools; distinct from the green plants. From WordWeb.
Perhaps Walter in Singapore has something to say on the matter.
I don’t often think of being in the landscape however these past days I’ve had the opportunity to be just that. In the landscape, of the landscape.
To explain. Now and then there opens for me an opportunity to go off grid and spend time in a small retreat hut in the monastery grounds. So recovering, well by the way, from a cold and hearing the call to be less outwardly active I’ve carved out a few hours each day this week to hut dwell. A series of mini breaks, three or four hours here and there, to sit with nothing calling for attention.
As dawn comes to the valley, from dim glimmer through murky grey to misty glow, I’ve sat. And I’ve sat on the porch mid-day too, reciting a scripture. Intimate with the great sweep of the valley. An hour or two in the late afternoon, the sun first blazing in the window then dipping behind the hill. Evening, picking my way across the field in drizzle with headlamp batteries fading to nothing – and still finding my way. Deep blackness, inky black, with pin pricks of light. Are they near, or far? Is that one moving? It’s blinking. A plane? A satellite? A UFO?! With little or no illumination landscape takes off into a wholly other world of envisioning. After all sharp focus is only a very small part of our vision capacity.
So much of the time ones eyes are narrowed to sharp focus. On the screen, the phone book, notices on the notice board (bane of my life – where are my glasses!). Text and text and more text. So when there is not so much obvious need for sharp focus one can go wide screen. Be in the landscape. Allow corner-of-the-eye sight. Allow the eyes to roam wide and open, focused but not narrowed in on anything particular. Wholly in the landscape. Wholly the landscape.
With practice, even coming into a large room there can be an entering into a room-scape, rather than immediately narrowing ones beam, so to speak, to ones sitting or standing place. All rather interesting. But enough of this pondering. Take a look at these winning photographs from the Landscape photo of the year 2009 awards published on the BBC web site.
Thanks to Dave for the link – keep ’em coming Dave.