This quote has been sitting in the draft section waiting to be published. Yes, indeed we do walk our talk, best we can. To not walk our talk and believe we are. Is delusion.

Surrender the need for the world to be ordered according to a conception of justice, logic, rational motives, and the ‘truth’.
Develop the stamina to live in accordance with one’s highest aspiration. To walk your talk.

Author unknown.

Just sayin’, nothing more than that. A reminder, not an accusation.

This post is for all those who grieve their loves and losses. Love, beyond all conception of what that word conveys, never dies.

No, I am not about to die. And yes too! Any moment our mortality will catch up with us and then we ‘walk on’. And those awaiting their moment will walk on too. Words of guidance below.

When I die
Give what’s left of me away
To children
And old men that wait to die.
And if you need to cry,
Cry for your brother
Walking the street beside you.
And when you need me,
Put your arms
Around anyone
And give them
What you need to give to me.

I want to leave you something,
Something better
Than words
Or sounds.
Look for me
In the people I’ve known
Or loved,
And if you cannot give me away,
At least let me live on in your eyes
And not your mind.

You can love me most
By letting
Hands touch hands,
By letting bodies touch bodies,
And by letting go
Of children
That need to be free.
Love doesn’t die,
People do.
So, when all that’s left of me
Is love,
Give me away.

By Merrit Malloy

Photo by Mark Rowan – as always ‘many thanks’.

I gave this talk, via Zoom, to a handful of people yesterday afternoon. It has just been published on the Throssel Website. I welcome questions and comments.

‘Being Where You Are’
This talk includes a guided meditation focusing on connecting with physicality and physical location including one minute of zazen. A brief talk, given while sitting in zazen, is followed by reflecting on what happens internally when moving from sitting alone to engaging with the external world. There is in addition practical guidance on how not to ‘lose oneself’ in daily living. The talk ends with a rhetorical question:  ‘what is it that draws us back (sooner or later) to zazen’?

Suddenly a pain
emotional distress
a moment of separation.

Yet ever present?
Me, and the tree
Me and….

My prayer?
There is and…..
there isn’t one.

Glad to return here after a fairly long stretch of time. Here is a short video explaining, and showing, what I’ve been doing this past month.

Why should I fear? When was I less by dying? This poem takes us past the idea that we are born into higher (or lower) life forms according to past deeds. Understanding, REALLY understanding, birth and death brings us past, or deeper within, the ‘opposites’ of birth and death. Love this poem. …and when I let my angel body go! Fabulous.

“I died as mineral and became a plant,
I died as plant and rose to animal,
I died as animal and I was human,
Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?
Yet once more I shall die human,
To soar with angels blessed above.
And when I sacrifice my angel soul
I shall become what no mind ever conceived.
As a human, I will die once more,
Reborn, I will with the angels soar.
And when I let my angel body go,
I shall be more than mortal mind can know.”

― Rumi Jalal ad’Din

Poetry is poetry, a way and a form to point our ordinary ‘earth bound’ bodymind powerfully. Just point. Feels like we are heading into summer!