Dave of Holding No Bough blog is a regular reader and leaver of comments. Why not link over to a couple of his recent post. First read Flight and then Watching. Below is a quote from Flight.

When I hear the lark ascend in Vaughan Williams’ The lark ascending I feel a just out of reachness, like the lark can’t quite get there, like we (or should I say I) can’t quite get there. Where ever there is. Does the music point to that feeling of wanting to go home in the spiritual sense? Am I just confusing this with some existential feeling of being out of kilter? And in (an adult’s) crying this same out of reachness, like the tears try to fill the gap. Such crying could be over any loss and not closely connected to spiritual home sickness. Yet there is I suppose, at the root of all pain, a gap between where we feel we want or need to be and where the universe appears to have placed us. A gap born of our illusion of separation, our incarnation in the physical body in the material world.

Dave and I correspond, and talk when he is here. Sometimes I get difficult but tonight I just wanted to say thanks. Tomorrow I might get difficult! My message for Dave? This, right here and now, is the Garden of the Bodhisattvas. There is not a gap, there are no gaps, open the gate and walk in. The key is acceptance. Deep commitment (could we be approaching vow again) to the (so called) path that leads there will have you at the gate in no time.

Started to write about broken promises.
Started to get preachy.
Started to sense that it’s time to stop.
So that’s what I’m doing.

This is for H. <>

There are, of course, levels of discourse. And nowhere is this more apparent than when talking about the subject at hand. For short I’ll call that Vow.

In the early days of Buddhism, in the time of the Buddha, I believe there was a simple way to enter the community of monks. The Buddha, or perhaps one of his close followers would say: Come Monk! And that was it. This simple form was a mutual recognition of….mutual recognition of…that which inspires the heart, enlivens the heart, to follow that which the Buddha was pointing out through the way he was living and what he was saying. No doubt there were people who came to join the growing band of devotees who were not invited in. That would be for one reason or another and who know now what they might have been. Being female was one reason, and that changed due to the Venerable Ananda’s representations to the Buddha.

In the intervening centuries becoming a monk has become formalized to a huge extent. The center of the wish remains the same whether it be ones vocation to be a monk or ones vocation to be an IT professional for example. (I do have to stress however that living the life of a monastic isn’t a life style choice, it goes deeper than that.) What I’m pointing to is the fundamental of vow/wish. I’d go so far as to say this is common to all, although the form that takes is vast and unfathomable in its’ expression. Unfathomable because what one encounters in the world doesn’t always look like it’s inspired, deep, honorable, worthy, worthwhile etc.

So here in this post there is a focus on the deep, for most largely unconscious, level of what it is to be human. A human with other humans. Buddhas together with Buddhas. As I am sure I remember hearing, Buddhas come in all shapes and sizes.

See the comments section attached to yesterdays post.