1914 Truce Christmas Eve in the trenches of France, the guns were quiet. The dead lay still in No Man’s Land – Freddie, Franz, Friedrich, Frank ... The moon, like a medal, hung in the clear, cold sky. Silver frost on barbed wire, strange tinsel, sparkled and winked. A boy from Stroud stared at a star to meet his mother’s eyesight there. An owl swooped on a rat on the glove of a …
Exact, Deliberate Care
Reading, once again, Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is like reconnecting with an old friend: a deep comfort and easy pleasure, rich with sweetness and joy. One of my favorite passages ... About five years ago I saw a mockingbird make a straight vertical descent from the roof gutter of a four-story building. It was an act as careless and spontaneous as the curl of a stem or the kindling …
Provocative Hops
Psalm Oh, the leaky boundaries of man-made states! How many clouds float past them with impunity; how much desert sand shifts from one land to another; how many mountain pebbles tumble onto foreign soil in provocative hops! Need I mention every single bird that flies in the face of frontiers or alights on the roadblock at the border? A humble robin — still, its tail resides …
Practice Notes: Tension, Entropy, Awareness
Question: If the essence of all phenomenal appearances is Awareness, then presumably the appearance of a corpse and the appearance of a living organism (human or otherwise) would be experienced within (what Mahamudra refers to as) the “one taste” of Awareness. So how, then, should we describe the distinction between an organism that is considered to be “alive” and an organism that is considered to …
[Read more...] about Practice Notes: Tension, Entropy, Awareness
A Different Breath
A god can do it. But will you tell me how a man can penetrate through the lyre’s strings? Our mind is split. And at the shadowed crossing of heart-roads there is no temple for Apollo. Song, as you have taught it, is not desire, not wooing any grace that can be achieved; song is reality. Simple, for a god. But when can we be real? When does he pour the earth, the stars, into us? Young …
Unidentifying the Day
It is late November, Thanksgiving, and the slow rain falls as all day it has fallen. The mists drift in the treetops along Camp Branch. The ewe flock grazes the green slope as in a dream of a painting by Samuel Palmer. There is no wind. It is completely quiet. From the distance comes only the sound of the branch flowing in its wooded hollow, old, old, and new, unidentifying the day and …