if only -

July 24, 2009
Tricycle's Daily Dharma

Rest in Natural Great Peace

When I meditate, I am always inspired by this poem by Nyoshul Khenpo:

Rest in natural great peace
This exhausted mind
Beaten helpless by karma and neurotic thought,
Like the relentless fury of the pounding waves
In the infinite ocean of samsara.

Rest in natural great peace.

Above all, be at ease, be as natural and spacious as possible. Slip quietly out of the noose of your habitual anxious self, release all grasping, and relax into your true nature. Think of your ordinary emotional, thought-ridden self as a block of ice or a slab of butter left out in the sun. If you are feeling hard and cold, let this aggression melt away in the sunlight of your meditation. Let peace work on you and enable you to gather your scattered mind into the mindfulness of Calm Abiding, and awaken in you the awareness and insight of Clear Seeing. And you will find all your negativity disarmed, your aggression dissolved, and your confusion evaporating slowly like mist into the vast and stainless sky of your absolute nature.

–Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying (HarperSanFrancisco)

it's all good. enjoy!

Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.

~Buddha

"Is the future post-emergent?"

Don't blame me for the title. It's a sub-heading for an article on religious publishing that I read this afternoon. Skimmed, really. It's hard to focus when you have to get past sentences like "What will the next stage of emergent look like?" -

I just emerged from The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch. Usually, I don't get too far into novels whose characters are despicable, uninteresting, and/or hollow. I felt that way about almost everyone in the book, beginning with Charles, an English actor, egocentric and anal, who has retired to an old house by the sea. To say that Charles is an unreliable narrator would be a giggle-worthy understatement.

Into his picturesque refuge comes a cast of friends, lovers, and relatives - the very people he had intended to leave behind - like so many hungry ghosts. (They are, indeed, hungry. Charles sends them out for food and ruminates on his precious culinary philosophies. Should one should serve apricots dried or hydrated? Charles knows.) They troop in and out of the house like so many stock characters in mediocre plays - all except the one he longs for, his long-lost muse.

Charles may believe that his best role as an actor was Prospero, but I came to think of him as a donkey-headed fool, whose ego and cowardice are far more dangerous (and pathetic) than the brawn of any Caliban.

How did I get past this miserable lot of characters? I realized that the voice of the main character in the book does not belong to Charles. It is the voice of the sea: eternal, self-renewing, non-judgemental - and dangerous when taken for granted.

(Setting-as-character is not that unusual. I just read Rebecca, after all. Isn't Manderley itself a character?)

The Sea, the Sea is structured as Charles's diary and autobiography. Past and present jumble as his guests and his own misapprehensions become as entangled as eel grass. As a narrator, he is quintessentially unreliable because everything, whether animal, vegetable, or mineral, means nothing except as it relates to him. You can trust his descriptions of the sea and the cliffs, but what lies beneath?

After I read this novel, I learned that I am not alone in not being able to latch onto the characters. Others also have found the characters less humans than philosophical principles with shoes.

Still, post-emergent, I find myself thinking about the book from the viewpoint of Charles's cousin James, a soldier and a student of Tibetan Buddhism. James tells Charles about the Bardo, the limbo between life and death, where facing and accepting one's own monsters can free one to enter the realm of the Buddhas, symbolized by the mandala.

When Charles retired from his theatrical life - died, in the eyes of his old world - he sought clarity, but he sought it within his own ego. Does Charles have the humility - or humanity! - to create his own post-emergent future?

(Yes, by the way, I loved the book.)

a loose, sloppy melange

Loose. I'm a loose knitter. It's official. I was knitting next to the TsockTsarina at Panera's yesterday, bemoaning how ridiculously low I have to take my cast-on numbers to avoid making socks that could fit around my head. She graciously checked my gauge. Oh... my... God... On #1 needles, with fingering, I was getting 5-6 stitches per inch. (Note: the Tsarina did not call me loose, else I would have begun to wail, right there in Panera.)
I posted on the "Techniques" forum at Ravelry for suggestions. So far, I've gotten some good ones, such as changing where I hold my index finger. I have to do something. I've been seeing my knitting getting sloppier lately. So that's me: loose and sloppy.
(How does one's knitting become loose when one is anxious and wound up as tight as can be?)

Not only am I loose and sloppy, I'm way uncoordinated. I tried spinning for the first time, using some fleece that Maven gave me. Literally, I could not coordinate my two feet to alternate in pushing the pedals! Probably just as well that I don't get a spinning bug right now - I'd probably spin loose, sloppy yarn...


I just volunteered to index When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chödrön for the Shambhala community at Tanjur. As soon as I saw the thread on the Mindful Knitters forum at Ravelry, I joined the project. I was just about to begin rereading this book, and I'm a librarian - what a perfect opportunity to be useful to myself and others!