A beutiful meditation on Noticing Space from Ajahn Samedho:
Now the spacious mind has room for everything. It is like the space in this room, which is never harmed by what goes in and out of this room. In fact, we say ‘the space in this room’, but actually the room is in the space; the building is in the space. When the building has gone the space will still be here. So we can have a perspective, we have the actual walls and the shape of the room, and the space. Right now we can see the limit of this room, and the space of this room is contained by the limits of this building.
Space is something that we tend not to notice, because it doesn’t grasp our attention, does it? It is not like a beautiful flower something really beautiful, or something really horrible — which pulls your attention right to it. You can be completely mesmerised in an instant by something exciting, fascinating, horrible or terrible; but you can’t do that with space, can you? To notice space you have to calm down — you have to contemplate it.
This is because spaciousness is not extreme, it has no extreme qualities. It is just spacious, whereas flowers can be extremely beautiful, with beautiful bright reds and oranges and purples, beautiful shapes — extremely beautiful shapes — that are just so dazzling to our minds. Our something else can be really ugly and disgusting.
But space is not dazzling, it is not disgusting, and yet without space there would not be anything else; we couldn’t see. If you had just this room, and filled it up with things so it became solid, or filled it up with cement — a big cement block — there’d be no space left in this room. Then, of course, you couldn’t have beautiful flowers or anything else; it would just be a big block. It would be useless, wouldn’t it? So we need both; we need to appreciate the form and the space, because they are the perfect couple, the true marriage, perfect harmony — space and form. We contemplate this, we reflect, and from this comes wisdom. We know how things are, rather than always trying to create things the way we might want them to be.
This comes by way of a tremendous set of Buddhist resources at BuddhaSasana.
The National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation has a fantastic resources page which is worth checking out. There are dozens of pieces of material, links and book lists to support individuals and communities in engaging in the process of dialogue.
I have added some of these to the Cool Websites section of the Open Space Wiki. Feel free to add more sites there.
As an addendum to the story below on the flooding in the Pemberton area, my friends at the In-SHUCK-ch have sharedtheir story of the historical flood that dispersed the Lillooet people in mythical time.
No strangers to rain, eh?
I’ve cross posted this from my Bowen Island Journal blog. The major concern around these parts of the southwest coast of Canada has been record rainfalls over the last few days. We had sun yesterday but it has started raining again and we are under another heavy rainfall warning. The flooding is serious up in Pemberton and Squamish. Eight hundred people have been evacuated from their homes and two people have died. I used to work a lot up in Pemberton when I was involved in Treaty negotiations there in the late 1990s. I know the mayor and several leaders in the surrounding First Nations. Flooding is nothing new to these folks, living in a flat valley that often backs up with ice or just bursts its banks when it runs too high. Many of the houses and farms in the Pemberton Meadows are built on raised berms to keep them out of the historic flood plain so hopefully the damage will be minimized by the good precautions they have taken. The biggest concern for many will be the seed potato stock that is stored in root cellars. Pemberton is one of the few blight-free places in Canada, which means that seed potatoes grown there are highly valued. Even though nearby Whistler drives a fair chunk of the local economy, agriculture and logging still make up a lot of the enterprise in the Valley. And seed potatoes are the cream of that crop.
At this point the communities of Pemberton, Mount Curry, Birken, D’arcy and N’Quatqua as well as the In-SHUCK-ch Nation communities of Skatin, Samahquam and Port Douglas are cut off from the rest of the world by washed out bridges, so the bigger concern for all involved is getting food and essentialls in to the Valley. Government says a temporary bridge should be in place over the washed out Rutherford Creek in a couple of days. I know they can all hang on, being flood veterans and pretty self-sufficient up that way.
So I’m sending out best wishes to my old friends and colleagues, Allan McEwan, Phil Perkins, Hugh Naylor and mayor Elanor Warner as well as the folks down the Lillooet River Valley in the In-SHUCK-ch Nation communities and up in D’Arcy and N’Quatqua.
I have been documenting this incredible rainfall on my other blog, Bowen Island Journal. Head over there to follow the story.
Seher interessant – und sehr simple
by Mark-Steffan G�wecke
Mark-Steffen G�wecke is a German photographer who has created a series of Polaroids that include and transcend one another.
This is a really nice way to imagine Ken Wilber’s idea of evolution:
Holons emerge holoarchically. That is, as a series of increasing whole/parts. Organisms contain cells but not vice-versa; cells contain molecules but not vice-versa; molecules contain atoms but not vice-versa. And it is not vice-versa, at each stage, that constitutes unavoidable asymmetry and nested hierarchy (holoarchy). Each deeper or higher holon embraces its junior predecessors and then adds its new and more encompassing pattern or wholeness – the new code or canon or morphic field or agency that will define this as a whole and not merely as a heap…
— Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology and Spirituality p. 56
Link via Idle Type