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June 12, 2003 By Uncategorized

Jack Ricchiuto posts some thoughts on happiness to which I responded with some of the following in his comments:

The greatest gift I can give my children is being with them.

Two days ago I spent two hours with my two year old son during which I said nothing. I simply sat on the grass with him, at his eye level and played whatever he wanted to play. I expressed no desires or needs of my own, I imposed no agenda on him. We laughed together and when our wrestling got out of hand and he got hurt I held him on my lap and placed my hand over the ear he mashed when he fell to the ground. He fell asleep on my lap and that is where his day ended. I sang to him and took him inside to bed.

My son offered me the gift of his presence, his joy and happiness and utter abandon of being a child. Children are our most precious dharma teachers.

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June 12, 2003 By Uncategorized

Stonewall Place closes. What a wonderful documented adventure in the Aleutians that was.

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June 12, 2003 By Uncategorized

Dervala Hanley rides the most dangerous road in the world and lives to tell the tale.

We switched to the left-hand side for the official start of the crazy Coroico road. Downhill traffic drove closest to the drop, and had to yield to vehicles going uphill to La Paz. This was terrifying. The edge of the road often crumbled to nothing, and often there was only room for one car, requiring slow backward creeps around blind corners. The locals weren’t bothered, blithely overtaking on these corners with Pachamama’s drunken blessing. The honks of the oncoming trucks, above and below, made me feel like jungle prey. The girl who had somersaulted right at the start joined us back on the bikes, despite her bandages. We congratulated her on her bravery.

‘You don’t understand,’ she said, ‘It’s much, much scarier on the bus.’

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June 11, 2003 By Uncategorized

For perhpas my last little entry on Pentecost, have a look at AKMA�s Pentecost Sermon:

Now, you may have noticed that that kind of humble, forgiving love doesn�t just spring up in fountains all over the place. That love, that humility, that forgiveness come down to us as a gift, and our best efforts can�t make that gift come. But we can learn to be ready, we can practice the craft of forgiveness, the attitude of humility, so that the Spirit finds in us a limberness for the labor of love. Indeed, when divine love meets spiritual limberness, why, there�s no end of the amazing things that can happen. You might even see a miracle once in a while, if you look hard enough.

Nice stuff there. The whole sermon strikes me as a call to giving attention to Spirit, inviting it to feel ourselves and tune us to the possibility of the miraculous.

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June 11, 2003 By Uncategorized

Courtesy of whiskey river comes this quote from Ludwig van Beethoven, which beautifully captures the notion that “spirit must rise from the earth” even if it seems to reside in the sky:

Here, surrounded by the products of nature, often I sit for hours, while my senses feast upon the spectacle of nature. Here the majestic sun is not concealed by any dirty roof made by human hands, here the blue sky is my sublime roof.

When in the evening I contemplate the sky in wonder and the host of luminous bodies continually revolving within their orbits, suns or earths by name, then my spirit rises beyond these constellations so many millions of miles away to the primeval source from which all creation flows and from which new creations shall flow eternally.

When, now and again, I endeavor to formulate my seething emotions in music – oh, then I find that I am terribly deceived; I throw my scrawled paper upon the ground and feel firmly convinced that never shall anyone born on this earth be able to express in sounds, words, colors or stone those heavenly images that hover before his excited imagination in his happiest hours … yes, it must come from above, that which strikes the heart; otherwise it’s nothing but notes, body without spirit, isn’t that so?

What is body without spirit? Earth or muck, isn’t it? The spirit must rise from the earth, in which for a time the divine spark is confined, and much like the field to which the ploughman entrusts precious seed, it must flower and bear many fruits, and, thus multiplied, rise again towards the source from which it has flown. For only by persistent toil of the faculties granted to them do created things revere the creator of infinite nature.