Joy and sadness inter-are. Thank you for this love reminder from Curious Cappuccino
Mother’s Day blues creep
Melancholy nostalgia
Love’s still in the roots
Haiku, Mother’s Day Blues
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Category Archives: Observations
Refuge in what?
Yes, we can make a start. Thank you, Lynn
What does it mean to take refuge in the Buddha, Dhamma, and Sangha? It’s a repeated refrain in the Pali canon that the path to freedom starts with having faith in the Buddha, Dhamma, and Sangha – what does that mean for us?
The Buddha was a historical person who led an extraordinary life and accomplished, through his own physical and mental efforts, a goal that many have since pursued. But believing those facts is not the same as understanding their implications. We have to start by understanding, or at least thinking it’s possible, that each of us is imbued with deep psychological roots that are both selfish and unselfish, cruel and kind, wilfully ignorant and that incline towards wisdom. In Buddhist language these are the roots of greed, hatred, and delusion, along with their opposites: generosity, unselfish (even unbounded) love, and clarity and wisdom. If we observe our own…
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Cross my heart
Beautiful picture.
May 12 – Lookin’ for Love in All the Wrong Places
It’s said that “America has a loneliness epidemic” (see NPR‘s recent piece at https://www.npr.org/2023/05/02/1173418268/loneliness-connection-mental-health-dementia-surgeon-general
So what? Well, here are the consequences of loneliness according to a recent advisory from the U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy :
- “you can feel lonely even if you have a lot of people around you, because loneliness is about the quality of your connections.”
- the physical consequences of poor connection can be devastating, including a 29% increased risk of heart disease; a 32% increased risk of stroke; and a 50% increased risk of developing dementia for older adults
- many young people now use social media as a replacement for in-person relationships, and this often meant lower-quality connections.
- U.S. participation in community organizations — from faith groups to recreational leagues — has declined in recent decades.
- A 2022 paper from Johns Hopkins University also found socially isolated older adults had a higher chance of developing dementia than their peers. “Social connections matter for our cognitive health, and the risk of social isolation is potentially modifiable for older adults,”
Today’s senryu: Lookin’ for Love in All the Wrong Places
we all need to love
giving and receiving love
look for love wisely
May 11 – A Victim Mentality Or….
Victim Mentality? This is a dangerous topic.
Last week during a 5-day meditation retreat that I and 300 others attended, a special small group consultation session was offered to “anyone who has experienced trauma OR knows someone who has experienced trauma.” Duh! Crowd murmuring began immediately with the gist being: wouldn’t that include everyone here, if not everyone on the planet.
While first or second-hand trauma seem part of our times, does that mean we should “wallow in misery”?
A Healthline article, How to Identify and Deal with a Victim Mentality, written by Crystal Raypole (see http://www.healthline.com/health/victim-mentality), offers a lot of information on this malady. Here are a couple of highlights:
- “The victim mentality rests on three key beliefs: Bad things happen and will keep happening. Other people or circumstances are to blame. Any efforts to create change will fail, so there’s no point in trying.
- People identify with the victim role when they “veer into the belief that everyone else caused their misery and nothing they do will ever make a difference.”
- A victim mentality can be distressing and create challenges, both for those living with it and the people in their lives. But it can be overcome with the help of a therapist, as well as plenty of compassion and self-kindness.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6yUY7M9yfw
Today’s senryu: A Victim Mentality Or ….
It’s clear, we’re in pain –
should we tell everyone or
someone who can help?
May 10 – Purity Is Not Holiness
Here’s another Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation repost (from https://cac.org/daily-meditations/). It’s a beautiful reminder, similar to a message from the Bhagavad Gita, that divine DNA is in all of us and that love and life are messy.
Purity Is Not Holiness
Pastor and public theologian Nadia Bolz-Weber describes how emphasizing “purity” leads us away from holiness:
Our purity systems, even those established with the best of intentions, do not make us holy. They only create insiders and outsiders. They are mechanisms for delivering our drug of choice: self-righteousness, as juice from the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil runs down our chins. And these purity systems affect far more than our relationship to sex and booze: they show up in political ideology, in the way people shame each other on social media, in the way we obsess about “eating clean.” Purity most often leads to pride or to despair, not holiness. Because holiness is about union with, and purity is about separation from….
To connect to the holy is to access the deepest, juiciest part of our spirits. Perhaps this is why we set up so many boundaries, protections, and rules around both sex and religion…. But when the boundaries, protections, and rules become more important than the sacred thing they are intended to protect, casualties ensue.
But no matter how much we strive for purity in our minds, bodies, spirits, or ideologies, purity is not the same as holiness. It’s just easier to define what is pure than what is holy, so we pretend they are interchangeable.
Bolz-Weber points to Jesus’ actions to encourage seeking holiness over purity:
Jesus seemed to want connection with those around him, not separation. He touched human bodies deemed unclean as if they were themselves holy: dead little girls, lepers, menstruating women. People of his day were disgusted that Jesus’ disciples would eat with unwashed hands, and they tried to shame him for it. But he responded, “It is not what enters the mouth that makes one unclean but what comes out of it that defiles” [Matthew 15:11]. He was loyal to the law, just not at the expense of the people.
Jesus kept violating boundaries of decency to get to the people on the other side of that boundary, those who’d been wounded by it, those who were separated from the others: the motherless, the sex workers, the victims, and the victimizers. He cared about real holiness, the connection of things human and divine, the unity of sinners, the coming together of that which was formerly set apart.
When I think of holiness, the kind that is sensual and embodied and free from shame and deeply present in the moment and comes from union with God, I think of a particular scene in the Gospels when, right in the middle of a dinner party, a woman cracks open a jar of myrrh and pours it over Jesus’ feet [Luke 7:37–38]. She then takes her unbound hair and wipes his feet, mixing her mane, her tears, and her offering on the feet of God. Her separateness, from herself and her God, is alleviated in that moment. Holiness braided the strands of her being into their original and divine integrated configuration.
Nadia Bolz-Weber, Shameless: A Sexual Reformation (New York: Convergent Books, 2019), 26, 22, 26–27.
nadiabolzweber.com
May 7 – Last Day of Retreat
magnoliagrovemonastery.org/photo-gallery
Sunday morning coming down … the last day of retreat is for final talks and final goodbyes. Some people linger as long as possible while others pack up early and are eager to return to home, family, work, and/or civilization.
The vast majority of retreatants are making promises to themselves and/or others to return again. There are many goodbye hugs and well wishes shared.
Today’s senryu: Last Day of Retreat
renewed spirits and
relief to move forward – yes
impermanence is
The six-hour drive home includes a lot of debriefing with car mates that had similar yet different experiences than you. Since retreatants are assigned living quarters by gender and meditation groups by chance, it’s very likely that each traveler has a different perspective on what was their favorite part of the retreat.
So long, Magnolia Grove.
magnoliagrovemonastery.org/photo-gallery
Apr 21 – Good One, Mark Twain
https://www.onthisday.com/people/mark-twain
Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain) born November 30, 1835, in Missouri and died April 21, 1910, in CT, at the age of 74 from a heart attack. An American author most known for his classic, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, published in 1885.
Known for his humorous and insightful quips, here are a few of my favorites:
“Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”
“When your friends begin to flatter you on how young you look, it’s a sure sign you’re getting old.”
“Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.”
http://www.azquotes.com/author/Mark_Twain
Today’s senryu: Good One, Mark Twain
enjoy life today
tomorrow too, if it comes
humor helps a lot
Going Down, Down, Down
Today’s senryu: Going Down, Down, Down
in hindsight, it’s clear
we made the wrong decision –
just saying, slow down
A BRIEF SUMMARY OF THE TITANIC
Titanic, British luxury passenger liner that sank on April 15, 1912, en route to New York from Southampton, England, on its maiden voyage.
The largest and most luxurious ship afloat, the Titanic had a double-bottomed hull divided into 16 watertight compartments. Because four of these could be flooded without endangering its buoyancy, it was considered unsinkable. Shortly before midnight on April 14, it collided with an iceberg southeast of Cape Race, Newfoundland; five compartments ruptured and the ship sank. Some 1,500 of its 2,200 passengers died.
After the disaster, new rules were drawn up requiring that the number of places in lifeboats equal the number of passengers (the Titanic had only 1,178 lifeboat places for 2,224 passengers) and that all ships maintain a 24-hour radio watch for distress signals (a ship less than 20 mi [32 km] away had not heard the Titanic’s distress signal because no one had been on duty). The International Ice Patrol was established to monitor icebergs in shipping lanes. https://www.britannica.com/summary/Titanic
Apr 10 – After Easter – Now What?
Below is a repost of a provocative reminder from Sr. Joan Chittister.
What Easter is Really About
“The true division of humanity,” Victor Hugo wrote in Les Miserables, “is between those who live in light and those who live in darkness.” Victor Hugo, it seems, understood Easter.
We love to think of Easter as the feast of dazzling light. We get up on Easter Sunday morning knowing that the sorrow of Good Friday is finally ended, that the pain of the cross has been compensated for by a burst of brilliant victory from the gates of the grave, that Jesus is vindicated, that the faith of the disciples is confirmed for all to see, and that everyone lived happily ever after. We love fairy tales. Unfortunately, Easter is not one of them.
On the contrary, Easter is raw reality. Easter stands in stark witness, not to the meaning of death, but to the meaning of what it is to go on despite death, in the face of death—because of death. To celebrate Easter means to stand in the light of the empty tomb and decide what to do next. Until we come to realize that, we stand to misread the meaning not simply of the Easter gospel but of our own lives. We miss the point. We make Easter an historical event rather than a life-changing commitment. We fail to realize that Easter demands as much of us now as it did of the apostles then.
Most of all we miss the very meaning of the Easters that we are dealing with in our own lives, in our own time.
Easter is the feast that gives meaning to life. It is the feast that never ends. After Easter, the tomb stands open for all of us to enter. If Jesus is risen, then you and I have no choice but to go into the tomb, put on the leftover garments ourselves, and follow Jesus back to Galilee where the poor cry for food and the sick beg to be taken to the pool and the blind wait for the spittle on their eyes to dry. All the fidelity in the world will not substitute for leaving the tomb and beginning the journey all over again. Today. Every day. Always.
That’s what Easter is really about. It is the “division of humanity” to which Hugo refers in his dramatic rendering of the struggle between light and dark. Yes, Easter is about dazzling light—but only if it shines through us.
—In the Light of the Messengers: Lenten reflections by Joan Chittister, OSB
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