Posts Tagged → love

note to self and others

my home office on maui

 

This

is an absolute necessity

for anybody today. You must have a room,

or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know

what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know

who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody,

you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where

you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and

what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation.

At first you may find that nothing happens there.

But if you have a sacred place and use it,

something eventually will

happen.

 

Joseph Campbell

 

gradual cultivation

lori andrews

 

You must keep this

mind balanced and equanimous,

without deluded ideas of self and others,

without arbitrary loves and hates, without grasping

or rejecting, without notions of gain and loss.

Go on gradually nurturing this for

a long time, perhaps twenty

or thirty years.

 

Whether you encounter

favorable or adverse conditions,

do not retreat or regress — then when you

come to the juncture between life and death,

you will naturally be set free and be not afraid.

As the saying goes, “Truth requires sudden

awakening, but the phenomenal

level calls for gradual

cultivation.”

 

Yuanwu

zen letters

 

work the soul with discipline

please help support blue dragon

 

Borrow the beloved’s eyes
Look through them and you’ll see the beloved’s face
everywhere. No tiredness, no jaded boredom.
“I shall be your eye and your hand and your loving.”

Let that happen, and things
you have hated will become helpers.
A certain preacher always prays long and with enthusiasm
for thieves and muggers that attack people
on the street. “Let your mercy, O Lord,
cover their insolence.”
He doesn’t pray for the good,
but only for the blatantly cruel.

Why is this? his congregation asks.
“Because they have done me such generous favors.
Every time I turn back toward the things they want.
I run into them, they beat me, and leave me nearly dead
in the road, and I understand, again, that what they want
is not what I want. They keep me on the spiritual path.
That’s why I honor them, and pray for them.”

Those that make you return, for whatever reason,
to God’s solitude, be grateful to them.
Worry about the others, who give you
delicious comforts that keep you from prayer.

Friends are enemies sometimes,
and enemies friends.

There is an animal called an ushghur, a porcupine
If you hit it with a stick, it extends its quills
and gets bigger. The soul is a porcupine,
made strong by stick-beating.
So a prophet’s soul is especially afflicted,
because it has to become so powerful.

A hide is soaked in tanning liquor and becomes leather.
If the tanner did not rub in the acid,
the hide would get foul-smelling and rotten.

The soul is a newly skinned hide, bloody and gross.
Work it with manual discipline,
and the bitter tanning acid of grief,
and you’ll become lovely, and very strong.

If you can’t do this work yourself, don’t worry.
You don’t even have to make a decision,
one way or another. The Friend, who knows
a lot more than you do, will bring difficulties,
and grief, and sickness,
as medicine, as happiness,
as the essence of the moment when you’re beaten,
when you hear Checkmate, and can finally say,
with Hallaj’s voice,
I trust you to kill me.

 

Jalal al-Din Rumi