Jenta: Conqueror

I was forever getting lost

until one day the Buddha told me

To walk this Path,

you will need seven friends –

Mindfulness, curiosity,

courage, joy,

calm, stillness,

and perspective.

For many years, these friends and I have travelled together.

Sometimes wandering in circles.

Sometimes taking the long way around.

There were days when I thought I couldn’t go on.

There were days when I thought I was finally beaten.

It’s scary to give all of yourself to just one thing.

What if you don’t make it?

Oh my heart.

You don’t have to go it alone.

Train yourself 

to train 

just 

a little 

more gently.

--Matty Weingast, "The first free women"

Mittakali - Friend of the dark

I was always smart.

If the Path was good,

I figured it would make me 

even smarter.

One night while meditating,

I watched my thoughts

piling themselves up 

all around me.

My mind built a house

out of all those thoughts -- 

then filled that house.

Soon it was a whole city.

A whole world.

Oh, my beautiful, beautiful thoughts.

Who will look after you after I'm gone?

I swear I could weep.

I could weep for all of you.

My sisters. 

Do you really want to be free?

Are you ready to leave behind

all your precious little houses--

and make your home everywhere?

It's not as hard as you might think.

First stand up.

Then walk out the door.

--Matty Weingast, The First Free Women

Future Home of the Living God

We are so brief.

A one-day dandelion.

A seedpod skittering across the ice.

We are a feather falling from the wing of a bird.

I don't know why it is given to us to be so

mortal and to feel so much.

It is a cruel trick, and glorious.

 

--Louise Erdrich 

Since I’m not sure of the address to which to send my gratitude, I put it out there in everything I do.

--Michael J. Fox

Awe

It’s a shiver that climbs the trellis

of the spine, each tingle a bright white

morning glory breaking into blossom

beneath the skin. It can happen anywhere,

anytime, even finding this sleeve of ice

worn by a branch all morning, now fallen

on a bed of snow. You can choose to pause,

pick it up, hold the cold thing in your hand

or not. Few tell us that wonder and awe

are decisions we make daily, hourly,

minute by minute in the tiny offices

of the heart—tilting the head to look up

at every tree turned into a chandelier

by light striking ice in just the right way.

--James Crews

A House Called Tomorrow

You are not fifteen, or twelve, or seventeen—

You are a hundred wild centuries

And fifteen, bringing with you

In every breath and in every step

Everyone who has come before you,

All the yous that you have been,

The mothers of your mother,

The fathers of your father.

If someone in your family tree was trouble,

A hundred were not:

The bad do not win—not finally,

No matter how loud they are.

We simply would not be here

If that were so.

You are made, fundamentally, from the good.

With this knowledge, you never march alone.

You are the breaking news of the century.

You are the good who has come forward

Through it all, even if so many days

Feel otherwise.  But think:

When you as a child learned to speak,

It’s not that you didn’t know words—

It’s that, from the centuries, you knew so many,

And it’s hard to choose the words that will be your own.

From those centuries we human beings bring with us

The simple solutions and songs,

The river bridges and star charts and song harmonies

All in service to a simple idea:

That we can make a house called tomorrow.

What we bring, finally, into the new day, every day,

Is ourselves.  And that’s all we need

To start.  That’s everything we require to keep going.

Look back only for as long as you must,

Then go forward into the history you will make.

Be good, then better.  Write books.  Cure disease.

Make us proud.  Make yourself proud.

And those who came before you?  When you hear thunder,

Hear it as their applause.

--Alberto Ríos

January

Of course it's to be expected:

the dim light and early dark

and the endless days of rain.

And if the week of brutal cold 

wasn't what you signed up for,

well, it's what you got,

so might as well make the best of it.

Other people got blizzards,

and friends have flooded basements

or days without power

or lost everything to wind-whipped 

wildfire. Of course, there's nothing

less comforting than the notion

that others have it worse.

Misery doesn't love company, 

it just spreads like an oil slick

across the dull land, and we

have moved on from terror

to a cranky ennui. But one day

last week the clouds lifted,

and there was the mountain, shining

in all its snow-clad glory.

My breath caught to remember

that what I see is not 

the sum of what is there.

--Lynn Ungar

The Vacation

Once there was a man who filmed his vacation.

He went flying down the river in his boat

with his video camera to his eye, making

a moving picture of the moving river

upon which his sleek boat moved swiftly 

toward the end of his vacation. He showed 

his vacation to his camera, which pictured it,

preserving it forever: the river, the trees, 

the sky, the light, the bow of his rushing boat

behind which he stood with his camera

preserving his vacation even as he was having it

so that after he had had it he would still

have it. It would be there. With a flick

of a switch, there it would be. But he

would not be in it. He would never be in it.

--Wendell Berry

One of the mighty illusions in our culture is that all pain is a negation of worthiness: that the real chosen people, the real worthy people, are the people who are most free from pain. 

--bell hooks

Be patient with everyone, but above all, with yourself. I mean, do not he disheartened by your imperfections, but always rise up with fresh courage. I am glad you make a fresh beginning daily. There is no better means of attainment to the spiritual life than by continually beginning again, and never thinking that we have done enough. How are we to be patient in dealing with our neighbor's faults if we are impatient in dealing with our own. He who is fretted by his own failings will not correct them. All profitable correction comes from a calm and peaceful mind.

--Saint Francis de Sales