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#2527 - Sunday, July 16, 2006 - Editor: Gloria Lee  

"A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it."

– Jean de la Fontaine  


  "wake and walk out"
(rumi/barks)


If I flinched at every grief, I
would be an intelligent idiot. If

I were not the sun, I'd ebb and
flow like sadness. If you were not

my guide, I'd wander lost in Sinai.
If there were no light, I'd keep

opening and closing the door. If
there were no rose garden, where

would the morning breezes go? If
love did not want music and laughter

and poetry, what would I say? If
you were not medicine, I would look

sick and skinny. If there were no
leafy limbs in the air, there would

be no wet roots. If no gifts were
given, I'd grow arrogant and cruel.

If there were no way into God. I
would not have lain in the grave of

this body for so long. If there were no
way from left to right, I could not

be swaying with the grasses. If
there were no grace and no kindness,

conversation would be useless, and
nothing we do would matter. Listen

to the new stories that begin every
day. If light were not beginning

again in the east, I would not now
wake and walk out inside this dawn.

(from "The Soul of Rumi" trans Coleman Barks)


Terry Murphy on Allspirit
     


 

by Bob O'Hearn on Garden Mystics  


  Practicing Buddhism is about discovering ourselves to be in a great, flowing river of continuities. Just as our mother and father live inside us, so do generations upon generations of mothers and fathers before them. Part of our task is to discover how all our ancestors inform our lives--and the same holds true for all forms of life, for we have been shaped not only by human ancestors but also by the environments in which they lived.


-- Joan Halifax, in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, Vol. I, #4

 


  The Buddha described his teaching as "going against the stream." The unflinching light of mindful awareness reveals the extent to which we are tossed along in the stream of past conditioning and habit. The moment we decide to stop and look at what is going on (like a swimmer suddenly changing course to swim upstream instead of downstream), we find ourselves battered by powerful currents we had never even suspected--precisely because until that moment we were largely living at their command.


-- Stephen Batchelor in The Awakening of the West
 


photo by Alan Larus http://www.ferryfee.com/bluesky/islands/once.htm    

"No better love than love with no object,
No more satisfying work than work with no purpose.
If you could give up tricks and cleverness,
That would be the cleverest trick!"

~Rumi


From the book, "Rumi Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy
and Longing," translated by Barks

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