Click here to go to the next issue
Highlights Home Page | Receive the Nondual Highlights each day
#2559 - Sunday, August 20, 2006 - Editor: Gloria Lee
This issue makes room for a few voices not often heard here. -Gloria
Why should
those who rejoice when Destiny brings good
Moan when that same Destiny decrees misfortune?
What is there that is mightier than Destiny?
For it is there ahead of us even in the plans we devise to
overcome it.
-Tirukkural
38: 379-380
Excerpted from the Tirukkural, translated by Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami
Afraid So
Is it starting to rain?
Did the check bounce?
Are we out of coffee?
Is this going to hurt?
Could you lose your job?
Did the glass break?
Was the baggage misrouted?
Will this go on my record?
Are you missing much money?
Was anyone injured?
Is the traffic heavy?
Do I have to remove my clothes?
Will it leave a scar?
Must you go?
Will this be in the papers?
Is my time up already?
Are we seeing the understudy?
Will it affect my eyesight?
Did all the books burn?
Are you still smoking?
Is the bone broken?
Will I have to put him to sleep?
Was the car totaled?
Am I responsible for these charges?
Are you contagious?
Will we have to wait long?
Is the runway icy?
Was the gun loaded?
Could this cause side effects?
Do you know who betrayed you?
Is the wound infected?
Are we lost?
Will it get any worse?
-- Jeanne Marie Beaumont from Curious Conduct
When we meditate, we're
creating a situation in which there's a lot of space. That sounds
good but actually it can be unnerving, because when there's a lot
of space you can see very clearly: you've removed your veils,
your shields, your armor, your dark glasses, your earplugs, your
layers of mittens, your heavy boots. Finally you're standing,
touching the earth, feeling the sun on your body, feeling its
brightness, hearing all the noises without anything to dull the
sound. You take off your nose plug, and maybe you're going to
smell lovely fresh air or maybe you're in the middle of a garbage
dump. Since meditation has this quality of bringing you very
close to yourself and your experience, you tend to come up
against your edge faster. It's not an edge that wasn't there
before, but because things are so simplified and clear, you see
it, and you see it vividly and clearly.
-- Pema Chodron, in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, Vol. I, #1
"In the window's reflection, I see who I want to be."
They'd chase a false hope. The job, it turned out, lasted only a couple of months. The family paid the friend of the uncle for a mobile home that never materialized.
Mom, dad and Andy ended up in a homeless shelter in downtown Seattle. Senter met a girl there, though. She liked to play video games. "That's hard to find in a girl," Senter said.
On their way back from the Woodland Park Zoo one day, they got stuck in traffic. His girlfriend, tired, laid her head on his chest. Senter saw their reflection in the window across the aisle.
The moments people remember come at unexpected times and in unexpected places. As more people ride the bus -- there were 30 percent more trips taken on Metro last year than a decade ago -- many of those moments are happening in transit. That idea, of life happening on the bus, is reflected in many of the 60 poems that began going up inside Metro buses last week. They'll remain on display for the next year.
The poems chosen in the 13th annual Poetry on Buses program, run by King County and the group Public Arts 4Culture, reflect those moments people experience on the bus -- of overheard conversations, of the isolation some riders feel as they watch the city pass by, or, in Senter's case, of the sense that for all else that's gone wrong, there's solace in the reflection in the window across the aisle.
Reflection in the Sun
By Andy Senter
Traffic jam; draw bridge is up.
After an hour, she falls asleep in my arms.
I shield her eyes from the Sun
I see myself shielding her eyes from the Sun
I see myself with her in my arms.
In the window's reflection, I see who I want to be.
PASSENGER
By Betty Jane Sparenberg
Let another's driving be my
hypothesis of direction, for
I admit no asylum but transience,
where lost is my location,
where, in motion, it can be secret even to me
that I only ride for the lie of
going home,
that I never could endure
simply,
to stop.Sparenberg, an 11th-grader at the Nova Project, an alternative high school in Seattle:
"It's about kind of not having a place to go but pretending you have a place to go. ... It's about the fickleness of security, and how sometimes because life moves so fast, transience can feel more safe and 'homelike' than settling somewhere. ... It's about being lost and not really having a place I can call my own. Floating. Sometimes, home or school of wherever I'm going, just doesn't feel like home."
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/221186_buspoems22.html
link posted by Michael
Rawls to nondualnow
Even if your house is flooded or burnt to the ground, whatever the danger that threatens it, let it concern only the house. If there's a flood, don't let it flood your mind. If there's a fire, don't let it burn your heart, let it be merely the house, that which is external to you, that is flooded and burned. Allow the mind to let go of its attachments. The time is ripe.
-- Ajahn Chah, in Samuel
Bercholz's Entering the Stream
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.... not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not "So there's no God after all," but "So this is what God's really like. Deceive yourself no longer."
image by Robert O'Hearn on Garden Mystics
Rights of Access
by Briony
Penn
Monday Magazine, 2002
I once spent five years of my life studying which parts of the
earth you could walk without being fettered by physical and legal
obstacles. The idea of where we could still move without paying
or breaking the law seized me after spending years travelling on
the cheap in different parts of the world. In a sense I was a
wild animal sticking to places that I had a right of access:
Paris sidewalks, Dalmatian shorelines, English footpaths,
Norwegian utmarks, Canadian parks, Checkpoint Charlie, African
game trails, Guatemalan markets, American malls; as long as I
kept moving. When you stop, you are not seeking access you are
seeking sanctuary and that is different again. Then you have even
fewer options. Laying your head down on the earth to sleep under
the stars without impediment or paying is now hard to find except
in the poorest countries of the world where the numbers of
homeless have exceeded the numbers of officials to move them on.
During my research, I took to reading accounts of where
travelling people (gypsies, hobos, beatnik poets, the homeless
and backpackers) move and stay in their travels to sketch out
maps of public accessthe free spaces within the network of
possessed lands and resoources. The maps of their movements look
like spidery webs, narrow corridors with a few precious nodes for
resting: highway pullovers, abandoned city lots and unoccupied
institutional lands. These maps showed the spaces that wildlife
might also be able to move unfettered through and rest, because
physical obstacles are typically built to define the legal ones:
fences, walls and hedges.
Then I interviewed hundreds of people from three countries:
Canada, Scotland and Norway, about their perceptions of rights of
access to all different tenures of lands: I provided them with
maps and asked them to tell me where they felt they had rights of
access and where they didn't. These maps took on colours:
green areas where people unanimously perceived rights of access
(de jureâ) rights, e.g., parks and public lands), red areas for
off-limits (e.g., near someone's house) and yellow areas that
people felt could be accessed but perceptions of rights remained
unclear (de facto) wilderness, ecological reserves, institutional
lands). Most people felt that restrictions of access were
reasonable for conservation reasons or safety. You could charge
user fees if the type of recreation required costly facilities
but walking was seen as a basic civil right. I asked the same
questions of bureaucrats and managers of public spaces. They were
more men than women, they were more old than young, they were
mostly far from their days of youthful roaming and few had walked
the paths of the homeless or thought like a deer moving through a
city, but they all confirmed the existence of strong cultural
attitudes towards rights of access. The Norwegians entrenched the
old common laws of a right of access to the utmark or hinterland
in the Free Air Life Act. The Scottish had fought to keep the
English Trespass Act out of Scotland and maintain a common law
right of access even on private land as long as no damage was
done. British Columbians had fought to keep crown lands open
through the 60s when the forest industry was lobbying to pass the
Access Act which would have prevented us from accessing crown
land and viewing the damage.
At the time, nearly 25 years ago, I would have said BC was a
sympathetic place to be if you were roaming and/or wild.
Entrenched in law was the clause that if you were travelling
across crown land and not damaging anything you had a right of
access. You had a right of access to national, provincial,
regional and municipal parks because you were not charged to go
for a walk. You could stroll along sidewalks and linger in malls
and municipally-owned cemeteries. The shoreline was accessible
below the high tide mark thanks to a federal statute that
outlined the need to keep shorelines accessible to mariners. Like
a cougar on Vancouver Island I could walk from Victoria sidewalks
to Strathcona Park unhindered since 96% of the land was
publically-owned. I could roam at will, making decisions about
access based on topography, scenery and vegetation not just
fences and walls. In Europe, the gradual enclosure of land into
private dwellings and farms limited access down to footpaths,
small village commons, mountain paths and the odd park, but here
in BC we were supernatural and free.
In my dissertation, I predicted an erosion of rights of access in
BC as demand for land and resources grew and population
increased. This was because the costs of access would rise, even
to manage people walkingwith the assoociated trampling of land,
the maintenance of footpaths, the picking up of rubbish, the
costs of restoration and ecological monitoring, policing the
fears against wanderers and roamers. This would lead, in
fiscally-nitpicking times, to bean-counters looking for sources
of revenue to manage access outside of the general tax base.
Second, with increased mechanization of access (as
all-terrain-vehicles, mountain bikes and other paraphernalia hit
the trails), damage would increase exponentially and it would
become an issue rife with conflict. Elite user groups would
emerge with demands to privatize types of access, paralleling the
moves to privatize health services. At the heart of these
debates, I predicted, would lie the central question of whether
the ability to go for a walk or sleep on public land remains a
right that is unalienable.
My predictions proved correct with the principle of user fee for
what they call "non-consumptive recreational uses." In
English that is paying to go for a walk or sleep on public land.
As it stands now, the public have not alienated their right to go
for a walk on their land. They have alienated many other uses
like the right to take trees off the land, and now sleeping but
not to go for a walk across their land. This is not the same as
payment extracted at the gate or the parking lot to public land
for parking your vehicle and maintenance costs of roads in the
park. Those stickers go on your windshield not your forehead.
That is a very major distinction as parking and cars are accepted
by the public as commodities. You don't charge to use a sidewalk
but you pay to park your car. Government goes on to argue that
the costs of properly managing trails in parks and crown land
should be borne by users not the general public. This year no
money was spent on maintaining trails so it is academic really.
With trail or no trail, the debate has now become whether we have
a right to walk through public land or not. Aside from limiting a
freedom to walk there is also the question of limiting our
ability as citizens to monitor the use of crown lands. If we
alienate the right to walk to a commercial licencee, as they are
suggesting, the licencee can collect fees, decide who goes on the
land and where and we won't be able to see our public lands.
Norwegians, Scots and British Columbians told me that walking,
like breathing air, was a fundamental human right and shouldn't
become a commodity. One Norwegian told me that if they stopped
him from walking across his countryside, he wouldn't be Norwegian
anymore. Wild by definition is the freedom of movement. During my
thesis years, I would have nightmares of the public being trapped
like the famous Empress cougar in parking lots and sidewalks,
while the wealthy could buy their walks in exclusive resorts. Now
those fears don't seem so absurd and so far away.