Posted on by Cathy Edgett

Cleansing

It’s been raining for three days.  We lost power yesterday for almost twelve hours but we have a generator for back-up.  I was involved in a workshop on Zoom, Mahamudra and the Luminous Mind: The Third Karmapa’s Aspiration Prayer.

Our aspiration, our prayer was for world peace. The focus was on unifying emptiness and luminosity, on cultivating awareness, love and compassion, and wisdom.  This is both simple and complex, so I sit here now honoring the simplicity, the gift of it, even as I read the news of Trump. I’m with the challenge of holding it all with compassion and equanimity.  

I’m with these words of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, spoken after the end of World War II, during the military tribunal he organized to hold Japanese leaders accountable for their own horrific war crimes, including the sack of Manila in 1945. “The soldier, be he friend or foe, is charged with the protection of the weak and unarmed. It is the very essence and reason for his being.”

Our commander-in-chief is guilty of war crimes.  Let’s hold him accountable.  We need to heal.

On another note, I highly recommend Lee Klinger Lesser’s book, Return to Our Senses, A Path to Stability in an Unstable World.  It’s a font of guidance and wisdom, and personal examples of how to work with what comes.

She quotes astrophysicist Ethan Siegel: “The air we breathe contains one atom from every breath that every human has ever taken. In fact, right now, if you take a deep breath and then exhale, by the time a year goes by, approximately one atom from that breath will wind up in every other person on Earth’s lungs at any moment in time.”

Like the study of Mahamudra this weekend, that’s hard for me to visualize, and I understand it’s about connection.  We’re not separate; we are one!  Let’s cleanse and purify the air we share with each loving and compassionate thought and breath. We do it for ourselves, all sentient beings, and our beloved planet Earth.  

Earth and Sky
May we slide and climb and build and maintain bridges for All!
Posted on by Cathy Edgett

Joy

Today I read the words of Ajahn Sumedho: A life without generosity, respect, and giving to others is a joyless life. Nothing is more joyless than selfishness.

I contrast what Trump and cronies are doing with what Grant did when Lee came to him to surrender the Civil War.  From Heather Cox Richardson:

But the images of the wealthy, noble South and the humble North hid a very different reality. As soon as the papers were signed, Lee told Grant his men were starving and asked if the Union general could provide the Confederates with rations. Grant didn’t hesitate. “Certainly,” he responded, before asking how many men needed food. He took Lee’s answer—“about twenty-five thousand”—in stride, telling the general that “he could have…all the provisions wanted.”

By spring 1865, the Confederates who had ridden off to war four years before boasting that their wealthy aristocrats would beat the North’s moneygrubbing shopkeepers in a single battle were broken and starving, while the Union army, backed by a booming industrial economy, could provide rations for twenty-five thousand men on a moment’s notice.

Tuesday this week added extra trauma for many of us as we worried Trump would carry out the horrific things he said, but I continue to see how essential it is to stay with what we know is true, humane, and good. We do it for ourselves and the world. We feed and care for those who are hungry, and in need, and in that, we teach and feed ourselves on Joy which includes sorrow and grief, and happiness, tenderness, and care!

We push uphill to enjoy the downhill ride.
Exploring and creating stories down by the silent creek
Caressed by a Tree

 

Posted on by Cathy Edgett

Beauty is Truth

In John Keat’s poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, he writes that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” 

I saw that yesterday at the No King’s Protest.  I stood and waved with others at the exit to a freeway.  On a beautiful Saturday like yesterday, people are on their way to West Marin and the beaches.  As two lanes merge into one, they’re going slowly or often stopped, so it’s an intimate exchange as we stand on the sidewalk with our signs, music playing and joy and cheer waving with our signs.  It’s festive and invigorating, and a huge percentage of the people in the cars join in, waving, honking, smiling, and they are so beautiful.  They understand compassion, unity, care and the flowing energy and expansion of love.  Those who drive by compacted, ignoring and frowning are not beautiful.  They are a downer.  Of course this is my perspective.  One might say I resonate with those on “my side”, and yet, there is beauty in seeing movement, resonance, response, awareness, and joy.  I saw so clearly that love and care for others is a beauty treatment and brightens the heart and eyes.  We share a path and unity and care for all carves and curves the places to nourish and share and know enough.  

A grandmother standing next to me!
Another grandmother named Grace
Another grandmother – grandparents were out for our grandchildren!
My Grandson’s Sign with help from Dad!
Posted on by Cathy Edgett

Compassion

Yesterday I attended an all-day meditation retreat titled “With compassion, we turn the tide.”  I can’t convey how it felt then and how it feels now, but I’m reverberating with the offering, the generosity and dedication of this group of nuns, and what each of us might bring to our lives and the lives around us.  Here’s a documentary video to give a sense of the dedication a group of people choose in bringing generosity and compassion to their lives and the lives of others.  

Posted on by Cathy Edgett

Expansion

Today I notice so clearly what the early morning darkness does to my need to go within, to look around my home with new eyes.  Yesterday our rugs were cleaned and a tree branch that fell in the storm cut into pieces and removed.  Both allow me to see a little more clearly as the rugs, still drying, leave the space open and spacious.  What do I put back?  And more light comes through the space opened by the removal of branch and leaves. How now do I arrange my life in these next weeks of increasing darkness before the return to more light?

In that exploration, I read about the controversy over Toni Morrison’s book Beloved.   I think back to reading Moby Dick in high school and Heart of Darkness.  Did I understand the depths of what was being said?  Probably not but surely I was affected and moved  into the study of literature in college.  I wanted to understand and experience more than what was tangible and directly evident in my life.

What is it to be threatened by what comes from “outside”?  When my son was a freshman in high school, the first Gulf War began.  His school and those he knew were against it but on-line he connected with people who were going there.  He learned other viewpoints.  I’m grateful for that.

I will re-read Beloved to sink into why it’s such a threat to some that it threatens a very important election in VA.  When I wrote postcards urging Democrats to vote in this election, I didn’t realize how much was at stake.  I can have compassion for those who so fear anything that might threaten what they’ve been taught to believe, and I can hope the ability to understand our relationships, responsibility, and perceptions expands with a Democratic win.

There’s beauty when a variety of flowers share a space

Posted on by Cathy Edgett

Compassion

A friend sent me this story a few days ago and today I open it.  It’s “In the Belly of the Whale” by Patricia Hampl, perfect for this day.

I offer a few lessons from it to entice you in though they may seem stark without the story which is the point of stories.  We’re struck inside, touched and entertained as we’re changed.

The lesson begins to come home: at the heart of the refusal of mercy is not cruelty – but fear.

Cruelty belongs, then, to fear, and compassion belongs to justice. It is necessary to learn these relationships, to trace the integuments that bind us to our actions. 

But that’s the point: compassion is not a personal form of enlightened social welfare for everybody else. It is reality, it is how things fit together in the universe. To lack compassion is not merely to lack a human quality – it is to not quite exist, to be missing an essential working part of reality.

Compassion is the acknowledgment of connection, the refusal to see the world as divided into distinct units which can do without each other. It is, literally, a “suffering together with” (com/with + pati/suffer). It is primal union.

And so Dr. King taught, and so today, we remember and stretch to embody his teachings even more as they expand with his death. You can read the story here, as you salivate to digest.

https://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=4307&context=iowareview