Don't Be Deceived!

Don't be deceived by the world around you,

Don't be deceived by yourself.

When you look out the window just now,

Don't confuse the curtains for a landscape.

Don't mistake a pane of glass for

Blue sky and white clouds.

Todays image is a key scene from Monty Python's Holy Grail.

The Broken Bowl

His hands still marked

By scar and callus,

His kingdom now

A shattered palace,

We drink his cup,

No fear, no malice,

This broken bowl,

His sacred chalice.

Just whose hands are scared and callused? What kingdom is it that now is shattered? Whose cup is it at our lips? Why must we drink? Why no fear or malice? What is broken about the bowl? What makes this chalice sacred? Where does "sacred" live?

I wrote this poem yesterday, at noon, at work, in the middle of a very busy holiday retail workday. I'm not sure why the words came to me, but the poem formed itself pretty completely in just a few minutes and I had to stop and write it down on the back of some scratch paper. Several hours later I read it to a friend who dropped by the shop. After I did, her eyes widened and she told me she had just come from witnessing the death of a close friend of her husband.

He had died just a couple of hours earlier, in fact at noon. He died bitter with regrets over his perceived failure to express his love to friends, his failure to get together with friends from the past, the failure to appreciate the good times he had had with others and most of all his failure to help others whom he knew were in need when he could have.

I had been thinking of my poem in terms of this world that we live in as a shattered palace, once lovely now degraded by war, overpopulation, pollution and such, degraded by our own disappointments and false views. I had been thinking of ourselves as the suffering Christ and our own scared hands. The cup as the life that we live, drinking perpetually this less than perfect, wounded moment. This moment, this life itself, as the sacred chalice. If life is not sacred, then what could be? If "sacred" lives at all, surely it is living no other place than in our own hearts and minds. It is our knowing and living itself that gives life to the sacred. How could anything be sacred if tainted with fear or rancor?

But my friend's story forced home a more specific view. Here is one small life, one man, his life now ended. His body a shattered palace, certainly, but his dreams and cares, his feelings of love and friendship lie shattered too, now at an end and shattered by his own inaction. Up to the end, the bitter cup he was forced to drink was of his own making.

Lets us take heart and courage from the knowledge that we are the sacred chalice, we carry the light of life within us all. Lets us all, my friends and loved ones, take warning from the sorrow of another. Let us keep this cup we drink sweet with love, let us share the love we feel with others and when we depart, let us do so with a glad heart.

Use care as you prepare

The cup before you,

Sweet wine or gaul,

Remember,

It is you who

Will drink it.

The lovely broken chalice above is the work of craftsman Ron Chamberlain. It and more can be seen on his website: http://www.rdchamberlin.com/Home.html

Lines on Viewing the Full Lunar Eclipse

Dawn's early light,

The full moon itself,

Drawing veil,

Eclipsing.

Face full masked,

She drops,

Glowing crimson,

Behind distant trees,

Now gone,

And morning fresh delivered.

- 12/10/11

Image from: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/06/lunar-eclipse-photos/

Dreaming of an Old Friend

In the silent early hours,

When moonlight reveals

Those things that daylight misses,

The shades of memory

Are quite free to come and go.

Thus a visit from an old friend,

Dead now twenty years and more,

With a smile as warm as ever,

But a hand as ungraspable

As mind itself.

In June of 2008 I had a life-saving operation, a liver transplant. After regaining consciousness, I lay immobilized in intensive care for a few days and nights. One night, the nurse who usually hovered nearby, was called away to help deal with another patient in the next room who was dying. All of the staff became so focused on this man that I was left alone for a rather long time.

Lying there alone, I felt suddenly felt a great need to have someone there with me. I was dependent on an oxygen line and uncertain that I could keep breathing if I lost consciousness. Focused powerfully on my breathing, and powerless to move an inch, I turned to my own mind for help. I began to visualize an old friend of mine who had passed away a few years before.

Gene had suffered greatly in his life, surviving both tuberculosis in his youth and lung cancer as an adult. In the years we were friends, he walked with painful deliberation and struggled constantly for air. But he had such a powerful spirit, he never let his difficulties get in the way of his passion for the things he loved, art, music, history, literature and an appreciation for the beauty of women. Gene taught all that knew him by example how to face pain and adversity with courage, good humor and a relentless zest for life.

He was just the sort of friend I needed at that moment and so I conjured him up. I felt his presence and I could almost see him standing by my bedside. Gene was a fierce atheist, a product of an Irish upbringing that forever soured him on anything that smacked of God or an afterlife. I apologized to him for dragging him back from non-existence, for giving him a life of sorts again, if only for a short while, to help me in my moment of need. He seemed to understand and we had a great conversation about memory, existence and where it is that life actually lives. We agreed that it lives in the mind, where the past, the present and the future all have their existence, and where we were in fact having our conversation. It is also where we are at this moment, writing and reading this blog.

When the crisis in the other cubicle reached its' natural conclusion my nurse returned. I bid Gene farewell and allowed him to return to his beloved non-existence, thanking him for allowing me to use him in the way I had.

Now that three years have passed, I am once more undergoing another medical ordeal, this time it's interferon treatment to clear my system of the virus that has caused all the problems in the first place. It will go on for a year and it can be very demanding physically. I admit to feeling some anxiety about doing it, as it is not without serious risks. But a few nights ago, in the early hours when moonlight reveals those things that daylight misses, I had a dream visitor, my old friend Gene. He didn't say anything, he didn't have to. Although I could not grasp his hand, his smile told me all I need to know.

Thanks, Gene.

"The past is ungraspable, the present is ungraspable,

the future is ungraspable."

~ The Diamond Sutra

Our photo today is of the eery beauty of a night-blooming cactus, photographed hours before the dawn.

Why Sigh?

With their leaves as fine as feathers,

The graceful trees must sway and sigh

With every passing breeze,

But why, like they, must we?

These trees have been swaying since the dawn of time, for as long as there have been eyes to see them and a heart to feel the breeze of loss. "While loved, flowers fall" says old Dogen and he wasn't wrong. "All the world is falling" sings Antony in "The Rapture", and I think he has the right of it. But "Don't let it bring you down, it's only castles burning." Trees sigh, flowers fall and castles burn, it's the heart that doesn't fail. It is because we love these ones that fall that we feel the breeze at all.

So be brave. Live and love. And when it's blowing, feel the breeze and know that you are alive.

The feathery leaves seen above are the shadows of a pepper tree the afternoon sun casts on my bedroom window.

Without Effort

Unattended and without effort,

The Earth spins on,

Endlessly describing its arc

Around a star that never blinks.

Rain, without urging,

Always finds its way

Back to the sea.

The Earth, star, rain, rivers and the sea perform their endless action without intent and without effort. Our bodies function in a similar fashion, cells beyond number live and thrive without premeditation of any sort. Acting in concert, their wet net gives rise to the forms we call ourselves. The natural function of these collective cells gives rise to cognition, but its very easy to get lost in our thoughts. In meditation, we may still the busy mind and restore our perspective. With balanced mind, we are free to enjoy our effortless world once more.

Enjoy!

Today's handsome image comes from a copyright-free archive at:

http://www.123rf.com/photo_6956303_earth-and-sun-space-sunrise.html

The Real Way of All Flesh

All flesh that’s fallen,

It is found,

Lies ever changing

In the ground,

Sustaining empires of

Small hungry creatures.

Beetles, ants and fungi

And bacteria all thrive

On the remains of those who

Were once themselves alive.

Scattered ashes in

Garden soil or sea

Nourish numberless now,

As well as those who

Are still yet to be.

Life circles all,

Both Feed and Fed,

And not even

Those who die

Are dead.

What's all this fuss about life and death? None of us getting out of the chain of life anytime soon, so don't bother running, you can't get away! Just relax and enjoy being fed while you can, your turn to play food will come soon enough. Those salmon were having a pretty great time up until the moment they got caught. And now? Delicious!

Life has been thriving on this mud ball for a long time and will go on thriving for a long time to come. So what if the Empire of the Meat Eating Monkeys slowly passes away or is gone in a flash? Those of us writing and reading this are the part of the process that got to sit up and admire the scenery. Enjoy the view, my friends, that's why you're here. It's a truly rare privilege to be here now, so pay close attention!

The cool customers pictured above made their brief appearance at Seattle's Pikes Place Market earlier this year. How about you?