@suziannesaid Someone once said that we cannot know the highest highs without also experiencing the lowest lows. Years before the events in my post, I was very near the lowest low, far worse than these two events. It all joins together to produce perspective, and this is what enables my "more abundant" life now. There is purpose to be found to almost every event in one's life if one bothers to look.
Thank you for your empathy.
Sadness enriches the soul; we are not complete without it. A bit of wisdom from my grandmother (a Nebraska farm girl): "Wash your eggs before you put them in the basket." The basket is your mind, the eggs are experience, and the dirt clinging to the eggs is the pain associated with the gaining of experience; learn the lessons, but get past the pain of how you learned them.
I love the Bamboo Tree:
It staves off heat and cold,
Cultivates unbending fidelity;
Empties its mind every day.
In the moonlight it plays with its shadow
And sends clean words before the wind.
When it wears snow on its head,
Grace fills the deep forest.
- Jinkag Haesim (1178-1234)
The autumn branches are bare,
The sunlight weak,
The mountain lonely,
The frost flowers clear.
I close the door
And drift into a dream
Until the squawk of a magpie
Startles me awake.
- Wonkam Chungji (1226-1292)
The original enlightenment
of each and every
sentient being is constantly
enlightening all sentient beings,
prompting them all to regain
their original enlightenment.
The humble, meek, merciful, just, pious, and devout souls are everywhere of one religion; and when death has taken off the mask they will know one another, though the divers liveries they wear here makes them strangers. This world is a form; our bodies are forms; and no visible acts of devotion can be without forms. But yet the less form in religion the better, since God is a Spirit; for the more mental our worship, the more adequate to the nature of God; the more silent, the more suitable to the language of a Spirit.
Both sacred wisdom
And ordinary feeling
Have completely fallen away
No craving
For success and fame
Rises in my mind
Don’t tell me that I’ve fallen
Into the cave
On Stone Frost Mountain
Inside my heart I keep
Three thousand prancing
Chestnut horses.
The Way does not require cultivation—just don't pollute it.
What is pollution? As long as you have a fluctuating mind fabricating artificialities and contrivances, all of this is pollution.
If you want to understand the Way directly, the normal mind is the Way.
What I mean by the normal mind is the mind without artificiality, without subjective judgments, without grasping or rejection.
Conceived in covenant.
Formed by mighty hands in the darkness.
A hope for a life of giggles and smiles, of laughter and joy, story telling, and wonder.
What joy and wonder as she arrives, little hands and feet, a smile so sweet.
With pain and sorrow a troubled heart, a year, a week, a day or two.
Now she is on streets of gold. In the nail pierced hands.
No pain or sorrow can touch her now.
She waits with him for others coming.
A hope for a life of giggles and smiles, of laughter and joy, story telling, and wonder.
...when we talk of Nirvana we imagine that there is such a thing...
as in the case of a table or a book.
Nirvana, however, is no more than a state of mind or consciousness when we actually transcend relativity—the world of birth and death.
...
20 Dec '18 22:51
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