Better Living Through Literature
Words + Projects + Stuff I Like
“As long as I live, I’ll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing. I’ll interpret the rocks, learn the language of flood, storm, and the avalanche. I’ll acquaint myself with the glaciers and wild gardens, and get as near the heart of the world as I can.”
John Muir from Journal, 1871.
(Via Pinterest. In my head, I hear this being read by Master Yoda.)
I have felt off for the last few weeks, and I can’t tell if it’s because of the unsettled weather, having less time to myself, professional issues, or just not going to enough yoga classes with my awesome teacher.
For times like this, there are hippie platitudes–I mean, quotes from The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying:
Above all, be at ease, be as natural and spacious as possible. Slip quietly out of the noose of your habitual anxious self, release all grasping, and relax into your true nature.
Think of your ordinary emotional, thought-ridden self as a block of ice or a slab of butter left out in the sun. If you are feeling hard and cold, let this aggression melt away in the sunlight of your meditation.
Let peace work on you and enable you to gather your scattered mind into the mindfulness of Calm Abiding, and awaken in you the awareness and insight of Clear Seeing.
And you will find all your negativity disarmed, your aggression dissolved, and your confusion evaporating slowly like mist into the vast and stainless sky of your absolute nature.
(From here, via said awesome yoga teacher. Yes, I visit that site nearly every day.)
Oh yes, I’m still getting my hippie on with late Beatles tunes. I never cared much for this one until I listened to the lyrics (past the “love, love, love” part); now, I like hearing that there’s “Nothing you can do but you can learn how to be you in time” and there’s “Nowhere you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be.”
Bonus Ringo at the end. Mr. Conductor!
It’s Jack Kerouac’s birthday today, in 1922 (his parents were French Canadian, so “Ti Jean” was the family nickname for him).
I blame Kerouac (and Salinger) for nurturing my hippie tendencies–open any page of The Dharma Bums at an impressionable age, read about hitchhiking and backpacking and mountain climbing, and then throw in something like this? No surprise there.
There were now early spring mornings with the happy dogs, me forgetting the Path of Buddhism and just being glad; looking around at new little birds not yet summer fat; the dogs yawning and almost swallowing my Dharma; the grass waving, hens chuckling. Spring nights, practicing Dhyana under the cloudy moon, I’d see the truth: “Here, this, is It. The world as it is, is Heaven, I’m looking for a Heaven outside what there is, it’s only this poor pitiful world that’s Heaven.”
Here’s some Rilke to get your inner hippie on board for the week. (My new thing is trying to trust the universe, so of course I liked this):
We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; if there are dangers at hand, we must try to love them.
How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples–the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses. Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are waiting for us, beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.
1. For cat lovers and font lovers: 20 Cats as Fonts. Including:
2. Comic Sans Cat looks like I feel after this week.
3. I continue to cope with hippie songs. Any song where you can sing “Om” is a good one:
The little space within the heart is as great as the vast universe. The heavens and the earth are there, and the sun and the moon and the stars. Fire and lightning and winds are there, and all that now is and all that is not. –The Upanishads
(Image from the Heart and Soul nebulae via Bad Astronomy; quote via my inner hippie. )