quotes
Still Hiking
“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.
Re-Reading The Dharma Bums
Mary Frances On Going To Restaurants
From “D is for Dining Out,” in An Alphabet for Gourmets, by my BFF Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher:
I had a happy beginning in [the] neglected art and much abused privilege [of dining out], one that has sheathed it in unfading pleasure for me when it is done well. When I was no more than five or so my father and mother would begin to prepare my spirits for Easter, or Christmas, or a birthday, and when the festival rolled around, there I would be, waiting to greet it…on the pink velvet seat of the region’s best restaurant.
I admit I am prejudiced about it. I seldom dine out, and because of my early conditioning to the sweet illusion of permanent celebration, of “party” and festivity on every such occasion, I feel automatically that any invitation means sure excitement, that it will be an event, whether it brings me a rained-on hamburger in a drive-in or Chicken Jerusalem at Perino’s. The trouble is, I’m afraid, that I expect people I dine with to feel the same muted but omnipresent delight that I feel.
Worthy Of Dr. Sagan
You guys. Phil Plait at the Bad Astronomy blog has outdone himself. He’s describing a massive, massive infrared survey of the sky–over 150 billion pixels, showing a billion stars–and he does it really, really well (click through to see how he gives an idea of scale). But it’s at the end of the post that he gets really Sagan-esque:
Think on this: there are a billion stars in that image alone, but that’s less than 1% of the total number of stars in our galaxy! As deep and broad as this amazing picture is, it’s a tiny slice of our local Universe.
And once again, we’ve reached the point where I’m out of words. Our puny brains, evolved to count the number of our fingers and toes, to grasp only what’s within reach, to picture only what we can immediately see — balk at these images.
But… we took them. Human beings looked up and wondered, looked around and observed, looked out and discovered. In our quest to seek ever more knowledge, we built the tools needed to make these pictures: the telescopes, the detectors, the computers. And all along, the power behind that magnificent work was our squishy pink brains.
A billion stars in one shot, thanks to a fleshy mass of collected neurons weighing a kilogram or so. The Universe is amazing, but so are we.
Trying Times
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.)
Friday Unrelated Information
1. I took the day off today. So far I have slept in and received a gift of cognac-fig ice cream made from goat milk (thanks, Amber!). If these things have happened before 10:00, what greatness will the rest of the day hold?
2. Actually, I think the “greatness” will be working on house projects and professional projects and maybe even sewing. I will think of this Isak Dineson quote:
When you have a great and difficult task, something perhaps almost impossible, if you only work a little at a time, every day a little, suddenly the work will finish itself.
Hippie Quote Thursday
“Quietly go to work on your own self-awareness. If you want to awaken all of humanity, then awaken all of yourself. If you want to eliminate the suffering in the world, then eliminate all that is dark and negative in yourself. Truly, the greatest gift you have to give is that of your own self-transformation.”
– Lao Tzu
Happy Birthday, Ti-Jean
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.”
No Thaw
The 2-4 inches of snow we got Monday night disappeared by Wednesday. It made me think of the part in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe where spring comes to Narnia in about four hours:
And now the snow was really melting in earnest and patches of green grass were beginning to appear in every direction…Every moment the patches of green grew bigger and the patches of snow grew smaller. Every moment more and more of the trees shook off their robes of snow. […]
“This is no thaw,” said the Dwarf [to the White Witch], suddenly stopping. “This is spring. What are we to do? Your winter has been destroyed, I tell you! This is Aslan’s doing.”