“Try the meditation of the trail, just walk along looking at the trail at your feet and don’t look about and just fall into a trance as the ground zips by. Trails are like that: you’re floating along in a Shakespearean Arden paradise and expect to see nymphs and fluteboys, then suddenly you’re struggling in a hot broiling sun of hell in dust and nettles and poison oak… just like life.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
From Astrid Lindgren, author of the Pippi Longstocking books, here is some Buddhist advice disguised as two Swedes on summer vacation:
Pelle had already begun to dread the awful day when they would all have to go back to town. He had an old comb with as many teeth as the summer had days. Every morning he broke off a tooth and noticed anxiously how the comb grew thinner and thinner.
Melker saw the comb one morning and threw it away. To worry about the future was the wrong attitude toward life, he said. One should enjoy each day as it came. On a sunny morning like the present one, life was nothing but happiness. How wonderful it was to go straight out into the garden in pajamas, feeling the dew-wet grass under one’s feet, and then take a dip from the jetty and afterward sit down at the painted garden table to read a book or the paper while drinking delicious coffee.
Astrid Lindgrin, Seacrow Island.
It’s been around 100 degrees here for a week; last year we didn’t even hit that mark. So it seems extra hot somehow and the air conditioning is working overtime because it’s not cooling off at night like it usually does in the desert.
Naturally, there’s a quote for this:
“From midnight on, it seemed a volcano beyond the town was smoldering red-hot ashes everywhere, crusting slumberless night watchmen and irritable dogs. Each house was a yellow attic smoldering with spontaneous combustion at three in the morning.”
(By Mr. Ray Bradbury in Dandelion Wine, of course.)
It was (and still is) unseasonably hot here so we skipped a hike. Instead, the weekend was filled with seeing friends, making food, a little pruning, and even massages. I had to think of this quote from Rainbow Rowell’s Attachments:
Since the yoga studio I like closed last year, I’ve been (kinda sorta) practicing with the Yoga Download site at home, which means I’m on their email list.
This past week I’ve felt anywhere from indecisive to stuck to thwarted on a lot of things–bathroom remodel plans, what new car to get and when, what my life is going to look like in 2, 5, or 10 years. So when I got the Yoga Download weekly email that started like this, it was pretty perfect:
All too often in yoga and in life, we become attached to our desired outcome…We become so focused on the end goal, that we lose our presence in the process. Instead, transformation becomes a mental concept; yet another thing that we overthink or project into the future, yet another item on a never-ending list of to-dos.
What if instead, we were to simply be present, trust the process, and detach from outcome? It may be deceptively simple, but putting this little mantra into action can be profoundly helpful. It allows us to notice the subtle fruits of our labor that may otherwise go unrecognized. Along the way, we may see that sometimes, it’s one step forward and two steps back, but that’s okay because we trust that we are on a general upward trend.
Sure, you could say that it’s no surprise I got a hippie thought in a yoga email. But I got it when I needed to see it most. There are messages for us everywhere, even in marketing emails.
This is from The Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett. I haven’t read any Pratchett but maybe I need to start this this one:
The universe is, instant by instant, recreated anew.
Therefore there is in truth no past, only a memory of the past. Blink your eyes, and the world you see next did not exist when you closed them.
Therefore, the only appropriate state of the mind is surprise.
The only appropriate state of the heart is joy.
The sky you see now, you have never seen before.
The perfect moment is now.
Be glad of it.
We went to Moab for the weekend to celebrate my friend’s birthday, just like last year. The light and clouds weren’t quite as incredible this year, but that’s really splitting hairs in a place like this. It was a grand time in a grand place that continues to fascinate, as Ed Abbey puts it so well:
“Even after years of years of intimate contact and search this quality of strangeness in the desert remains undiminished. Transparent and intangible as sunlight, yet always and everywhere present, it lures a man on and on, from the red-walled canyons to the smoke-blue ranges beyond, in a futile but fascinating quest for the great, unimaginable treasure which the desert seems to promise.”
It’s been a while since we’ve had a hippie thought, so here’s something good to keep in mind from The Book of Awakening by Mark Nepo:
I have a soft spot for “writers of the West” because that’s what I want to be someday, too. Here he is talking about being just that:
“If there is such a thing as being conditioned by climate and geography, and I think there is, it is the West that has conditioned me. It has the forms and lights and colors that I respond to in nature and in art. If there is a western speech, I speak it; if there is a western character or personality, I am some variant of it; if there is a western culture in the small-c , anthropological sense, I have not escaped it. It has to have shaped me.”
1. I finally watched The Grand Budapest Hotel last month and have been meaning to recommend it. The concierge character, M. Gustave, reminded me so much of my best friend trying to be gracious in his own store, giving us quotes like this:
“Rudeness is merely the expression of fear. People fear they won’t get what they want. The most dreadful and unattractive person only needs to be loved, and they will open up like a flower.
2. This article about the origins of the phrase “having it all” (title of Helen Gurley Brown’s 1982 memoir, early feminist demand, currently unpopular for being unrealistic) is fascinating. Short version: Brown never wanted that phrase to be the title in the first place.