http://www.wickpix.com/portfolio/animation/

This one’s for fun.

Esperanza Spalding’s  performance at the Nobel Peace Prize proceedings (Dec. 16, 2009). Lovely and meandering, not a new message but…is it new messages we need?   “The road to peace is endless, the journey with open eyes is how we’ll mend this…. I’m sure enough, and I won’t give up”  she says. Yep, like that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXtAFOr9ahs&feature=related

Then what is the answer?–  Not to be deluded by dreams.
To know that great civilizations have broken down into violence,
and their tyrants come, many times before.
When open violence appears, to avoid it with honor or choose
the least ugly faction; these evils are essential.
To keep one’s own integrity, be merciful and uncorrupted
and not wish for evil; and not be duped
By dreams of universal justice or happiness.  These dreams will
not be fulfilled.
To know this, and know that however ugly the parts appear
the whole remains beautiful.  A severed hand
Is an ugly thing, and man dissevered from the earth and stars
and his history … for contemplation or in fact …
Often appears atrociously ugly.  Integrity is wholeness,
the greatest beauty is
Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty
of the universe.  Love that, not man
Apart from that, or else you will share man’s pitiful confusions,
or drown in despair when his days darken.

-  Robinson Jeffers, The Answer, 1936

I came upon these words again this evening, and find them a comfort. I hope  you will, too.

HYMNUS AD PATREM SINENSIS

I praise those ancient Chinamen
Who left me a few words,
Usually a pointless joke or a silly question
A line of poetry drunkenly scrawled on the margin
of a quick splashed picture–bug, leaf,
caricature of Teacher–
On paper held together now by little more than ink
& their own strength brushed momentarily over it

Their world and several others since
Gone to hell in a handbasket, they knew it–
Cheered as it whizzed by–
& conked out among the busted spring rain cherryblossom
winejars
Happy to have saved us all

by Philip Whalen

http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/2010/bodys-grace/transcript.shtml

Yesterday, on NPR’s “Speaking of Faith”,  Christa Tippett interviewed Matthew Sanford, a philosopher and yoga teacher who has been paraplegic since the age of 13.  He’s published a book, Waking: A Memoir of Trauma and Transcendence. I’m including here some selections from the transcript, because I found the way Sanford speaks of silence and absence,  after injury but also just in the course of aging, very intriguing!

“…a level of silence or absence of normal sensation, silence, got infused into my mind-body relationship, but I think that’s happening to all of us. I think that’s aging. Like our mind-body relationship is changing over time.

“The silence is the aspect of our consciousness that makes us feel slightly heavy. It is the source of our feeling of loss, but also of a sense of awe.”

and later, “This silence demands grace, not rupture.”

Mr. Sanford: But part of what I try to do is make it seem more ordinary. When I do compare it to our experiences, I, you know, like when you’re washing your dishes for another day after another meal and you have that kind of quiet feeling, I think we all know what I’m talking about. You can kind of feel it, when you feel beauty.

Ms. Tippett: It’s the silence within us.

Mr. Sanford: Mm-hmm. For example, you know, when you learn to soften your organs of perception, let’s say if I’d ask you right now to soften the inside of your mouth, and in particular, relax your tongue, something will happen to your perception inward in your body and you will hear something different. The world will suddenly get a little quieter; you’ll feel a different kind of presence in you. That’s what I mean by silence. And I do think it’s an ordinary experience. I think that we have it all the time. We just don’t recognize it. I think that’s where stress lands. I think that there’s an invisible aspect of our consciousness that’s here, that we need to manage better, we need to be more present with for a lot of reasons because I think this same silence we’re talking about both connects us to other people and separates. It goes either way.

Ms. Tippett: In a way, I understand it also goes towards life or towards death.

Mr. Sanford: Or it is both. You know what I mean? It’s not like the silence can only go towards life. In fact, I kind of think that level of absence that we carry within us that I’m calling silence is itself some level of dying or death that we carry within us. And so it’s not that the silence can go away from it. I think in trying to listen, for example, to the silence of my paralysis, that it itself has texture, that it itself has life in it. And it’s a kind of life that mixes. In a yoga pose, for example, you try to make what I would say the silence congruent with physical exertion, not just physically exert with a lot of will. Think about what you can feel in your body. You only feel a little portion of it. If I were to ask you to stretch the intercostal muscles right now, you wouldn’t exactly know how to do that.

Ms. Tippett: Yeah.

Mr. Sanford: Like you have silence, too, in your mind-body relationship. If I’d ask you to lift your inner — the arches of your feet directly, you wouldn’t be able to do that. If you were to try to go there, you would encounter a wall, a brick wall. Now, the question is, is it just a brick wall? Or if you start, and start to listen and to be quiet, you can start hearing that brick wall. It isn’t just a wall. It’s a different quality of awareness that’s residing within you, that in that silence, sounds can gain texture again. And I say one place the moon might reveal itself, life reveal itself again, only darker. I compare it to walking from a well-lighted room into a dark one. At first you can’t see anything. But if you sit and you pause and you listen, usually there’s enough light to get across the room, you know? It’s not going to be like turning the light back on, but in fact, the world gets this other kind of texture that makes it beautiful. Also makes it scary in the dark. You know, it goes either way.

[music]

Ms. Tippett: Here’s how Matthew Sanford describes this silence in his memoir:

Mr. Sanford: (reading) Imagine walking from a well-lit room into a dark one. Imagine the darkness as a visual expression of silence. My rehabilitation made a mistake with the silence by focusing on the absence of light. It too quickly accepted the loss and taught me to willfully strike out against the darkness. It told me to move faster rather than slower, push harder rather than softer. It guided me to compensate for what I could not see.

Another course of action, however, is patience. Stop moving, wait for the eyes to adjust, allow for stillness and then see what’s possible. Although full-fledged vision does not return, usually there is enough light to find one’s way across the room. After a while, the moon may come out, sounds might gain texture, the world might reveal itself once again, only darker.

A number of people have asked me what they can do about the heartbreaking destruction of life and habitat going on in the Gulf.

Here’s one thing:

http://www.oceanconservancy.org/site/PageServer?pagename=home&cvridirect=true

And then, there’s the day-to-day discipline of buying less new stuff.  Pretty much every new thing you buy burns petroleum one way or another.

I like to think of myself as living pretty simply…I think most of us like to think of ourselves that way. But the fact is, I buy stuff I don’t need. It’s not gloomy, macabre, or Puritan to ask myself to stop and wonder if this whatever will really make me happy. What really makes me happy right now? What do I rejoice in? Probably not so much the new shoes, more taking a walk in the old ones. Think I”ll go do that!

http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/journey/

Here’s a link to a gorgeous thing—an interactive trail designed by Stephen Oppenheimer, which summarizes scads of research showing where humans originated (Eastern Africa) and how, over thousands of years, we spread all over the globe. What a resource!

Instead canvas plimsolls will replace uncomfortable and “environmentally hazardous” leather shoes.

The move by the country’s school boards follows a campaign by Maneka Gandhi, Indira Gandhi’s widowed daughter-in-law, who is now an member of parliament for the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party. She is one of India’s leading animal rights campaigners and a fierce opponent of slaughtering cows, which are revered among Hindus.

India’s Central Board of School Education and the Council for the Indian School Certificate Examination has accepted her proposal.

Black leather shoes were introduced as mandatory items in Indian school uniforms during British colonial rule and have continued unchallenged ever since. Their widespread use has made schoolchildren the country’s largest consumers of leather products, according to the People for Animals (PFA) campaign.

Sixteen schools in Madras have already banned leather footwear in response to their campaign and protesters have since been lobbying schools in Chandigarh, Punjab.

Now central government officials have backed the campaign following a series of letters from Mrs Gandhi.

“This decision was forced on Indians by the British. It is a decision that is not just unhealthy for children but environmentally very dangerous,” she wrote. Leather shoes do not absorb sweat, force children to change their shoes during the day, and cause schoolchildren to have larger carbon footprint, she said. They are also more expensive for parents.

Gerry Arathoon, Secretary of CISCE, has backed the campaign and said the board believes leather shoes ’stink’, gather dust, need regular cleaning with ‘toxic’ polish, and that the tanneries they come from are a source of disease for their workers.

Canvas shoes, by contrast, are easy to clean, comfortable, absorb sweat, kind to cows and without colonial associations.

from the Telegraph, 5 May 2010

This is a slow, pensive rendition I’d never heard before.  It’s worth listening through the whole song, because she makes a beautiful clear statement near the end.

On a night when the news about oil fouling the Gulf keeps coming and coming, when a person has to grieve and grieve again, it helps to hear the song of such a great big soul and be thankful for that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZa3XsHA6UU&feature=related

This is just a treat for you.

http://www.ted.com/talks/natalie_merchant_sings_old_poems_to_life.html?utm_source=newsletter_weekly_2010-04-13&utm_campaign=newsletter_weekly&utm_medium=email

Love this poem.

THE WORLD OF THE SENSES

What a day: I had some trouble
following the plotline; however,
the special effects were incredible.

Now this, the

dreaming breathing body
lying right beside
my own, just think–

at any given instant
it might undergo a change so
enormous that nothing is left of it

but mere object, a thing
to be taken away from me, never
to be seen again, never.

– Franz Wright

from The New Yorker magazine, April 28, 2008

Yesterday evening I spoke about the ways I can see sangha  developing strength, bringing forth its full creativity for the life of us all.   The following two links have been inspiring to me this way, in recent days.

Lauren Reichert, in “Tikkun”, writes about healing in community.

http://www.tikkun.org/article.php/mar2010reichelt

Chaz Buzan dancing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67tbjOC0CjY

I hope you’ll enjoy these, gorgeous in different ways.

Please
my friends,
be kind
for everyone
you meet
is fighting
a hard battle.
(Attributed to Plato)

This quote came to mind again today, on a rough day for interactions; one of those days when I can only seem to get a foot out of my mouth long enough to insert the other one. Perhaps if I chant it  for a while, that will interrupt the insistent miasma of mind long enough to let some air in.

Music really helps at these times, too.

I hope today kindness meets you, and you meet kindness.

This home for writings, for various kinds of messages offered to any who might find some encouragement here, has been made lovely by Mary Jo Meade, whose patience, kindness and eye are so appreciated! As the third or fourth New Year of 2010 is celebrated it seems right to launch again.

And, yes, there’s been a lovely synchronicity. Mary Jo showed to me the picture of the Cedar Waxwing, and I immediately saw it as right.

Yep, the Grandmother connection. My grandmother, Mary Masland, well actually, Gran, came to stay with us for a month or more when I was about 5. She had broken her hip and came with a wheelchair and a nurse, Mrs. Wingate. Gran brought with her a set of cards for learning your birds: picture on one side, name and facts on the other. The one that I liked best was the Cedar Waxwing. Not sure why! It’s not a dramatic bird, and its call is plain, too.

It has quite a wonderful name, though, don’t you think? Cedar Waxwings apparently roam far and wide looking for berries to eat. Berries, of course, can be found somewhere even in dead of winter, even now. So I’ll let you know on these pages where I’ve found berries, and hope thereby to nourish all of us a little.