Tag Archives: Buddha

Apr9

on not waiting

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I did not write a post yesterday.  I did not have an inspiration for a post.  I tried waiting, fingers on the keyboard, mind searching, digging, not finding.  I decided not to wait.

I feel like when I am waiting, I am focused too hard on wanting, and when I am focused on wanting, I am also focused on what I do not have. An idea or enough of anything – money, chocolate, fun.

When I start thinking about lack, then it is time for a change.

One of the strategies in my eBook, Breaking into Blossom, is change, inspired by Pauline Oliveros’s Poem of Change.  The point is to change anything, your position, your location, your mind, your body.  Dramatically, imperceptibly.

A few weeks ago, I listened to an Abraham workshop with Esther Hicks, and she said, “Make the fun that you are having unrelated to anything else.”  What that meant was to not make the fun you are having dependent on how much money you have, how great your blog post is, how your health is, how your kids are doing or anything else.

For the past three years, we have been trying, but not really trying, to sell our house.  We love our house, and don’t particularly want to move.  But we also feel it is time to have less to take care of, or rather, to be taking more care of what has become most important to us – our creative endeavors and each other.

So I need to stop waiting there too.  Stop waiting for a buyer, for a resolution to that uncertainty.  Because here is the thing:  if I am waiting, I am not really here, not breathing this breath, not dancing the dance of this moment, savoring what is here.

Not waiting is one of those changes that requires vigilance, noticing – so that I can tell if I have slid back into some subtle, cramped form of waiting.

What are you waiting for?

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Feb15

the wait

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Guinevere and Jules are waiting for us to finish tea and make their breakfast.  They are moderately patient.  They are confident that breakfast will arrive.

I am waiting for inspiration.  I am impatient.  I am not confident that inspiration will come. For the past couple days I have been feeling a lull, like a surfer out on a flat sea, no wave in sight.

But I am keeping in mind something that Stephen Nachmanovitch said:  Attempts to conquer inertia are by definition, futile.  Start instead from the inertia as a focal point, develop it into a meditation, an exaggerated stillness.  Let heat and momentum arise as a natural reverberation from the stillness.

I know that in dance, stillness is the canvas on which the movement appears.  With my writing have lost some sense of stillness being the place to begin.  I am filling the moment with too much effort, too many gestures, too little breath.  There is also this:

To the mind that is still
the whole universe surrenders.
                                       Buddha

Aug30

The Skin Horse

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I love the way that this Buddha is becoming a part of everything.  Lichens nesting on his shoulders, in his hair, grasses tickling his back, the weight of him settling into the bricks, little bits of detritus and moss and a heart stone from Lucy Vincent Beach in his lap.  It reminds me of the story of the Skin Horse from The Velveteen Rabbit.

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but really loves you, then you become Real.”

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real, you don’t mind being hurt.”

“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out, and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real, you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

I feel like becoming real requires Buddha sitting – becoming a part of everything.  Less doing, more being.  Letting the body listen through pores, cells, breath.