Many Buddhist traditions share a specific practice for opening the eyes, opening the eyes of the heart. If you follow the path of enlightenment that Gautama Buddha walked, one who wishes to be free of entangling thoughts and desires — desire for the next and better car, the other better house, a different and better …
There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams hurry too rapidly down to the sea, and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion, turning to waterfalls under our very eyes. — For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains aren't waterfalls yet, in …
A certain slant of light or the softness of the breeze tells you; the brightness of the birdsong tells you it is morning. Most of the world is waking now, refreshed, while the night shift yawns and paws its way to bed. The light turns green. The light turns red. The morning traffic pauses. As …
If you are familiar with the Tarot — not the arcane, mystifying deck of cards employed by lesser guides, but the cards whose images represent archetypal moments and movements in life — you will recognize its patterns and elements in places and phases of your own life. They were, after all, the result of many …
In an introduction to his poem "Technology", my son, during his eighth-grade graduation speech, wondered aloud if our technical advances were the hallmark of a New Age, or in fact its death-knell. His words rang with youthful and categorical vigor which is harder to come by in middle age, and so strident that they are …
Balance must be struck between mind-numbing labor and lack of information, and mind-numbing frivolity with so much information it becomes meaningless.
There are some writings to which you are close enough, in historical moment and the nuance of language, that each word falls like a spark on your skin, an electric current to the wire of your life. Others are foreign even in translation, even after the attempt to make them current or accessible to a …
Tonight I was sitting in a pile of wood shavings, they fell like heavy flakes of snow as I carved away layers of beech, until I was adrift. A seated Buddha is concealed within what was originally a modest 6″ block of roughcut. The Buddha’s always within… I know that… you just need the patience …
The cobbles of the roadway wind from the heights down to the Saint Lawrence, through the old Centre Ville, where the money of past generations found their comforts, and the history of a nation come and gone remains on the tongue, in the food, in the grey and red blocks of granite in the walls. …
What we repeat becomes our center, that's sure. So when the wind is kicking up spray — when the movement of the air is really howling round you — we return to what we have repeated, what has become our rote. If it is made of wood, you will likely float; if it is a …
Was the phrase "to harp on" really coined by Shakespeare — Still harping on, my daughter? — or did he conveniently lift it from earlier works, freshen it up, add a dash of dash, and re-release it to a marveling public? Perhaps every artist should work this way. A rather recent invention of the overweaned ego, the …
Invisible, the wind came off the high mountain peaks, cold and crisp as water from the glacier, and poured down the divide and over the foothills in torrents, mingling as it went with the desert air east of the range, stirring up dust devils and clouds, raising the earth from the earth and carrying it …