What's Next?

 Nancy's down with a change-of-season cold, headache, sore throat, stuffed head, some achiness, etc. Got some herbs from Ani (nun) Yeshi Wangmo,  the Tibetan medicine doc (Emgee-la), boiled them down with the help of Lama Lee's 2 burner propane stove in his apartment here (he's recovering himself from a few days of being sick), and she's staying in bed to rest and stay warm. Yesterday was the most miserable weather day so far, heavy rains, cloudy and cold all day and night, the first foreshadowing of the damp cold days to come, and we'll be here for much of it in November if things shape up the way they typically do. Yuk. My absolutely least  favorite weather conditions, and I expect my ageing body to let me know in various ways about its specific unhappiness in this regard.

Ani Yeshe Wangmo, Emgee-la

Sudden weather change

me a tender seed, exposed

Be safe, take cover

BUT........Lama Lee, fully understanding all of this at age 82, gave us an electric heater, which he in turn had gotten from Nyima, the Stupa Guest House owner (Nyima gave Lee two heaters, and Lee gave me one of these). Now what we need is an adapter so that the enormous plug on the heater wire will fit into the smaller outlets in the wall. Nyima's working on this. This would be the first time that we've had a heater here during this time of year, and it'll be a game changer, for me anyway. Oh Boy!!!

My haiku same same

Give me more trust, shake loose fear

Strong winds open doors

We're wondering about the changes in our lives that we're both experiencing. Questions of meaning and purpose again arising in these later years. We're both feeling similarly that the days of "just hanging out", whether in Thailand or now in India, are over, and this opens wide the door to the next unknown dimension. These last few years, of traveling and just being, in astounding places, have been a great blessing. It seems clear now though that there's something new afoot, although we have no very clear or good idea of what that might be.

Listen to this space

deep explore into silence

Sounds of one's own mind

Well, we have had one idea come up: a joint "project" that Nancy and I  might undertake together. What that might mean exactly is anyone's guess at this point. I've thought of the possibility of somehow helping ourselves and others address that great looming reality of levels upon levels of grief that confront us all, both all the time, and also in these times uniquely as regards climate collapse for example. Not an original idea, but maybe something we could be useful at together.

Now, with the latest horrors in Israel/Palestine (nothing new under the sun), it may be all too easy, as usual, to react reflexively with opinions and beliefs and dogmas and righteousness of one kind or another. None of this is of much use, as usual, or of much interest to me. What does interest me are the deeper, simpler, truths underlying all of that: inescapable inter-connection, pain, grief, fear, the necessity for love, compassion, empathy...... and actual wisdom. 

There may be nothing much any of us can do, as usual, though we like to believe otherwise so as not to feel utterly out of control, about the perennial machinations of the power hungry, the "leaders" who lust after control and wealth and domination, those who, even if they began with admirable intentions, have since become, misguidedly, addicted to the enslaving intoxication of power and have lost their way along the way. In any case I'm too old to think otherwise about myself, and I'm not shy to think so about most of us in most times.

We grow up thinking

certain truths self evident, 

deluded by hope

Which leaves me, which leaves some of us, to take a more realistic view of things, and to be painfully/joyfully comfortable focusing on the changes that I/we can do something about, within ourselves. Another un-original idea of course, and one that I'm happy to claim as mine also, occupying, as I do now, Elderhood. We sometimes like to bray about honoring our elders, seeking their stories and their wisdom for our own.........mere entertainment, more often than anything I'm afraid, rather than for true edification and guidance. What if we actually paid attention to what the world's "elders", ie. wisdom teachers have been saying for millennia, and shaped and simplified our actual lives accordingly?

"Love and suffering touch the same in all of us – no mother suffers or loves, or suffers love differently from any other. But we choose what to do when they meet. We are writing a new ethic at that intersection, no longer an ethic of tribes, an ethic of mothers and human beings." Rabbi Zach Fredman

Rabbi Zach

Tender beauty breathes

in the midst of destruction,

hard truths; paradox