Teaching – Portugal, 4 avril 2009 : Waking Up in Portugal
Midday talks by Amy Tu es cela Hollowell Sensei from a week of sitting in Góis and a final conference in Porto, each one a piece/peace of mind.
avril 2009
Eve of retreat, early spring
It's the eve of departure for seven days of retreat in Portugal. What is there to say? The day was brilliant with sun. Had lunch with a 91-year-old friend, who is leaving Paris in a few days after many years of living here. I'll miss her, thinking I may never see her again. Or maybe [...]
mars 2009
Fritz, may he go in peace
The partner of a longtime sangha friend died today in Amsterdam after a year of illness with cancer. A ceremony for him tonight joins all of us, each individual participant, as one. We chant, bow, burn incense, realizing here and now together what is "beyond" words and understanding. This is where we are not different [...]
Closer and closer
This morning I cleaned the bathroom. The mirror had become smudged. I also fed the cat. In a letter written to a friend in the 1930s, Samuel Beckett expressed dismay that a poem he had written was facultatif, or optional. I am struck by the resonance this has for me, how I feel exactly that [...]
Nothing special
The Métro is packed with returning. The babies and small children seem particularly weary and agitated. Everyone, though, looks like they want and need something. I wonder what that might be. I wonder where they have all been, where they are all going. And me? I like this verse from Layman Pang: ''What I do [...]
Whatever is best
Go to work early this morning, and deal with the daily news, meeting each task as it comes to me. Hours later, return home to care for my sick child, do laundry, answer mail, cook food. Am quite disappointed not to be able to attend a reading by the marvelous French poet Yves Bonnefoy tonight. [...]
Simplicity is dazzling
I put aside the newspaper and its endless accounts of economic failure and accusations of fraud and deception, of war and oppression, of hunger and despair, kidnapping, trafficking, loss and gain, plans to save and plans to punish, refusals and denials, rejection and division, glory and infamy, victory and defeat, getting and spending, falling and [...]
Racing the sky
It's a brilliant afternoon, spring oozing in every direction as the cat pursues a fat fly buzzing around and around the room. When the insect stops, the cat stops. She waits. The fly crawls along the wall, then zips away, with the cat in fast pursuit. When the fly dips, the cat leaps, nearly catching [...]
One breath
In the morning paper, a headline on an article about the tenor Plácido Domingo: Singing every day as if it were the last Every day IS the last, every song the last and best. Domingo said he would end his fabulous career by simply one evening after a performance saying, That's it! And so it [...]
Always something and nothing
All these days without words now end. Having been sick, there were other things to do. Of course, there is always someone who is sick and always someone who is not. There is always something to do and always nothing to do. And from a friend comes a link to this brief encounter with Robert [...]