I just happened to realize another one of my clues of love: Where you see your individual fears and regrets being scattered away by your shared hopes and happiness, there you can find love.
I think that’s a good pointer to all kinds of love, especially friends or even among strangers with whom we resonate.
Just wanted to take a moment to share. 
I saved a quote from an article last week that I thought spoke very well to how important it is to always keep the mind questioning and open to new answers. So much shifts around us, so many new things are revealed each day that previously were hidden, that if we can’t maintain a habit of keeping our eyes open to them we’ll wind up blind. We’ll only see a world that once was visible to us, and project it onto what’s really in front of us, seeing our illusions rather than reality.
That’s a super hard habit to keep though. Maybe the answer is to every week (or day or month?) pick one thing we’ve assumed and try to find as many different ways to look at it as possible and see if we change our assumptions. Like when I challenged my assumption that I hated mushrooms (done wrong, I still do, otherwise I LOVE them).
We should find a way that works for us, though. It’ll take practice. It’ll take trial and error. But I think we’ll hit on something that works for us. Because Marty’s right.
[I]t’s dangerous to always think with exclamation points instead of question marks. Your stance on any particular issue is far less important than whether your worldview is a product of inquiry or incuriosity, whether you feel more comfortable questioning the crowd or blindly marching with it. No ideology has a monopoly on reality.
- Marty Beckerman
I love Jonathan Winters. I first saw him as a kid on Mork & Mindy (and loved him both as Mindy’s uncle and then later as their alien kid) and then off and on through other things I happened to catch him in. I haven’t seen him often, but he always seemed to carry both a genial warmth and a fierce sense of presence, not an easy trick to pull off.
Anyway, I ran across this quote from him, and it sounds very much like something he’d say. It’s this kind of comfortable optimism that would sustain a character like his.
Nothing is impossible. Some things are just less likely than others.
- Jonathan Winters
I’ve been all kinds of munchy this week, so today’s thoughts are two (funny to me) pages from my calendar that came almost back-to-back a week or so ago:
Enlightenment is: do what
you want
eat what there is.- Jack Kerouac
Someone asked Master Yun-men, “What is the most urgent phrase?”
The Master said, “Eat!”- Yun-men’s One Word Zen
I went to Wikipedia to look up the spelling of Reiki, which it calls “a spiritual practice developed in 1922 by Mikao Usui”. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a tradition that says there is an intelligent force of energy that exist throughout the universe and within us, and that with training, you can use your hands to direct this force to help injuries and illnesses heal.
While I was there I skimmed down a little to see anything said by the founder, and found a translation of something I really kinda like. I especially like the “Just for today”, because it lets the rebellious little misery-mite be content with the idea that you’re not permanently shushing it, so it’ll maybe sit this one out so you can focus on creating a brighter day.
Here’s the quote –
The secret method of inviting good fortune.
The marvelous medicine for all sickness
Just for today:
Do not be angry
Do not worry
Be grateful
Work with integrity
Be kind to others and to yourself.
Every morning and every night, sit in the Gassho position [hands held palm-to-palm] and speak these words out loud in your heart.
For the evolution of body and soul, Usui Reiki Ryoho- Mikao Usui, the founder
I’m going to retell a Zen story that I came across again on today’s calendar page. To me, it conveys how much easier it is to bear a situation if you don’t feel totally stuck and recognize that there is a way out (however unpleasant). It also gets me thinking about letting go, and how it’s so much easier to work with life if you keep your mind and hands open.
Here’s how it goes…
A husband and wife felt lost in an endless swamp of financial and social troubles. They could see no possible options to solve their debts nor their shame, and had decided that the only way out was a double suicide. They were just working out the best and fastest way to exit together, when there was a knock on their door.
An old friend had stopped by for a surprise visit from many miles away in the country. The couple welcomed their friend, and all three of them talked through the night about old times, about everyone back home with their triumphs and troubles, and all the things old friends catch up on. Right before leaving the next morning, the friend said how wonderful it was to see them and promised to visit again as soon as possible.
As the door closed, the wife turned to her husband and said, “You know, last night gave me a lot of time to think. It occurred to me that we can survive this, so long as we live with our minds utterly ready to die at a moment’s notice, should it come to that.” The husband replied, “I was just going to say that exact same thing!”
I truly believe good humor is a really huge component of success. It helps us take ourselves and situations more lightly, which frees our energy from getting all hung up. If we can laugh, we can release some of the tension and work with what’s left — and maybe even be a little more in the mood to handle it. In all the research I’ve read into theories on the nature and origins of humor, a release of tension has been the most common thread.
It’s because of this that humor doesn’t just help us weather adversity; it helps us learn and prepare. When we find something funny or entertaining, our minds open up to it in a way that we otherwise might not have. Our guard relaxes, making us more ready to accept that new or different thing.
I think there’s something else to it, too. I think we often find something to be funny cause it’s true, or because it exposes an untruth. That’s a vague generalization, but I think there’s something to it.
Anyway, that’s all what I thought of with regards to today’s quote:
When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth.
- George Bernard Shaw
I’ve got some words from Cary Tennis that I just ran into again, from his advice column on Sunday. Someone was asking about whether it was better to stay in a relationship that wasn’t really feeding her personal happiness, but his response is, as usual, very much broader than just the question asked.
I think it’s a great reminder to keep in touch with what, deep down, we truly want and need. And to acknowledge them and work with them without condemnation. It’s not selfish to be happy and cared for. It’s our job, because the world needs us at our best, and nobody else can do for us what we need to do for ourselves.
I think it is legitimate to act according to your deepest and truest necessities, because your deepest and truest necessities do not spring from you and are not controlled by you; they spring from where you exist in the world; they come to you as instructions from the world and are thus not selfish and narrow as you might fear; they are broad and universal and thus poetic and heroic.
They are bigger than any narrowly conceived right-or-wrong principle.
- Cary Tennis, Since You Asked 10/25/09
How to do that, you may ask? Well since I’m actually putting this up onto the blog a good while after I first shared it, I’m going to continue the quote with a really great paragraph:
This framework I suggest says: Trust in the community of things beyond you; be in harmony with your deepest self, because that is the bigger way of truth; it is the bigger way; it may seem full of tragedy and apparent misstep, of apparent moral failing; it may bring down upon your head the judgment of others, of family and loved ones and later your own offspring; it may make you seem to be a person of questionable judgment; it may cause you to be an outcast. But if it is true to your destiny in this deep sense — which can only be discovered by relentless self-inquiry and relentless allowing-in of the necessary, by allowing the earth to move you toward the place you belong, by trusting that it’s not just about you and your decision but about where the world requires you to be — then I think in the end there is some justice in whatever decision you might make.
According to Wikipedia, Matsuo Basho was the most famous poet of the Edo period in Japan. That’s pretty impressive, since the Edo period is listed as going from 1603 to 1868, whereas Basho was only around from 1644 to 1694. He was a famous haiku poet and teacher at the time, but preferred to wander the countryside for inspiration rather than languish in high society.
I think it’s because of his preference for going out and experiencing life that makes him so vibrant and accessible… and funny. He’s another one of my favorite examples of a “stodgy and staid” topic like “respectable poetry” having room for rascals. So in honor of Basho and a very wild week, I want to share a translation of one of his poems (I don’t know who translated it):
Eaten alive by
lice and fleas — now the horse
beside my pillow pees- Basho
I’m back from being ill at the beginning of the week, and swamped yesterday! Getting my head back together, I caught up with my calendar and came across the quote from yesterday that I’m gonna share:
I don’t like work — no man does — but I like what is in work — the chance to find yourself.
- Joseph Conrad
