I was reading Tenpa over at Digital Tibetan Buddhist Altar. A few days earlier he made a call to action over an important Buddhist monument, a stupa in Albuquerque, New Mexico, that the National Parks Service was about to demolish.
I was happy to discover that along with Digital Tibetan Buddhist Altar, other folks in the “Buddhosphere,” (not my invention!) managed to get the Parks Service to back off and the stupa was saved!
I followed the links in Tenpa’s post and discovered several other Buddhist blogs with links that led me on and on.
I paused at the above linked The Reformed Buddhist and through its blogroll came to Dangerous Harvests, whose round-up of interesting posts in the Buddhosphere led me, finally, to Ox Herding.
Not a long post, talks about a sentiment we all have known about since childhood, that the little things can mean a lot. Giving flowers to someone, a smile, that kind of thing.
In the Buddhist context this post was suggesting folks don’t need to be monks on a mountaintop to make the world better.
But what struck me, and what struck the blogger at Dangerous Harvests, were these two paragraphs:
I’ve seen in my own life how hard it is to stay present to the requirements of the moment. It takes more than attentiveness to the shifting phenomena of feelings, impulses, thoughts and perceptions.
It takes a genuine commitment to love this world, no matter how it appears. It requires us to set aside our self-centered stories, to expose ourselves to the real.
“No matter how it appears.” Just as we would love a parent, a mate, a child, even if they were sick or even insane, we would still love them. No matter how they appeared.
Our mission, if we choose to accept it …
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… buddhists laugh, too!
no matter how it appears. I do not like what people have done to it here and now. Buddists may have a sense of humor but it seems pretty lame and tame in the present illusion were collectively experiencing and it’s present appearance. I think that god’s got a sick sense of humor. don’t want to start any blasphemous rumors…
Which I take to mean a benevolent and good world system and not the Darth Vader Evil corporate empire we have now.
A good reminder to love Mom Earth and all beings. No matter how much things piss us off.
the google surfing I mean. lol. Here’s an interesting one, following your crumbs… here.
Sadly, Im up to my eyeballs with working on DH’s CD design stuff. Challenging but fun in an annoying way. I am so impatient.
Perhaps yet another metaphor for me… I can “see” it in my mind’s eye, but Im fairly clueless as to how to make the best use of the tools I have on hand, to execute.
This is very hard to do. We think our stories are ourselves. They are not and truly facing things as they are can show you that fact. Still, we need narratives to live in context so we shouldn’t minimize them. In the Zen tradition there is this notion that our lives are real/unreal. Really that are unreal if we look clearly but at the same time consensus reality is something we must focus on or we lose the thread of the more universal truth. It appears to be a paradox but it’s only a way of putting things in their proper perspective and ordering the world. As long as we are grounded and know that the truest part of our experience is that which experiences and that, from a scientific point of view, it is the only true thing we know. Then, we can weave are way through the bizarre bazaar that is life on this planet at the moment.
this? heh.