Letting go of letting go . . .
In the mailbox on a rainy Thor's Day in Okieland . . .
This universe is much too big to hold onto, but it is the perfect size for letting go. – Sharon Salzberg
Today is the birthday of The 14th Dalai Lama [Tenzin Gyatso]. The Tibetan religious leader, and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize was born today in 1935 Taktser, Amdo, northeastern Tibet.
And, it’s the 116th anniversary of Frida Kahlo's birth. The internationally recognized Mexican painter was born on this day in 1907 near Mexico City in her parent's home, known as The Blue House.
In a tradition renowned for paradox, the biggest paradox of Zen is this: Zen teachers have nothing to teach. That’s because the dharma is already yours—it is your own faceless face, unborn and indestructible, and only you can discover it. There is no magic mirror any teacher can hand over to make you see it. . .No one can teach you Zen, but you need a teacher to understand that. - - Daniel Diffin
You deserve to love what you do every single day. And the best way to begin such a day is by letting go of yesterday. And the moment immediately before this one.
I'm not sure where I heard this one, perhaps in The Tao of Pooh – anyway: So it is said, one morning early, Tigger bounced into Pooh's house waking him up asking “What's the first thing you think of when you wake up, Pooh? I always think “What a wonderful day.”” According to accounts, Pooh, rubbing his eyes, said “What's for breakfast?”
That that does not last
It's Odin's day,
The 4th has come and gone
the town's dogs and cats
have come out from their
hiding behind the sofas
with no more care
than do we about
the American Dream.
Check out the red-white-and-blue posed by Heather Cox Richardson.
Monday, July 3, was the hottest day ever recorded globally, according to data from the U.S. National Centers for Environmental Prediction. . . The southern U.S. has been suffering under an intense heat dome in recent weeks. In China, an enduring heatwave continued, with temperatures above 95F. North Africa has seen temperatures near 122F. And even Antarctica, currently in its winter, registered anomalously high temperatures. Ukraine’s Vernadsky Research Base in the white continent’s Argentine Islands recently broke its July temperature record with 47.6F. Friederike Otto, climate scientist with the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at Britain’s Imperial College London, not prone to hyperbole, marked the news saying “This is not a milestone we should be celebrating, it’s a death sentence for people and ecosystems.” Reuters item posted by HuffPost.
I try to focus on today rather than brood about the future. Love that well which won't last long. – Garrison Keillor
The self-evident truth . . .
. . . of one particularly curious myth . . .
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator, with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
This lofty egalitarian ideal is the plot line of our national mythology. . .Of course, we know this national folklore has been so often a fairytale. . .The tug of war between the common good and individual rights, often narrowly reserved for white, straight men and systematically denied to others, has been our messy national story. . .We live within what Buddha called Indra’s Net, an interconnected web that at every intersection holds a droplet of water that reflects every other droplet. . . In the end, there is both an irony and a beauty to the communal embrace of interdependence — a realization that our individual freedoms and the collective good are actually one and the same. And perhaps our framers, despite their personal hypocrisies, were wise enough to comprehend this. – Jeff Krasno Jeff's essay “Interdependence Day” is a worthy of an entire read.
America, the whole world, is a contradiction. All seems fragmented, while the separations are illusory in fact. Our solidarity is not a choice, it’s a reality. Philosphers and mystics as far back as Siddhartha and contemporary physicists beginning with Einstein and extending to Neil de Grasse Tyson assert the fact that we’re all connected to each other, to the earth biologically, chemically, and to the rest of the universe atomically. All beings are created equally. That fact compells us to see the other, the human being next to us, or in a Mongolian village, or in a refugee camp in the Ukrain or Russia, as a person with value equal to our own. Our lives are no more valuable and worthy, of no greater or lesser significance, than those of any other human being. No more or less deserving. Our rights are not more important than those of any “other.”
The system says that change can’t come, that gravity wins, that religion is of no use except to placate the people, that you’d better put your trust in growth mutual funds. But there are other Ways. The strength of our illusory tribe is no less dependent than on the creative freedom of the individuals who comprise it. What might that freedom look like? Holly Wren Spauding offers an answer with an individual declaration of freedom:
The freedom to see differently. To be more human.
To question widely held beliefs. To wonder at length.
To create new customs.
To hurry less and less. To take a minute. To lose track of time.
To trust my authority. To resist in small and large ways, every single day.
To fail. To begin again. To flourish without witnesses.
To make it up. To insist. To keep going.
To trust there is another way, to find it or create it.
“The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.”