"Learn how to meditate on paper"

"Learn how to meditate on paper. Drawing and writing are forms of meditation.

Learn how to contemplate works of art.

Learn how to pray in the streets or in the country.

Know how to meditate not only when you have a book in your hand

But when you are waiting for a bus or riding in the train..."

-- Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, 1962

Mindfulness at Home

We like Karen Maezen Miller's "10 Tips for a Mindful Home" in this March issue of Shambhala Sun...

Wake with the sun
There is no purer light than what we see when we open our eyes first thing in the morning.

Sit
Mindfulness without meditation is just a word.

Make your bed
The state of your bed is the state of your head. Enfold your day in dignity.

Empty the hampers
Do the laundry without resentment or commentary and have an intimate encounter with the very fabric of life.

Wash your bowl
Rinse away self-importance and clean up your own mess. If you leave it undone, it will get sticky.

Set a timer
If you're distracted by the weight of what's undone, set a kitchen timer and, like a monk in a monastery, devote yourself wholeheartedly to the task at hand before the bell rings.

Rake the leaves
Rake, weed, or sweep. You'll never finish for good, but you'll learn the point of pointlessness.

Eat when hungry
Align your inexhaustible desires with the one true appetite. 

Let the darkness come
Set a curfew on the internet and TV and discover the natural balance between daylight and darkness, work and rest.

Sleep when tired
Nothing more to it.

—Karen Maezen Miller 

From the March 2010 issue of the Shambhala Sun.

Photo of Bet Giyorgis Church, Lalibela, by Mark Tuschman. 

Meeting the Divine—January 23 gathering

We lived in a Tibetan Buddhist meditation hall for two days—all alone, it seemed.

The thangkas were beautiful

…as was the solitude—and they have stayed with us in important ways.

A singing bowl still awakens us.

But nothing came all the way to life

…until you were here,

…and we sat together with a common, obscure intention,

…and the whole room hummed like a singing bowl itself.

Shree and Sushil and Pradeep and Promud hung the thangkas and set the singing bowls

…not like a shop, but like a temple.

And with her voice and singing bowls, Sharon created sacred space—within us and among us

And Emily explained—with passion and precision—Room to Read’s resolve to help.

Now all but one thangka and one singing bowl have gone.

But the sacred space is still here.

Saturday night was never about fundraising per se. But let’s do the math and see what else happened then.

With the purchase of thangkas and singing bowls and notecards and Red Egg prayer beads, we created $583 to contribute to Room to Read. We rounded that number to a neater $625

…because via one of those synchronicities the universe loves to give, we realized this morning that the Financial Times had selected Room to Read as a “Charity Partner,” which means that until January 27 (whew!), corporate sponsors will match all donations. In the blink of an on-line button, we’ve just raised $1250. We’ve dedicated that amount to Room to Read’s “Girls’ Education Program in Nepal.”

Yes, by some abstract abacus or another, we could consider this a modest sum.

But do the math. What this really means is that we’ve provided for the educational needs of five Nepalese girls for a full year.

You have paid their tuition.

You have bought their books.

You have given them uniforms

…and backpacks

…and writing supplies

…and provided their transportation. If they live far away from school, you have given them a bicycle.

You have given them female mentoring…and life skill classes and a wealth of other activities that will support them.

So when you are meditating upon Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion,

…or writing your friend a notecard,

…or wearing your prayer beads and running your fingers along them prayerfully, or absentmindedly,

…or when you are striking the singing bowl that opens your heart chakra

let it be a meditation bell

…reminding us that we are more connected than we imagine.

A few months ago, we were at the school in Nala that Shree and his brothers attended—a school with which Room to Read partners.

Even so, I don’t always remember well enough.

But let this art,

…these photographs,

…these dear faces—and our time together—help to remind us.

Note

Below is a link to Room to Read’s “Girls’ Education Program.” Here you can learn more particulars about the program’s approach and whom you are supporting.

http://www.roomtoread.org/Page.aspx?pid=284

Alchemy and Coffee

I confess I’m glad the holidays have passed.

Perhaps you are, too – and for all the expected reasons.

 

 This doesn’t mean the days aren’t important – quite the contrary, perhaps.

But our busyness and expectations can obscure the natural rhythms in which we also live.

Some of us have been living within lunar cycles as much as we can now,

…punctuated by the birthdays of dear friends

…like Emily Marley Morales -- whose grandfather is home for the occasion from Red Rhino Orphanage in Kenya.

This photo was taken just yesterday.

 And we commemorate the passing of loved ones, too—like our dear friend Jeannine Benson

…because we need quieter remembrance

…and ritual

…whether we call it that or not.

“The rivers and mountains are Steve’s church,” Sharon Spiller says about her husband.

“Don’t get me started,” he answers when we ask him about fly-fishing in the Sierra or about the flies he fashions at a small table at home—near where Sharon keeps singing bowls and amulets.

And when you hear Steve describing being on a Sierra lake at dawn, you’re hard pressed to avoid using words like reverence and contemplation and solitude yourself.

“I think of it as alchemy,” Sharon says.

In this case, she’s speaking about a singing bowl in her hand, still amazed at how something like rose quartz can transform itself into such a sound.

 

You can hear Sharon yourself—this coming Saturday night at our second Red Egg gathering—when she chants with singing bowls to lead our meditation.

Not so long ago we wandered into the Blue Bottle Café in San Francisco.

 

And then we wandered into it again the next day,

…and the day after that,

…and then another day just for the helluvait

…and to guarantee that we had become habitués.

 And it really is alchemical, and consciously so -- from the bowls and piping

…and measured application of heat

…that becomes light

…that becomes the drip-drip-drip of this siphoning

…that becomes a cup that looks like this

…or this.

We don’t do commercials, but we like good theatre wherever we can find it.

And then, of course, the coffee spirits you away

…back to Reykjavik

…and Autun

…and Krakow where we were exactly a year ago today

…and to Ethiopia where one friend

…and then another takes you into her home

…because all around the world, coffee can be a ceremony, just as tea can be.

And then there is café life, where even in your own city you can be traveling again –talking with a perfect stranger about a book you haven’t heard about, but which now you’re going to read.

Or you can be as happily rapt in your own anonymity as a pilgrim on a dusty road.

All of this can sound trivial, even shameful, in a world where – as I type -- people are still digging with bare hands through rubble in Port-au-Prince trying to reach the cries of loved ones and strangers.

We have to be vigilant against our own estrangement.

We live within two rounds – the smaller rituals we create and the vast human and even cosmic cycles that go pinwheeling around us. Sometimes the vast ones seem so far beyond our comprehension that we avert our gaze in confusion.

But perhaps this is the test of ceremony. Does it leave us absent in the soap bubble of our own dream – as beautiful and childlike as that might be,

…or does it awaken and vitalize -- and in the end, connect us – with others, with the earth, with all the wider cycles that sustain us and in which we have our being.