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Noble Truth

4/21/2020

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Noble Truth
 
Truth visits some days
twirling her hair and
gracious in her half smile,
but flinging wide her cloak
to concede what lives within: 
Suffering--
that dry and rattled leaf,
pale eyes cracked and
blue as aged porcelain,
weeping a pale mist.
 
Maybe you feel her wintry hand
brush the clenched fist of becoming
and sense the easing of a cramping grip.
 
Maybe you waken, then,
in this holy perplexion
where the letting go runs
to both ruin and salvation,
and you find yourself not
marvelous or divine, but
a shade more delicate,
a trifle more worthy,
in your servitude
to Suffering.

    Buddha’s four noble truths are…  the truth of suffering, the cause of suffering (clinging), the end of suffering (relinquishing), and the path to the end of suffering (the noble eightfold path).  Buddha's teachings of non-clinging and suffering have always dogged the central musings of my life, Helen's essay "Suffering" tops my list of favorites (though I'm sure that's true of many here) and a calligraphy of Joan's hangs near my bedside and serves as a reminder on anxious nights: "Demand Nothing; Refuse Nothing - all Opposites are of God." I've always had a feeling that if one can get close to understanding suffering, truth is not far behind.

 Jo Marie Thompson
 February 20, 2020
at Kevala Retreat for Apple Farm
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What Do I Feel?

4/20/2020

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BY Karen Branan
 
     What do I feel? Not any one thing for very long. On waking, wonderment at that dream of the pink baby girl who spoke with wisdom which I do not remember. Wonderment is followed by intrigue as doors inch open to possibilities in that dream. Intrigue is immediately interrupted by affection as Spike bounds upon my bed and nestles into his customary cradle between my blanketed legs – another baby, this one hungry for hugs and tuna.
     Awake now, the Out There seeps in, bringing a frisson of fear. What now? What today? What new White House idiocies? Who stricken? What learned? What closed?
     The pack-rat has also awakened with her worries, her lists, her inventories. What is enough? What is too much? And the mother comes forth as well with her need to nurture. Who needs sanitizer? Apples? Tylenol? A walk? A poem?
    What do I feel? Hope, yes, because the glorious work I have done for so long goes on and is, in some strange and inextricable way, enriched by this crisis, this plague, which while shutting us away from each other shuts us into ourselves and plants seeds for tomorrow, then brings us together through technology to plan and build and know that a new world is aborning at the very moment the old is being destroyed.
    I have no word for this feeling, but know I have been preparing for this time since I was that tiny pink baby of whom I dreamt and know that somewhere deep inside new feelings and wisdom await that will carry me to this coming world, to this entirely new life.
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    ...it is in part by our response to the great stories of the world  that we too can begin to find, each of us this individual story expressing the symbolic meaning behind the facts of our fate and behind the motives that determine the day-to-day choices of our lives.  -Helen Luke, The Inner Story

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