"He who experiences the unity of life sees his own Self in all beings, and all beings in his own Self, and looks on everything with an impartial eye."
~The Buddha
~The Buddha
Friday, September 30, 2011
Early Morning Buddhist Inspiration - 9/30/2011
"He who experiences the unity of life sees his own Self in all beings, and all beings in his own Self, and looks on everything with an impartial eye."
~The Buddha
~The Buddha
JOB WELL DONE
The work on the garden is finished. Well, this one project anyway. The work on a garden is never finished. Some pictures of the results on the deck:
And down below:
And the person responsible...
Shelly believes that all human beings need to be in touch with the land. She sees her work with plants as healing. "It's therapy," she says. I'm working on a bird of paradise plant whose roots and stems have become so impacted that it can no longer breathe. "Therapy for whom?" I ask: "For me or the plant?"
Obviously, it's for both. I'm pretty proud of my work on the miniature roses, too...
Next, the Buddha garden needs attention. Better be careful, or I'll get hooked!
Thursday, September 29, 2011
SHOWER
Up ahead this coming Sunday we have the much-anticipated baby shower for our daughter. With more than forty people due to descend upon us for the afternoon, the preparations have begun. There are both advantages and disadvantages being married to a perfectionist. I admire Ellie's insistence that everything be just right, but I'll confess it also drives me a little crazy. One of the great features of our Los Angeles home is the big deck right outside the living area, overlooking the lower garden and with a view of the Hollywood Hills and the city of Hollywood itself. It has been six years since we worked on the potted plants that grace this area, and the time had clearly come--especially with the shower approaching--to freshen it up. Many of the plants have become compacted in their pots, some have seen their best days, some have simply grown fatigued or died. They get a great deal of sunlight, sometimes very hot, so it's hardly surprising that some have done a losing battle with the elements. Bottom line: they needed expert care and attention.
Enter Shelley and Ken of World Wide Exotics (this one, from their website...
... perhaps a shade too exotic for our deck! Looks like a dinosaur to me)--and their quietly industrious assistant Marcos...
They have their own nursery out in Sylmar, and came armed with big bags of soil to replenish the dirt, and new plants to replace some of the old. They have been working on the project for a good part of the day and--because they got lost on their way here and arrived considerably later than planned--they'll need to come back tomorrow to complete the job. Meantime, some process pictures:
This corner, I think, is done...
It looks like we'll have a beautiful--well, still more beautiful--deck for Sunday. It's always a pleasure to watch experts go to work, and these guys certainly qualify. There is a passionate quality, too, that is delightful and infectious. We ended up the day much pleased with what is shaping up.
Early Morning Buddhist Inspiration - 9/29/2011
"Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without."
~The Buddha
~The Buddha
Early Morning Buddhist Inspiration - 9/29/2011
"Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without."
~The Buddha
~The Buddha
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
New Clothes, same old Buddha
Nothing new to post.
Peace, Leaf
ONLY CONNECT
It has become a commonplace, these days, to observe how dependent we have all become on our "connectivity." What a word! It throws us--I should speak for myself: it throws me--into a near panic, at least a conniption, when my computer fails to connect me with the Internet. It happens frequently on our travels. Most recently it happened first in London, of all places, and then again in New York City. You'd think, wouldn't you, that whatever magic makes the digital connection is simply in the air in those great cities, instantly available when you open up your laptop. But no. There are always the unexpected hindrances. It requires patience--more, I confess, than I have--to make the necessary intricate adjustments, to find the new codes and passwords, to hit exactly the right combination that unlocks the door.
These thoughts were prompted on our return home by the box that awaited me from AT&T: a new modem and a new device (name?) that broadcasts the signal through the house, operating not only the online access for the computers but also the television reception and recording system. We had been increasingly plagued, before we left, by intermittent lapses in the service, especially in Ellie's upstairs office, and I had asked our trust assistant Emily to get AT&T on the case during our absence. The box in the garage was the result of her efforts. A do-it-yourself solution to our problems.
Well, I tried. To say that my skills in electronic assembly would be an understatement, but this looked simple enough. Until I reached the instruction that told me to connect the gray cable. Where the gray cable was supposed to be, there were three green cables. I was flummoxed. I awaited Emily's arrival yesterday afternoon. She is, of course, being much younger and much smarter in these matters, a good deal more competent than I. She looked at the instruction sheet, carefully mapped out with explicit visual aids for dummies, and she too had to admit defeat. We called the company.
Hand it to At&T, their tech guy arrived promptly the next morning. I did not feel quite so stupid as I watched him work under my desk for a good couple of hours before testing out the system. Everything worked. And worked better than before. Faster. With no interruptions. I remarked upon his genius, but he was modest: you soon get to understand how these things work, he explained. It takes a couple of weeks...
So here I sit, thinking about connection, and how dependent I have become upon it. I was writing just a couple of days ago about my (relatively benign) addictions. This is another one. Was a day when a letter would take four or five days to make the journey between writer and recipient through the post; even longer, or course, if you go back a century or two. Now I notice my impatience if the email fails to load in more than a few seconds. The joy of opening a letter from a loved one has been replaced by the chore of working through fifty advertisements and other spam before reaching a few lines of personal communication in the form of hastily-written, mis-spelled, ungrammatical shorthand blitzes of verbiage. Words are rarely used as the medium I have always loved, but as the conveyers of instant messages, quickly eyed and just as quickly trashed with the delete button.
It's foolish, though, to wax nostalgic. I shall have grown old, indeed, when I can no longer adapt to the changes in the culture in which I live and work. For the present, where would I be, as a writer, without the miracle of the Internet and the opportunity it offers to communicate with my fellow human beings throughout the world? It has brought with it a privilege I would be ungracious not to recognize. But then I think of those moments on our recent journey when I actually met, face to face, with people with whom I can communicate normally only with the aid of the computer, via email, or Skype, or this blog I write.
I'm thinking not only of family and old friends. That was indeed a treat, to spend time with my sister, my son and his family, the friends I have mentioned in along the way in my recent entries. I'm thinking also of those fellow bloggers--Fiona and Kaspa of A River of Stones and Writing Our Way Home; and Jean of Tasting Rhubarb--met in person for the first time, after following them online. I'm thinking of meeting for the first time with the Blankfort family, Ellie's relatives in New York, contacted only courtesy of the Internet. I'm thinking of the kind orthodontist who helped us through the maze of the subway in Manhattan, and with whom we are now in touch thanks to the same digital marvel. These are connections that would have been scarcely imaginable before.
The best, warmest, and most intimate human connection is through the senses: touch, sight, hearing... These things cannot be replaced. There is a richness and a depth to it that can simply not be replicated in electronic form. Written words--unless in the form of poetry, perhaps, or a song--cannot express love with the same intensity as a single glance, a touch of the fingers, a whisper. The fulness of human relationship can only be truly experienced in person. Failing which, however, I'm grateful to have the proxy of online contact. To be able to "reach out and touch"--even if only digitally--is a treasure not to be ignored.
Early Morning Buddhist Inspiration - 9/28/2011
"The mind is the source of happiness and unhappiness."
~The Buddha
~The Buddha
Early Morning Buddhist Inspiration - 9/28/2011
"The mind is the source of happiness and unhappiness."
~The Buddha
~The Buddha
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Early Morning Buddhist Inspiration - 9/27/2011
"As the fletcher whittles and makes straight his arrows, so the master directs his straying thoughts."
~The Buddha
~The Buddha
Early Morning Buddhist Inspiration - 9/27/2011
"As the fletcher whittles and makes straight his arrows, so the master directs his straying thoughts."
~The Buddha
~The Buddha
Monday, September 26, 2011
BUSINESS
For the last leg of our trip, we had used accumulated miles to buy business class tickets. It makes a huge difference--not only in the leg room, but also in the food, the entertainment options, the quality of service from check-in to baggage claim. I dread to think how much it would have cost had we actually sprung for the privilege in cash, but the miles were sitting there and needed to be used.
Awakening this morning in the familiar environment of our own house, our own bed, (and our own dog, George, on the bed with us!) I found myself thinking about how much air travel has to teach us about dukkha--that suffering referred to in the Buddha's First Noble Truth. To be sitting in a marginally comfortable seat for five tedious hours, 35,000 miles above the earth, traveling at 500 miles per hour, with two hundred other suffering human beings--some of them, to our rear, suffering very much more than business selves!--has to be at least one of life's less than comfortable experiences.
This realization gave me the opportunity to reflect upon some of the strategies I use to distract myself from discomfort, namely, in this case: food and drink, entertainment, and of course crossword puzzles. I use these not only when traveling by air. I use them at home, too. For the month before leaving on this particular trip, I had taken the trouble to be circumspect about the food and drink; I had been watchful of my tendency to over-indulge in food, for comfort's sake rather than actual need; and I had mostly avoided the wine that I love so much--and a glass or two of which usually prove an excellent palliative. Traveling for these couple of weeks, I had rapidly fallen back into old habits, to preserve that admittedly artificial level of comfort in the stress of travel. My addiction to the screen with flickering images and stories remained for the most part unfed; and crosswords were few and hard to find.
My addictions are harmless enough, I suppose. I have no wish to beat myself up about them too severely. The point is, though, that I do use them as palliatives. They do not cure the pain of dukkha--the suffering we all share as human beings--but they disguise it. So it serves me to recognize and acknowledge how they function. The release from suffering that the Buddha holds out as a possibility will not happen so long as the distractions, no matter how harmless, remain comfortingly hidden from view. "Here endeth," as I recall my father saying the altar, after reading the appropriate passage from the Book of Common Prayer, "the lesson for the day."
NEW YORK: LAST DAY
(Posted Monday, after our return.)
We started out our last day in New York City in our very pleasant breakfast room, overlooking 23rd Street....
Having contacted a long-lost cousin several weeks ago, Ellie had arranged to meet him and his family for lunch, and he had suggested a drive out along the Hudson River to their country home. He was at our hotel promptly at noon, and we headed north along Riverside Drive and out across the George Washington Bridge in cloudy, somewhat muggy weather, passing through the busy small town of Piermont and up into the hills. Here's a glimpse of the river from the car along the way--no time for the grand view!
Cousin Gary kept us busy along the way with family history: he and Ellie, it seemed, had never actually met, but Gary had known Ellie's father and her uncle, and the two of them shared common memories of numerous other family members and friends.
Up in the hills, we arrived in the driveway of a lovely country house, shaded by trees and surrounded by koi ponds and a terraced garden with a chicken coop. Here we were greeted by Gary's wife, Debbie, and soon by their sons Adam and Jase, and Jase's lovely family--his wife Caroline and their two children, the very bright eight-year old, Emma and the six-month old Jack. A great family, all lively, all creative. Jase's band, Glint, managed by his brother, has been touring internationally and is now producing a (third?) CD. We sat for a while in the living room, enjoying the tidbits Debbie had prepared. Then took the ritual family pictures...
... and left in a caravan of two cars for lunch at Baumgart's, in neighboring Englewood, New Jersey--a traditional, family friendly diner that now serves, among other things, an excellent Chinese menu.We had intended to return to the city in time to stop at the Guggenheim Museum, but were so engaged with the family that the time slipped past without our noticing. Gary and Debbie drove us back into town, and we took advantage of the few minutes to spare before our dinner date to put our feet up and catch our breath. Then, at six, we walked across town to Tenth Avenue to meet our Laguna Beach friend Huw at the Cookshop. Great to see him again, and to catch up with his fascinating international business life. Huw is a fellow Buddhist practitioner and a member, now mostly in absence, of our little sangha in Laguna. An excellent dinner made from fresh, local foods, a bottle of fine, crisp Alsatian pinot blanc, and good conversation.
We indulged one final time in a common dish of ice cream, swearing to get back to our good habits on our return home; then took a walk with Huw along the Highline...
with wonderful, intimate rear window views into the apartment buildings along the way, and more distant city prospects. A great way to see New York at night...
and a wonderful way to conclude our visit here. Tomorrow, a car to the airport and the flight back to Los Angeles...
Early Morning Buddhist Inspiration - 9/26/2011
"To enjoy good health, to bring true happiness to one's family, to bring peace to all, one must first discipline and control one's own mind. If a man can control his mind he can find the way to Enlightenment, and all wisdom and virtue will naturally come to him."
~The Buddha
~The Buddha
Early Morning Buddhist Inspiration - 9/26/2011
"To enjoy good health, to bring true happiness to one's family, to bring peace to all, one must first discipline and control one's own mind. If a man can control his mind he can find the way to Enlightenment, and all wisdom and virtue will naturally come to him."
~The Buddha
~The Buddha
Sunday, September 25, 2011
Early Morning Buddhist Inspiration - 9/25/2011
"Whatever words we utter should be chosen with care for people will hear them and be influenced by them for good or ill."
~The Buddha
~The Buddha
Early Morning Buddhist Inspiration - 9/25/2011
"Whatever words we utter should be chosen with care for people will hear them and be influenced by them for good or ill."
~The Buddha
~The Buddha
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