KateThoughts

Very cool little stories..not so simple...

"My father he always say that the oil is already inside the student, already there from all time. The teacher only has a match and makes it light, and then the student isn’t a student anymore, just a friend, going the same way down the dark road but seeing now by himself.”

 “You have to believe your own oil is there, though, or nobody can lights it.”

 

"The point of it was: Don’t make your own life in reaction to others. So maybe the whole trick of the spiritual search was “To thine own self be true.” Maybe the real work was just scraping off layer upon layer of conditioning, assumption, and imitation, and finding, somewhere in the depths, your actual face. Maybe that’s what Rinpoche meant by “you understand you’re not you.”

 

"he kept telling me how brave I’d been to go first, how he might have gone only on the child’s slide if I hadn’t been there, how he might not have gone down a second time after seeing how fast we went on the first. And so on. He had conquered, in a small way, his supposed fear of “high.” But I suspected then, and I suspect to this day, that it was all a trick. By the second run on the faster slide I realized that the proper technique involved a complete letting go, an abandoning of oneself to the fates, the skill of the waterslide engineers, and the conscientiousness of the county inspectors. A mindless, illogical trust. Was there no spirchal lesson there?"

 

 

all ― from "Lunch with Buddha"  by Roland Merullo

 

I'm on Breakfast with Buddha, now, and will follow that with Dinner with...

 

All fiction of the 'spirchal' sort, my kind of reading material.

And I'm using Insight Timer now, some, too...   but, as with other pet-jobs, I tend to veg on TV and too much food when I'm in someone else's house..

 

Merullo writes with wonderful skill and uses language in ways that delight me. That's a large part of the attraction in these little books.

I don't claim to be Christian, as he is, but he doesn't make those tenets the point of his stories. 

TED Talks: David Holt & Mountain Music

Wait until you see/hear the mouth bow...and stay tuned until the very end to see Thunderwear! Video is about 25 minutes and worth it all.  ENJOY! He's got a dobro, too, Bill.

"Let It Be" The Beatles

A Clear Voice amidst the cacophony:

"One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times. The light of the soul throws sparks, can send up flares, builds signal fires, causes proper matters to catch fire."

an excerpt from the essay,
We Were Made for These Times
by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PhD.

Read the full essay here: http://www.criswilliamson.com/about/news/we_were_made.html

no comment from me is necessary.

National Anthem - My Favorite Version

And here's a link to a precious group of young girls doing a pretty wonderful version of their own:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKCVS57j284 The "embed' feature was disabled or I'd load it here, too. Enjoy!

Books Mentioned in Previous Posts

Ishmael by Daniel Quinn mentioned here.
The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C. Clarke mentioned here.  (currently OOP)
The 5th Sacred Thing by Starhawk mentioned here.
Any book by Pema Chodron mentioned here.