Filippino Lippi  1457-1504 

(metalpoint, with white gouache) (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

 

Open Road Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue

 

April 15, 2023

 

Dear Mindful Meditators

 

Our Meditation & Mindfulness Dialogue began on September 15, 2020. Recipients include people inside and outside prison walls. It is currently mailed to 10 men in prison and emailed to about 60 people who aren’t—including 9 men who were in prison in September of 2020 who are now out of prison! Hallelujah!

 

We are going to have our first get-together on Saturday, May 13th, from 2 to 4 p.m., at Taborspace in Portland: 5441 SE Belmont.

 

This will be an opportunity for people to get to know each other, and to have a dialogue about our life journey—what it means, what we love, what we do to nurture peace, happiness, goodness and understanding in our own life and in the lives of others.

 

I hope you can come! Bring a friend, if you like.

 

My friend Rocky Hutchinson, who is a member of our meditation & mindfulness community, called me the other day, and was excited to tell me about an author he had just discovered—Kahlil Gibran! Back in the day, The Prophet was an essential book in every hippie’s library. Rocky’s enthusiasm inspired me to re-read it (after 50 years). This quote from The Prophet relates to our upcoming gathering:

 

Your friend is your needs answered.

He is your field which you sow with love and reap with thanksgiving….

And let your best be for your friend.

If he must know the ebb of your tide, let him know its flood also.

For what is your friend that you should seek him with hours to kill?

Seek him always with hours to live.

For it is his to fill your need, but not your emptiness.

And in the sweetness of friendship let there be laughing, and sharing of pleasures.

For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.

 

—Kahlil Gibran

 

peace & love, y’all

Johnny

*

 

            Dreaming in Detail

 

The casting director for my dreaming

I can understand—bringing in my parents

from gone, grown children as infants again,

and a parade of strangers, each with a bit part

fraught with obscure purpose. The location scout 

found familiar places, made them mythic, then

added an abundance of tunnels, caves, cities 

in ruin, and a foggy coast. My costume director

surrenders to seasonal change—blues in spring

yielding to summer gray, and autumn black. But 

why is the director of photography so obsessed 

with effects of light both atmospheric and exact? 

In one scene we see fine hairs on my father’s arm 

glitter in low sun, then a heap of medieval coins,

then that lost button shining on a stone.

 

—Kim Stafford

*

 

A Fish Describes Water

 

There are prayers best said

only at night, in depths, water steps

rubies in the mouth.

 

Wind ripples across moon grass

longing to be released by washed

stones. The rowboat

 

is empty. What remains

is a song, a solitary gold-winged

warbler, the pattern of rain.

 

—Elizabeth Domike

*

 

What do you do to nurture  peace, love and happiness in your life?

 

Recently I had a chance to sit in on a phone call with Johnny and Rocky Hutchinson. Rocky is one of our inmates in the dialogue group, and he is one of the dearest human beings I’ve ever known. He has been in prison for a long time, and has had quite a—well—rocky experience.

 

I asked him how he was doing, and what he was doing, and he told me he had just finished the Master Gardener program, and he was also training dogs for use with people with disabilities. He loves it, both the gardening and the dogs. 

 

I said, “Rocky, you couldn’t have picked two more valuable activities for the soul than gardens and dogs!” And I realized that that is just how I feel: Gardens and dogs fill my heart and soul like nothing else.

 

You all might have heard that digging in dirt, the smell of dirt, of the soil, stimulates endorphins in the brain, the happiness endorphins. True!  Of course, I don’t head to the garden thinking, uh oh, I think I need some of them endorphins about now! No, it’s just an instinct, a drive, that takes me there. And planting carrots, chard, beans; digging watery moats around the tomato plants (the smell of those tomato leaves!); cutting bouquets of coral colored peonies and lavender irises (the smell of irises!); picking green beans with glints of sunlight beaming through the vines—all of this settles in me and brings focus, joy, and  quiet peace to my soul. Gardens, yes!!!

 

And dogs! Lolo! My love! Some friends took care of Lolo while we were gone and when I asked how she’d been, they said, “She had us with one look into her soulful eyes.” So true. She looks into your heart and understands when you’re sad, she rejoices when you’re happy, and every emotion is acknowledged with a loving and energetic lick on the face. Ick! you might say. Not at all—it’s the lick of love. Don’t you remember that Dusty Springfield song, “The Lick of Love..(is in your eyes…?”)  Oh wait—maybe it was “The Look of Love.” Whatever. 

 

Anyway, she’s a soft and fuzzy and uncharacteristically sweet-smelling dog! What more can you ask for?

 

SO: gardens and dogs. Rocky, you’re so right. But I must add that it’s you, Rocky, you and all the other men in our dialogue and theater group who bring peace, love and sheer happiness into my life, and I am forever grateful.

 

Addendum: But how could I have forgotten hiking??? Mt. Hood and Mt. Adams, my two sentinels. How could I have omitted family, and dear friends? Music!!!  Riding my bike! Art! Books and reading!!! 

 

What a topic!

 

—Jude Russell

*

 

To nurture peace, love and happiness I simply do nothing.  

 

Each morning I take my coffee out on the porch and watch the daybreak.  I say my little peace prayer.  Then I do Nothing.  I don’t analyze or plan or meditate or cogitate.  I find myself surrounded by the sky.  Maybe the moon is out, or the sun comes up.  It’s a moment of peace and harmony, and I did nothing to get here.  I merely stopped distracting myself.  

 

I can’t spend the whole day sitting here.  There’s still clutter in my life or my mind or my house that needs some tending to.  But when the morning starts out this peacefully the rest of the day usually follows suit.  Our natural state is peace and love, unless we sully it up.  How can this not nurture some happiness?  

 

Thanks, and love,  

 

—Bill Faricy

*

 

In the chalice of the heart,

 Lies love’s sweet essence:

Born of the seed of truth;

 Watered by the tears of devotion;

Warmed by the sun of faith,

 Through the fruit of days,

On the vine of humankind–

  One and another,

All One Together…

 

—sam muller 14 April ’23

*

 

Michel is currenlty using a book by Pema Chödrön as the inspiration for his meditation journal. (I’m not sure which one, but it appears to be inspired by Chögyam Trungpa’s Training the Mind.)

 

March 9, 2023  #14  Seeing Confusion as the Four Kayas is Unsurpassable Shunyata Protection

 

Through meditation practice you begin to realize:

1. Thoughts just pop up out of nowhere—dharmakaya
2. Thoughts are never ceasing—sambhogakaya
3. They appear but are not solid—sambhogakaya
4. All together: no birth, no cessation, no dwelling—svabhavikakaya

This understanding gives unsurpassable protection of

realizing called shunyata—“complete openness.”

Nothing solid to react to.

You’ve made much ado about nothing!

 

I can relate to this one. The fancy names mean little, but the effort of meditation practice for complete openness is valuable—learning to not react to mental formations. Thoughts of mind are like mists or fog; the warm light of reality will dissipate all obstacles to reveal reality as it is. I’ve driven in misty, snowy, fog late at night and my vision played tricks on me, so I had to drive extra cautiously. During a clear day, the same road was easy to see and navigate. Mind plays the same tricks on me with reality; I need to slow down and pay careful attention—nothing changed except perception. Or did it? Surprises appear faster through foggy delusions. I can’t see them coming. Definitely: foggy, misty, delusions require proceeding cautiously until clearer.

 

March 13, 2023  #17  Practice the Four Strengths, the Condensed Heart Instrucions

 

1. Strong determination to train in opening heart and mind
2. Familiarization with practices helping you do this
3. Positive seed within, experienced as yearning to practice and wake up
4. Reproach, tricky for Western students, realizing ego-clinging causes suffering, delight in self-reflection, honesty, seeing where you get stuck
5. Aspiration to help alleviate suffering in this world, expressing that intention to yourself

 

I value each of these principles and judge they can be of benefit to any religious practice. I find, and imagine it is similar for many, that working with ego issues can be the most challenging of all, since our culture is all about cultivating a powerful ego. My experience reveals Western egoism is the central source of all our sufferings. It’s from here that we develop attractions (grasping) and aversions (pushing away), and this ego makes us blind to our faults and challenges which, once corrected, would release—at least diminish—suffering. Yet, we focus on and build up ego, wondering at our suffering. The “escape” is to practice breathing.

 

—Michel Deforge