Avalokiteshvara

Invoking the Bodhisattvas' Names
from Chanting from the heart by Thich Nhat Hanh

We invoke your name, Avalokiteshvara.  We aspire to learn your way of listening in order to help relieve the suffering in the world.  You know how to listen in order to understand.  We invoke your name in order to practice listening with all our attention and openheartedness.  We will sit and listen without any prejudice.   We will sit and listen without judging or reacting.  We will sit and listen in order to understand.  We will sit and listen so attentively that we will be able to hear what the other person is saying also what is being left unsaid.  We know that just by listening deeply we already alleviate a great deal of pain and suffering in the other person.

Offering Joy

Dear Mark,
     One of Thich Nhat Hana's reminders is to offer joy to one person in the morning and to help relieve the grief of one person in the afternoon.  Epistolary Ecstasy has given me opportunities to live this more fully.  You encouraged me to share and give myself away with compassion and understanding through letter writing.  Your weekly plans invited the inspirations to think outside the box.  I have written my students, their parents, family members, and many friends and acquaintances. I have noticed smiles, responded to worries and risk taking, and received appreciation for the presence found in a handwritten letter sent by the USPS.  So thank you!  As always, you have enriched my life and I am so grateful for your willingness to give yourself away to me, one of your students.  May this letter writing continue!  

                                                                                Present moment, wonderful moment,
                                                                                Chris

the day after

In first grade we did our Wednesday morning yoga.

We always end that with these sentences:

May we be safe and protected.

May we be surrounded by love and kindness.

May we live with ease.

When we came back to the room we went around our morning meeting circle sharing our thoughts.

We said our sentences again with me asking where that would begin.

One student put her hand on her heart and said that it would begin in our hearts and spread.

I said yes, that we are a caring community, taking care of each other….

Just like the bees we have been studying.

They made up be phrases like, we can bee caring….

I smiled knowing

our children will lead the way to compassion and peace.

from my grandfather

Enough of this!

On the local channel after the presidential debate, an expert from a local university gave his analysis of the debate.  He said that Donald Trump needed to explain his “locker room” talk and Hillary just needed to smile.  That analysis was crazy talk.  The night before the debate a woman was sexually assaulted in the residence hall where my daughter lives on her college campus.  More “boys will be boys” while women are expected to smile?   Enough of this.  #notokay

Old Cedar Tree

Old cedar tree
twisted branches reaching to the sun
bark hairy
leaves prickly
shelter
some branches broken by
the heavy snows of the past
others able to withstand
even though pushed to the ground
by the weight.

Am I like this tree?
old and some parts
beginning to twist
a bit disheveled at times
parts prickly
but also providing shelter
sometimes pushed to the ground
by the weight of burdens,
but then rising up when they melt away.

The tree just has to be a tree,
I only have to be me.

Persimmon

you held the girls' swing on your strong green arm
back and forth we sang the Robert Louis Stevenson poem
How do you like to go up in a swing
and now that branch is gone

I sit under you remembering
my great warning to the girls
if you hear a snap or a crack ...... run

half of the bark is missing from your base
you leaf out each spring
holding onto life

when you decide to fall
you will take out the swing set
I am too tired to move that

I love finding patterns in your leaves
out my bedroom window on summer mornings
and watching your bare branches
dance in the wind on winter days

you have become my dear friend

From Thich Nhat Hanh

Posted on September 3, 2016 by Chris Wallach

“When you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you
don’t blame the lettuce. You look for reasons it is not
doing well. It may need fertilizer, or more water, or
less sun. You never blame the lettuce. Yet if we have
problems with our friends or family, we blame the other
person. But if we know how to take care of them, they will
grow well, like the lettuce. Blaming has no positive
effect at all, nor does trying to persuade using reason
and argument. That is my experience. No blame, no
reasoning, no argument, just understanding. If you
understand, and you show that you understand, you can
love, and the situation will change”
― Thich Nhat Hanh

Scorched Earth

I have been reading Scorched Earth by Fred A. Wilcox. It is about Agent Orange in Vietnam. My father suffered from exposure to Agent Orange.

The Vietnam War was not the first time that young men were sent off to kill and die for what their government and their fellow citizens considered a noble cause. Nor was it the first time that young men who’d been sent to war by flag-waving crowds returned home to find that they were expected to marry, find a job, start a family, and get on with their lives. Men and women who have experienced combat would like to do these things, but they carry scars, memories, and terrors, that will haunt them for the rest of their lives. Vietnam veterans did not want to believe that their government would expose them to chemicals that, years later, would devastate their immune systems, making them susceptible to a host of diseases like kidney failure, heart disease, diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, brain tumors, and various kinds of cancer. They did not want to believe that corporations that profited from manufacturing and selling deadly chemicals would chose to deny their products’ toxicity, and that these corporations would refuse to offer to help veterans of what, at the time, was our nation’s longest, second most expensive, and most divisive conflict since the Civil War.

Rape

a story

It was the Fourth of July and I had to take care of a few things so I could go on a big trip to California.  First on the list was to retrieve two wire cages I had used to protect the peach trees from deer.  This year the deer had knocked the cages over, stolen the peaches, and almost destroyed the trees.

As I turned the truck around and backed into the yard, a saw another problem to solve.  A possum had crawled into the compost bin to feed on my kitchen scraps and now he was stuck.  He was hanging down, suspended, some part of his body caught in between the two panels of the bin.  He looked up at me as I got out of the truck.  “Great!  Now I have to try to save you.”

I walked over to take a look and thought he had his foot caught.  I went in the house for a pair of gloves – just in case, texted my cousins asking for help, and then gathered tools.  I thought that I might be able to pop the bin apart and free him. After several attempts with varying sizes of pry bars, I discovered that I couldn’t pull it apart, and that his weight on the bin was a problem.

I went into the shed for boards and a container the height of his stuck appendage. I pushed the container as close to him as I could and then used a board to ease him up, sliding the container closer until he was resting on top.  I then saw what was caught.  It was not his foot, but instead his testicles.  At this point he was baring his teeth and drooling.  I talked calmly letting him know I meant him no harm.  I then went back to trying to pry the bin apart, but I just wasn’t strong enough. 

He was resting on boards and a container that allowed him to lay down rather than hang.  I decided I needed to walk away for a bit to think about what I could do.  I went to do another job.

Thoughts about the situation would not go away. He looked to me like he would soon be laying down to die. Without freedom, he would die slowly and sadly.   I didn’t want him to suffer and I wondered what I needed to do.  The flies were already starting to swarm around him.  Should I put him out of his misery?  I couldn’t imagine how I would do that.  Maybe I could perform an amputation.  But how would I stop the bleeding? 

My thoughts were interrupted by a phone call.  My cousins were there.  By the time, I got back to the house, the possum was free.  Bill had put on gloves and held the critter up, patting him, and talking softly to calm him.  Jeanne put muscle behind a crowbar and Bill lifted him out.  He carried him into the woods and set him on the ground.  The possum was dazed, but in a minute sauntered off into the woods.

When I got home, I used tape to cover all the cracks in the bin so no one else would get stuck.  The dharma for me in this was thinking about what part of the experience was the coiled rope and not the snake!  All in a day’s work on the farm.   

When You See Water by Alice Walker

When You See Water

By Alice Walker

When you see water in a stream

you say: oh, this is stream

water;

When you see water in the river

you say: oh, this is water

of the river;

When you see ocean

Water

you say:  This is the ocean’s

water!

But actually water is always

only itself

and does not belong

to any of these containers

though it creates them.

And so it is with you.

From The World Will Follow Joy

          Turning Madness Into Flowers

Writing Everywhere

I write everywhere.  It is impossible for me to read a book without having a conversation with the author and myself in the margins. Pencil is always at hand!  This page is from Alice Walker, over-coming speechlessness, page 17, Sangha.

Today I learned that Alice
also cried for the world
in a ritual,
a ceremony of healing
to show
that we are connected
to those we love,
the beautiful flowers,
grass,
stones,
"because whatever has happened to humanity, whatever is currently happening to humanity, it is happening to all of us."

Rejuvenation Through Creation

A day's work.
Finding my joy through creation.
The patterns within the indigo
are like the clouds in the sky.
So many unexpected treasures.