a ritual to read to each other - by William Stafford
A Ritual To Read To Each Other
If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke. And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact. And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider--
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark. For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give--yes or no, or maybe--
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
the necessity of the historical sense to those practicing "traditional" medicine | Tradition and the Individual Talent. T.S. Eliot. 1921.
Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, “tradition” should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity.
Eliot writes about poetry, but I think his commentary has broad applicability and being immersed in the world of Chinese medicine, I am receiving his words deeply. I think it highlights the need to critically evaluate what we are receiving, or else the past suffers, and the tradition's continued survival and vitality is diminished. We demonstrate our respect for our ancestors by how much we try to understand them in their unique contexts.
Hari-kuyo: Festival of Broken Needles « Stitchtress Stumbles
In the Hari-Kuyo ceremony, Japanese women gather once a year on Febuary 8th at Shinto shrines or Buddhist temples to thank their worn out needles and pins for good service.
It is also a time to value the small, everyday objects of daily living and to wish for progress in one’s needle work. In what is known as the Festival of Broken Needles, women gather to offer a funeral-type service by laying the needles to rest in soft jelly cakes or tofu. This burial is meant to bring rest to the needles and wrap them with tenderness and gratitude. This practice reflects the animist belief that all beings and objects have a soul.
i want a howling hurt...
"Not Here"There’s courage involved if you wantto become truth. There is a broken-
open place in a lover. Where are
those qualities of bravery and sharp
compassion in this group? What’s the
use of old and frozen thought? I want
a howling hurt. This is not a treasury
where gold is stored; this is for copper.
We alchemists look for talent that
can heat up and change. Lukewarm
won’t do. Halfhearted holding back,
well-enough getting by? Not here.
From Soul of Rumi
by Coleman Barks
not just clouds and lotuses. | Willoughby Britton at the @BuddhistGeeks Conference, on the Problem with Meditation
Britton asked Jack Kornfield, a well-known Buddhist teacher, how often severe episodes of mental instability -- psychosis, mania, etc., to a degree requiring hospitalization -- arose during his retreats at Spirit Rock Meditation Center. Kornfield replied that he saw about one bad case every two years. But he also says he saw two to four cases a year of less severe experiences, debilitating enough to lead to a "clinical impairment" -- for example, being unable to work for a month or more.
The most severe outcome, suicide, was not common, but it had happened once or twice in Kornfield's 30 years of teaching.
