A Mindful Life

On the black cushion
a stone sinking and floating
into the dark light.

Accept indeterminacy as a principle, and you see your life in a new light, as a series of seemingly unrelated jewel-like stories within a dazzling setting of change and transformation. Recognize that you don’t know where you stand, and you will begin to watch where you put your feet. That’s when the path appears.

-John Cage

A short, brilliant day. Night draws around me, tucks me in. Ready for a long winter’s nap. No thinking. No mind. Just body, bed, and blanket.

About the spiritual training of young, my view is a bit of the same. How you behave in your home is their spiritual upbringing. I think we have to be careful with all forms of ideological indoctrination, and that is what spiritual training is in children: the imposition of a set of abstract beliefs and ideals. Children will take these from of us, but I don’t think dogma serves anyone for long. After all, I was a very good Sunday School student, the star of my confirmation class, and yet I had my own spiritual crisis to resolve later in life. We all do.

I always remind myself that I’m not trying to raise a Buddhist child. I’m trying to raise a Buddhist mother, and it’s taking all my time! Not only my family, but also everyone everywhere will be served by my devoted discipline in my own training. Not because I’m self-important, but in recognition of the one true reality: no self. We are all interdependent, which means we are all one.

-Karen Maezen Miller

No Ordinary Life

Drink some coffee
light a candle
Rain patters
light a candle
Cat purrs
light a candle
A child’s party
light a candle
Eat cake
light a candle
Buy groceries
light a candle
Fold laundry
light a candle
Clean the bathroom
light a candle
Pay bills
light a candle
Read books
light a candle
Sing carols
light a candle
Cuddle and tickle
light a candle
Wrap presents
light a candle
Color and draw
light a candle
Bake cookies
light a candle
Cook dinner
light a candle
Wash dishes
light a candle
Bathe the child
light a candle
Rock and cuddle
light a candle
Sing lullabyes
light a candle

light a candle
light a candle
light a candle
light a candle
light a candle
light a candle
light a candle

light a candle

I protect my child as much as possible. Therefore, I have chosen not to tell her about yesterday’s tragedy. At age five, she simply does not need to know. What happened is incomprehensible to me, an adult; she would only personalize the information and worry for her own safety. I cannot make the world safe, but I limit media exposure at home. If she hears about it elsewhere and asks, I will answer her questions as simply as possible keeping in mind her age and ability to understand.

Eventually she will lose her innocence, but I won’t hurry it along.

My heart aches for the children and families on whom this horror was thrust, and I pray for their solace.

Wherever you can, let children have their innocence.

There are two ways of spreading light; to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.

- Edith Wharton

Something else to remember:

“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’ To this day, especially in times of disaster, I remember my mother’s words, and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers–so many caring people in this world.”

-Fred Rogers

November’s Art Every Day projects were a way to play and engage with a part of myself I hadn’t in a few years. So I want to keep momentum, and I’m playing along with Illustration Friday.

“Observe your own body. It breathes. You breathe when you are asleep, when you are no longer conscious of your own ideas of self-identity. Who, then, is breathing? The collection of information that you mistakenly think is you is not the protagonist in this drama called the breath. In fact, you are not breathing; breath is naturally happening to you. You can purposely end your own life, but you cannot purposely keep your own life going. The expression, ‘my life’ is actually an oxymoron, a result of ignorance and mistaken assumption. You don’t possess life; life expresses itself through you. Your body is a flower that life let bloom, a phenomenon created by life.”

-Ilchi Lee

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.”

-David Foster Wallace

Like some winter animal the moon licks
the salt of your hand,
Yet still your hair foams violet as a lilac tree
From which a small wood-owl calls.

-Johannes Bobrowski

This is the end of Art Every Day Month 2012. I really enjoyed it, and I’m proud of my work. Thank you for sharing it with me.