The Tracks of Mother Nature

The melting snow shows the footsteps of Mother Nature. The bounding tracks of squirrels melted first, looking like giant footprints through the snow.

Animals are looking for food, water, and shelter, so their tracks usually tell one of those stories. These melted squirrel tracks come from the apple tree in our yard straight to our deck, where the bird feeder is.

If we could see our own invisible tracks, they would show us going from one craving, one desire to another. Refrigerator. Music. Computer. Where did i put my phone? TV. Toilet. Bed. Refrigerator.

If we could see the tracks of our minds, oh, what a merry chase they would lead us! Hopping from one mental desire to another. It can be very instructive to simply write down our stream of consciousness for a few minutes.

Rest your body. Rest your mind. Come home to the here and now.

Heliconia

One of the aspects about being in the tropics that i love (besides sun, warmth, beach, and swimming in the ocean) is the tropical flora.

I test myself, trying to remember names of commonly seen landscape plants. Here at our yoga-villa is a heliconia. Yay! I remembered its name. (Pleasant.)

I love knowing the names of plants. Most of the Latin names (some derived from Greek) are descriptive of some aspect of the plant. Heliconia comes directly from the Greek word helikonios.

I also enjoy the Sanskrit or Pali names that are used in English. Although English has a gazillion words for the material world, the vocabulary for the inner world turns out to be quite limited.

In English, we have the word consciousness. In Buddhism, consciousness is delineated much more precisely: eye-consciousness, ear-consciousness, touch-consciousness, taste-consciousness, smell-consciousness, and mental-consciousness. Come to think of it, when we are conscious, we are conscious of something. Hmmm. Maybe the Pali language is on to something here.

Karma and Dharma have already migrated into English. The next words to migrate will be metta (loving-kindness) and dukkha (unsatisfactoriness, stress, suffering).

Today i am visually conscious of the heliconia and mentally conscious of how much i love knowing its name.

The In-Between

Icicles hang from tree branches. Freezing rain means the ground is glazed with ice. Temperatures hover right around freezing. Drip, drip, drip. This is the in-between time--sometimes rain, sometimes ice. Sometimes liquid; sometimes solid. Rain changing to ice; ice changing to rain.

The in-between time seems like a time of magic. In between night and day, the roseate dawn lights the darkness. In between the day and night, shadows lengthen and dimness prevails.

In between awake and asleep, liminal consciousness leads to unconsciousness.

In the ancient Egyptian calendar, these days before the new year were "extra" days--in between the years.

In-between is not a time of waiting, but of watching. Watching / feeling every moment change into the next.

Mirages

Driving across southwest Texas, we kept seeing mirages of water on the road in front of us. A mirage is a peculiar trick. It looks like water across the road, but as you drive closer, it disappears.

The Buddha says

Form* is like a glob of foam; 
feeling, a bubble; 
perception, a mirage; 
mental fabrications, a banana tree**; consciousness, a magic trick.

However you observe them, 
appropriately examine them, 
they're empty, 
void 
to whoever sees them appropriately.

Our self is a mirage. Like a rainbow, it seems to exist, but then it doesn't.

* the body
**a banana tree has no heartwood, no core

Intoxicating Flowers

Those poppies that we sowed on the last snow in March are blooming now. Papaver somniflorium--the flowers of sleep--otherwise known as opium poppy.

I pick a bouquet every day, or several, and give away as many as i can. Yesterday i took a bouquet to the receptionist at the jail where i volunteer to teach meditation on Thursday mornings. Most of the women i meet are in jail for possession of heroin. Or perhaps we should say possession by heroin.

Intoxicants, of any kind, alter our consciousness and take possession of us for a few hours. Meditation offers the possibility of altering our consciousness more deeply and more permanently than wine or heroin. If you spent your wine money and wine time on a meditation retreat, how much would that add up to? And the effects would be more long-lasting.

We take intoxicants to relieve our stress and pain. Now. We are aching now, even in the midst of our wonderful lives. Notice that. Wake up, and take the stress reliever that offers you an actual remedy.