Flowers Spell L-O-V-E

 

For my birthday, my sweetie brought home a beautiful bouquet of flowers. Such a delight to have fresh flowers on the kitchen table.

F-L-O-W-E-R-S spell love. So does T-A-K-I-N-G  M-E  O-U-T  T-O  D-I-N-N-E-R.

Love comes in many disguises. Some are sweet and feel good, like a hug. Some disguises are hard to swallow, such as tough love. And some disguises feel so entirely ordinary that you take them for granted--the air you breathe, the chair you are sitting on, the body that makes you think you are a self or have a self.

This self thinks she's a year older. A year older than what? 

The self is born anew every second.

Potato Harvest

 

Today i dug up 5 gallons of potatoes. I wonder how many pounds that is? One thing i know: It's heavy.

Now for the cleaning and sorting. After washing, i want them to dry out and for their skins to "heal." I know from past experience that sending them straight to the 55-degree basement will cause them to mold. So the potatoes need to dry out for a few days, yet not be exposed to the sun lest they get sunburn--their skins turn green. 

So i put each batch in a flat, cover it with a dish towel, and store it under the dining room table for a few days. We are not expecting company for dinner any time soon, so no one will know.

Digging potatoes is like searching for buried treasure. The Buddha's teachings are a treasure that will feed us for the rest of our lives.

Meanwhile, i have enough potatoes to last me several months.

Azaleas Mirrored

The azalea bouquet in our hotel lobby sits on a mirrored table. I'm tempted to simply gaze at the beautiful reflection.

We often focus on the reflection rather than noticing the mirror, the screen of awareness behind/around the object that grabs our attention.

Awareness is all around us. It's invisible and difficult to notice. Yet awareness is alive. Awareness says Yes to everything.

Applause is Short-Lived

My sweetie played a piano concert yesterday afternoon at the Brattleboro Music Center. The program was easy classical--Debussy, Ravel, Moussorgsky, and well, Rachmaninoff too. The tenor sang short songs in English by Vaughn Williams, Aaron Copland, and Randall Thompson.

When the short concert ended, while the audience was applauding, the tenor's wife and i presented the tenor and the pianist with flowers. Lucky for me, the pianist's flowers are now sitting on my kitchen table.

Flowers for the performers teaches us a great lesson about praise: It doesn't last long. Applause only lasts for a minute or so. The flowers, a bit longer.

During the performance, every musical piece was applauded, and the audience enjoyed the performers as well as the music. Then, an hour later, it was all over. This performance, which my sweetie has been rehearsing and committing to memory for the last 9 months--Done. Gone.

Praise is short-lived. Now back to our regular scheduled program of daily life.