@suzianne saidSadness enriches the soul; we are not complete without it. A bit of wisdom from my grandmother (a Nebraska farm girl): "Wash your eggs before you put them in the basket." The basket is your mind, the eggs are experience, and the dirt clinging to the eggs is the pain associated with the gaining of experience; learn the lessons, but get past the pain of how you learned them.
Someone once said that we cannot know the highest highs without also experiencing the lowest lows. Years before the events in my post, I was very near the lowest low, far worse than these two events. It all joins together to produce perspective, and this is what enables my "more abundant" life now. There is purpose to be found to almost every event in one's life if one bothers to look.
Thank you for your empathy.
Leaning on my staff,
I watch the sky clearing after snow;
clouds are layered high
over the mountain stream.
As the woodcutter
returns to his hut,
a cold sun sets
on perilous peaks.
A farmer's fire
burns the grass along a ridge;
wisps of cook smoke rise
in rock-girt pines.
Returning to the temple
along the mountain road,
I hear the striking of the evening bell.
- Chia Tao (779-843)
The humble, meek, merciful, just, pious, and devout souls are everywhere of one religion; and when death has taken off the mask they will know one another, though the divers liveries they wear here makes them strangers. This world is a form; our bodies are forms; and no visible acts of devotion can be without forms. But yet the less form in religion the better, since God is a Spirit; for the more mental our worship, the more adequate to the nature of God; the more silent, the more suitable to the language of a Spirit.
William Penn 1693
(QF&P 19.28)
The Normal Mind
The Way does not require cultivation—just don't pollute it.
What is pollution? As long as you have a fluctuating mind fabricating artificialities and contrivances, all of this is pollution.
If you want to understand the Way directly, the normal mind is the Way.
What I mean by the normal mind is the mind without artificiality, without subjective judgments, without grasping or rejection.
- Mazu (709-788)
Ramie's Day
Conceived in covenant.
Formed by mighty hands in the darkness.
A hope for a life of giggles and smiles, of laughter and joy, story telling, and wonder.
What joy and wonder as she arrives, little hands and feet, a smile so sweet.
With pain and sorrow a troubled heart, a year, a week, a day or two.
Now she is on streets of gold. In the nail pierced hands.
No pain or sorrow can touch her now.
She waits with him for others coming.
A hope for a life of giggles and smiles, of laughter and joy, story telling, and wonder.
In honor of her on her birthday