Allspirit

Tag: adventure

  • Cultivating Courage

    From Turning The Mind Into An Ally

    By Sakyong Mipham

    When I’m teaching, people often ask me questions in hopes of hearing some esoteric truth. They seem to want me to tell them a secret. But the most fundamental secret I know is rooted in something that we already possess, basic goodness. In spite of the extreme hardship and cruelty we see happening throughout the world, the basis of everything is completely pure and good. Our heart and mind are inherently awake. This basic goodness is a quality of complete wholesomeness. It includes everything.

    But before we can begin the adventure of transforming ourselves into awakened people-much less the adventure of living our lives with true joy and happiness, we need to discover this secret for ourselves. Then we have the real possibility of cultivating courage, from which we can radiate love and compassion to others.

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  • Penelope

    By Elaine Maria Upton

    I am Penelope and I sat here weaving
    all these years, weaving and waiting.
    My story may seem very dull,
    the story of weaving and waiting,
    unless, of course, you want to add
    some Hollywood or Cannes/Riveriera intrigue
    and write of all my suitors, and my temptations
    to an adulterous life, and unless you want
    to write that I worried about Telemachus,
    my son, and his ability to endure the slander
    of his father’s name. But even that
    seems dull beside tales of one-eyed monsters,
    Scylla and Charibidis, and all that drove
    my husband round the world. No, waiting
    is not particularly an exciting tale to tell.

    You’d have to be here, to live
    where narrative is swallowed up
    in the turns of a spinning wheel,
    and a particular herb tossed
    in the noon meal soup. The herb
    would make you drunk with sleep
    and you’d dream of spinning and
    of looms where names and forms
    are woven while the sun falls slowly
    in the long Mediterranean afternoon.

    And you’d wake to a tapestry
    that your fingers followed into being,
    a tapestry of names, colors, shapes
    to hang on a wall, or to drape
    the backs of children, old women,
    and returning kings. This woven
    thing–this tapestry–would remind us
    that history and time, like distant horizons
    elude us forever, and this body,
    this adventure, these wars, these seas,
    are but the densest measure of a dream.

    Wait, then, upon the fuller dream, the one
    woven in the loom, lent us by the weaving stars.

    23 February 1999

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