Sunday Morning Ponderables

Reverse Living

Life is tough.
It takes up a lot of your time, all your weekends,
and what do you get at the end of it?
Death, a great reward.
I think the life cycle is all backwards.
You should die first, get it out of the way.
Then you should live twenty years in an old-age home.
You get kicked out when you're too young,
you get a gold watch, you go to work.
You work for forty years until you're
young enough to enjoy your retirement.
You go to college, you party until you're ready for high school,
you become a little kid, you play, you have no responsibilities,
you become a little boy or girl, you go back into the womb,
you spend your last nine months floating.
And you finish off as a gleam in someone's eye.

- Norman Glass

My grandfather and his wife, on the Oregon farm, July 2011.

My Elinor Rose, on the Oregon farm, July 2011.

Sunday Morning Ponderables

If You Knew
by Ellen Bass

What if you knew you'd be the last
to touch someone?
If you were taking tickets, for example,
at the theater, tearing them,
giving back the ragged stubs,
you might take care to touch that palm,
brush your fingertips
along the life line's crease.

When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase
too slowly through the airport, when
the car in front of me doesn't signal,
when the clerk at the pharmacy
won't say Thank you, I don't remember
they're going to die.

A friend told me she'd been with her aunt.
They'd just had lunch and the waiter,
a young gay man with plum black eyes,
joked as he served the coffee, kissed
her aunt's powdered cheek when they left.
Then they walked half a block and her aunt
dropped dead on the sidewalk.

How close does the dragon's spume
have to come? How wide does the crack
in heaven have to split?
What would people look like
if we could see them as they are,
soaked in honey, stung and swollen,
reckless, pinned against time?


*   *   *   *

And some words of wisdom from the incomparable Patti Smith:

Sunday Evening Ponderables

Human mind on its highest level is

universal mind. As universal mind, it is

pure, tranquil, unconditioned, in its

true essential nature, but because of its

relations with the lower minds it

becomes the storage for their reactions.

~ Excerpt from Sayings and Tales of Zen Buddhism: Reflections for Every Day by William Wray

Sunday Morning Ponderables

Mark Bittman is not a vegan. However, he writes quite frequently, and quite eloquently, about the importance of limiting our meat consumption (his personal method is to eat vegan until 6 pm). Below is an article that resonated deeply with me because it delves, albeit briefly, into the idea that our current state of animal agriculture is harmful not only to the animals, the Earth, and our bodies, but to our psyches as well. The whole system is built to bring in as much profit as possible, regardless of what that means for the animals. But human beings are, overall, sensitive creatures. When we see with our very own eyes what happens on these factory farms, the horrors that the animals, as well as the laborers, have to endure, we become outraged! Because of this, secrecy and concealment are vital components to the process, integrated at every level. This is disturbing for many reasons, but especially because of the disconnect it allows us. We can still eat our steak and our bacon and our chicken nuggets and not have to even think about the road it traveled to our plates, the sheer amount of suffering involved in the process.

What effect does this have on  us as a society? If the concealment of animal suffering for the purpose of profit and pleasure is so deeply entrenched in our culture that most of us don't even think about it, doesn't it make sense that this secrecy, and the ability to disconnect that said secrecy affords us, would spill over to our interaction with other humans? From the anonymity of cyber-bullying to the sophisticated methods of modern warfare, human beings are severing the ties that bind us to each other, to our fellow creatures, and to the planet we live on. And it's not making us any happier.

Am I making sense? Sometimes I have trouble putting my thoughts into words. Anyway, these are the thoughts that plague me. What can I say? I've just always been the life of the party! *sigh*

I'll stop now, and let Mark Bittman fill in the rest. He's a professional, after all...


The Human Cost of Animal Suffering
By Mark Bittman
(published on NYTimes.com on March 13, 2012)

Until a couple of years ago I believed that the primary reasons to eat less meat were environment- and health-related, and there's no question that those are valid reasons. But animal welfare has since become a large part of my thinking as well. And I say this as someone not known to his friends as an animal-lover.

If we want a not-too-damaged planet to live on, and we want to live here in a way that's also not too damaged, we're better off eating less meat. But if we also want a not-too-damaged psyche, we have to look at how we treat animals and begin to change it.

We can start by owning up to the fact that our system is industrialized. And as horrible as that word - "industrialized" - seems when applied to what was once called animal husbandry, it is precisely the correct term. Those who haven't seen this, or believe it to be a myth perpetrated by PETA, might consider reading "Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight," recently published by Timothy Pachirat. (This isn't a review, but the book is superbly written, especiall given the grimness of the subject.)

You might think that "every 12 seconds" refers to the frequency with which we kill animals, but in a moment you'll realize that that's impossible: we process more than nine billion animals each year - hundreds per second. No, 12 seconds is the frequency with which the Omaha slaughterhouse where Pachirat worked for five months killed cattle, a total of around 2,500 per day.

Pachirat, whom I interviewed by phone earlier this week, took the job not as an animal rights activist but as a doctoral candidate in political science seeking to understand the normalization of violence. Like others, he concluded that our isolation from killing allows us to tolerate unimaginably cruel practices simply because we don't see them. But Pachirat emphasizes that it's not only we - consumers - who are isolated from the killing, but workers: at his plant only seven people out of 800 were directly involved with live cattle, and only four with killing.

Not that the other workers have it easy: "Every Twelve Seconds" shatters any belief you might have about the system treating animals with a shred of decency. "The sheer volume, scale and rate of killing," Pachirat told me, "the way the animals form a continuous stream rather than individual creatures, makes it clear the animals are seen as raw material. The cattle are called 'beef' even while they're alive - and that not only protects people from acknowledging what they're doing and that they're doing it to sentient beings, it's also accurate, a reflection of the process itself."

Our assertion of our right to treat animals as we do iron or lumber or car doors - to treat them as widgets - is not cannibalism, but it's hardly consistent with our keeping of adored pets.

Meat-eaters may assert that this is somehow justifiable, because we "need" to eat meat - just not cats or dogs or goldfish - to live. And even though we don't (in fact, there's increasing evidence that too much of it is harmful; more on that later this week), we have more than two million years of tradition to point to, we have bodies that process meat well and even thrive on it in limited amounts and we have a love of eating animal flesh that for most of us may not go away any time soon.

None of which justifies egregious maltreatment. (Yes, vegan friends, I get that killing animals, period, is maltreatment. This ambivalence, or hypocrisy if you prefer, is for every ambivalent or hypocritical omnivore or flexitarian a puzzle, and scale is an issue.) That maltreatment must first be acknowledged in order for us to alleviate it.

And that acknowledgment is forthcoming. The allure - and habit! - of meat-eating may be too strong for most of us to give it up, but recognizing its consequences is a move toward a middle ground: a place where we continue to eat animals but exchange that privilege (that's what it is) for a system in which we eat less and treat them better, one that allows our children to make more human decisions. Because once we accept that farm animals are capable of suffering (80 percent of Americans believe this to be true), we might well wonder what they've done to deserve such punishment.

The most publicized stories about industrial agriculture represent the exceptions that prove the rule: the uncommon torture of animals by perverse individuals in rogue operations. But torture is inherent in the routine treatment of animals as widgets, and the system itself is perverse. What makes "Every Twelve Seconds" different from (for example) a Mercy for Animals expose is, says Pachirat, "that the day-in and day-out experience produces invisibility. Industrialized agriculture perpetuates concealment at every level of the process, and rather than focusing on the shocking examples we should be focusing on the system itself."

At that point we might finally acknowledge that raising, killing and eating animals must be done differently. When omnivores recognize that our way of producing and eating meat reduces not only slaughterhouse workers but all of us to a warped state, we'll be able to bring about the kind of changes that will reduce both the meat consumption and our collective guilt.

Pachirat says he has changed as a result of his experience, becoming increasingly interested in what he calls "distancing and concealment." He now intends to work on those issues as they relate to imprisonment, war, torture, deployment of drones and other sophisticated weaponry that allow impersonal killing. And it's because these connections make so much sense that we should look more carefully at how we raise and kill animals.

"I didn't get into this to focus on animal issues," he told me, "but my own relationship to eating meat has been transformed, and I now forgo it altogether. It's just not worth the pleasure when you know the system."

When we all know the system, we'll be even more eager to change it.

Sunday Morning Ponderables

People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.


You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.


Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.


You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs.

-- Banksy, from Cut It Out

Sunday Morning Ponderables

The sun and the moon are always bright,
yet if they are covered by clouds, although
above they're bright, below they are
darkened, and the sun, moon, stars and
planets cannot be seen clearly. But if
suddenly the wind of wisdom should blow
and roll away the clouds and mists, all forms
in the universe appear at once. The purity of
the nature of man in this world is like the
blue sky; wisdom is like the sun, knowledge
like the moon. Although knowledge and
wisdom are always clear, if you cling to
external environments, the floating clouds of
false thoughts will create a cover and your
own natures cannot become clear.

(Excerpt taken from Sayings and Tales of Zen Buddhism: Reflections for Every Day by William Wray)

Sunday Morning Ponderables

The Tree Of Wisdom
(A Yoruba tale from Nigeria)


Tortoise stood beneath a Tree and thought about wisdom. He knew that gold held great value in the eyes of many. "But wisdom," he thought, "is worth more than anything else in the world."

Taking up a hollow calabash, a large bottle gourd, he tied it around his neck and went in search of wisdom. When passersby dropped morsels of wisdom during their conversations along the road, he picked them up and put them into his gourd. When the wisdom contained in the seeds of grain or in the nuts of trees fell to the ground or when a fluffy seed blew in on the breeze, Tortoise was there to snatch it up. If a bird's wisdom fluttered down from the sky in one of its feathers, Tortoise grabbed it with his beak and put it into the gourd. After many days of gathering and gleaning wisdom, the gourd was full.

As he gazed into his gourd, Tortoise thought, "Surely I am now the wisest of all. No one has ever gathered so much wisdom. This must be all there is in the world."

But now Tortoise was worried that someone might find his wisdom and steal it.

"I will put it up into this ancient baobab tree," he thought, looking at its wide spread of branches. "No one will ever find it there."

Tortoise hung the gourd full of wisdom around his neck and tried to climb the tree, but the gourd hung down by his belly and got in the way. He tried hanging it from one front leg and then the other front leg, but each time the weight of the gourd pulled him down and he fell off the tree. He tried tying it to his puny tail, but the rope kept slipping off. Then he tried holding it in his mouth, but he was so used to saying his thoughts out loud that he found he couldn't think clearly when his mouth was full.

Finally, he heard a small voice coming from the bush. "Hello, Tortoise."

"Where are you?" asked Tortoise, looking around.

"I'm down here."

"Oh, it's you, Snail," said Tortoise.

"That's no way to carry a gourd up a tree," said Snail.

"Well, then . . . how would you do it?" asked Tortoise curtly.

"Granted, I do not possess the wealth of wisdom that you do," admitted Snail, "but you might want to try tying the gourd onto the middle of your back, so the weight will be even and your limbs free to climb up the bark."

Tortoise stared at Snail and said nothing for a very long time. "Well," he snipped, "thank you for the words of wisdom."

Snail helped Tortoise to tie the gourd onto his back and watched as Tortoise made his way slowly up the tree and out onto one of its upper branches.

When Tortoise had caught his breath, he felt satisfied at holding all the wisdom in the world inside his gourd, which was now safely hidden in the tree. But then another thought began to eat at him.

"If I hold all the wisdom in the world inside this gourd," he thought, "then why is it that I needed advice from Snail to get the gourd up into this tree?"

At that moment, Tortoise realized that no matter how much wisdom he gathered, there would always be more to learn. So he untied the gourd from his back, dropped it from up in the tree, and watched as it smashed on the ground, planting some of its wisdom in the soil and scattering the rest to the winds.

Artwork by Evan

Sunday Morning Ponderables

me against the world


when I was a kid
one of the questions asked was,
would you rather eat a bucket of shit
or drink a bucket of piss?
I thought that was easy.
"that's easy," I said, "I'll take the
piss."
"maybe we'll make you do both,"
they told me.
I was the new kid in the
neighborhood.
"oh yeah," I said.
"yeah!" they said.
there were 4 of them.
"yeah," I said, "you and whose
army?"
"we won't need no army," the
biggest one said.
I slammed my fist into his
stomach.
then all 5 of us were down on
the ground fighting.
they got in each other's way
but there were still too many
of them.
I broke free and started
running.
"sissy! sissy!" they yelled.
"going home to mama?"
I kept running.
they were right.
I ran all the way to my house,
up the driveway and onto the
porch and into the
house
where my father was beating
up my mother.
she was screaming.
things were broken on the floor.
I charged my father and started swinging.
I reached up but he was too tall,
all I could hit were his
legs.
then there was a flash of red and
purple and green
and I was on the floor.
"you little prick!" my father said,
"you stay out of this!"
"don't you hit my boy!" my mother
screamed.
but I felt good because my father
was no longer hitting my
mother.
to make sure, I got up and charged
him again, swinging.
there was another flash of colors
and I was on the floor
again.
when I got up again
my father was sitting in one chair
and my mother was sitting in
another chair
and they both just sat there
looking at me.
I walked down the hall and into
my bedroom and sat on the
bed.
I listened to make sure there
weren't any more sounds of
beating and screaming
out there.
there weren't.
then I didn't know what to
do.
it wasn't any good outside
and it wasn't any good
inside.
so I just sat there.
then I saw a spider making a web
across a window.
I found a match, walked over,
lit it and burned the spider to
death.
then I felt better.
much better.

~ Charles Bukowski (from Urbanus)

*   *   *

I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent. 

~ Mahatma Gandhi

Sunday Morning Ponderables

To any thinking person, it must be obvious that there is something badly wrong in relations between human beings and the animals that human beings rely on for food; and that in the past 100 or 150 years whatever is wrong has become wrong on a huge scale, as traditional animal husbandry has been turned into an industry using industrial methods of production. There are many other ways in which our relations to animals are wrong (to name two: the fur trade, experimentation on animals in laboratories), but the food industry, which turns living animals into what it euphemistically calls animal products - animal products and animal byproducts - dwarfs all others in the number of individual animal lives it affects.

The vast majority of the public have an equivocal attitude to the industrial use of animals: they make use of the products of that industry, but are nevertheless a little sickened, a little queasy, when they think of what happens on factory farms and in abattoirs*. Therefore they arrange their lives in such a way that they need be reminded of farms and abattoirs as little as possible, and do their best to ensure that their children are kept in the dark too, because as we all know children have tender hearts and are easily moved.

The transformation of animals into production units dates back to the late 19th century, and since that time we have already had one warning on the grandest scale that there is something deeply, cosmically wrong with regarding and treating fellow beings as mere units of any kind. This warning came so loud and clear that one would have thought it impossible to ignore. It came when in the mid-20th century a group of powerful and bloody-minded men in Germany hit on the idea of adapting the methods of the industrial stockyard, as pioneered and perfected in Chicago, to the slaughter - or what they preferred to call the processing - of human beings.

Of course we cried out in horror when we found out what they had been up to. We cried: What a terrible crime, to treat human beings like cattle! If only we had known beforehand! But our cry should more accurately have been: What a terrible crime, to treat human beings like units in an industrial process! And that cry should have had a postscript: What a terrible crime, come to think of it - a crime against nature - to treat any living being like a unit in an industrial process!


It would be a mistake to idealize traditional animal husbandry as the standard by which the animal-products industry falls short: traditional animal husbandry is brutal enough, just on a smaller scale. A better standard by which to judge both practices would be the simple standard of humanity: is this truly the best that human beings are capable of?

The efforts of the animal-rights movement, the broad movement that situates itself on the spectrum somewhere between the meliorism of the animal welfare bodies and the radicalism of animal liberation, are rightly directed at decent people who both know and don't know that there is something going on that stinks to high heaven - people who will say, "Yes, it's terrible what lives brood sows live, it's terrible what lives veal calves live," but who will then add, with a helpless shrug of the shoulders, "What can I do about it?"

The task of the movement is to offer such people imaginative but practical options for what to do next after they have been revolted by a glimpse of the lives factory animals live and the deaths they die. People need to see that there are alternatives to supporting the animal-products industry, that these alternatives need not involve any sacrifice in health or nutrition, that there is no reason why these alternatives need be costly, and furthermore that what are commonly called sacrifices are not sacrifices at all - that the only sacrifices in the whole picture, in fact, are being made by non-human animals.

In this respect, children provide the brightest hope. Children have tender hearts, that is to say, children have hearts that have not yet been hardened by years of cruel and unnatural battering. Given half a chance, children see through the lies with which advertisers bombard them (the happy chooks that are transformed painlessly into succulent nuggets, the smiling moo-cow that donates to us the bounty of her milk). It takes but one glance into a slaughterhouse to turn a child into a lifelong vegetarian.

Factory farming is a new phenomenon, very new in the history of animal husbandry. The good news is that after a couple of decades of what the businessmen behind it must have regarded as free and unlimited expansion, the industry has been formed onto the defensive. The activities of animal-rights organizations have shifted the onus onto the industry to justify its practices; and because its practices are indefensible and unjustifiable except on the most narrowly economistic grounds ("Do you want to pay $1.50 more for a dozen eggs?") the industry is battening down its hatches and hoping the storm will blow itself out. Insofar as there was a public relations war, the industry has already lost that war.

A final note. The campaign of human beings for animal rights is curious in one respect: that the creatures on whose behalf human beings are acting are unaware of what their benefactors are up to and, if they succeed, are unlikely to thank them. There is even a sense in which animals do not know what is wrong.

They do certainly not know what is wrong in the same way that we human beings know what is wrong. Thus, however close the well-meaning benefactor may feel to his or her fellow animals, the animal-rights campaign remains a human project from beginning to end.

* abattoir: a slaughterhouse

J.M. Coetzee was the 2003 Nobel Prize laureate for literature. The above is an edited extract of a speech he wrote, given on his behalf by Hugo Weaving in Sydney on February 22, 2007.

*   *   *

It's not that we can make a difference, it's that we do make a difference, in everything we do and every choice we make. We have the choice whether we want that difference to be negative or positive, and you'll find that notion either very empowering or very scary because it means it's up to you.

~ Colleen Patrick-Goudreau, activist, vegan cookbook author, producer of the Vegetarian Food for Thought podcast, and founder of Compassionate Cooks.

*   *   *

If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.

~ Dalai Lama

*   *   *

The greatness of a nation and its moral progress, can be judged by the way its animals are treated. 

~ M. Gandhi

My husband Stephen, enjoying the company of Whitaker, a resident of Farm Sanctuary in Orland, CA.

Sunday Morning Ponderables

There is no place on earth where death cannot find us -- even if we constantly twist our heads about in all directions as in a dubious and suspect land . . . If there were any way of sheltering from death's blows -- I am not the man to recoil from it . . . But it is madness to think that you can succeed . . .
     Men come and they go and they trot and they dance, and never a word about death. All well and good. Yet when death does come -- to them, their wives, their children, their friends -- catching them unawares and unprepared, then what storms of passion overwhelm them, what cries, what fury, what despair! . . .
     To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us, let us adopt a way clean contrary to that common one; let us deprive death of its strangeness, let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death . . . We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere. To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.

MONTAIGNE

*   *   *

If we look into our lives, we will see clearly how many unimportant tasks, so-called "responsibilities" accumulate to fill them up. [...] We tell ourselves we want to spend time on the important things of life, but there never is any time. Even simply to get up in the morning, there is so much to do: open the window, make the bed, take a shower, brush your teeth, feed the dog or cat, do last night's washing up, discover you are out of sugar or coffee, go and buy them, make breakfast -- the list is endless. Then there are clothes to sort out, choose, iron, and fold up again. And what about your hair, or your makeup? Helpless, we watch our days fill up with telephone calls and petty projects, with so many responsibilities -- or shouldn't we call them "irresponsibilities"?

Our lives seem to live us, to possess their own bizarre momentum, to carry us away; in the end we feel we have no choice or control over them. Of course we feel bad about this sometimes, we have nightmares and wake up in a sweat, wondering: "What am I doing with my life?" But our fears only last until breakfast time; out comes the briefcase, and back we go to where we started.

*   *   *

Taking life seriously does not mean spending our whole lives meditating as if we were living in the mountains in the Himalayas or in the old days in Tibet. In the modern world, we have to work and earn our living, but we should not get entangled in a nine-to-five existence, where we live without any view of the deeper meaning of life. Our task is to strike a balance, to find a middle way, to learn not to overstretch ourselves with extraneous activities and preoccupations, but to simplify our lives more and more. The key to finding a happy balance in modern lives is simplicity.

*   *   *

The cells of our body are dying, the neurons in our brain are decaying, even the expression on our face is always changing, depending on our mood. What we call our basic character is only a "mindstream," nothing more. Today we feel good because things are going well; tomorrow we feel the opposite. Where did that good feeling go? New influences took us over as circumstances changed: We are impermanent, the influences are impermanent, and there is nothing solid or lasting anywhere that we can point to.

What could be more unpredictable than our thoughts and emotions: do you have any idea what you are going to think or feel next? Our mind, in fact, is as empty, as impermanent, and as transient as a dream. Look at a thought: It comes, it stays, and it goes. The past is past, the future not yet risen, and even the present thought, as we experience it, becomes the past.

The only thing we really have is nowness, is now.

Sometimes when I teach these things, a person will come up to me afterward and say: "All this seems obvious! I've always known it. Tell me something new." I say to him or her: "Have you actually understood, and realized, the truth of impermanence? Have you so integrated it with your every thought, breath, and movement that your life has been transformed? Ask yourself these two questions: Do I remember at every moment that I am dying, and everyone and everything else is, and so treat all beings at all times with compassion? Has my understanding of death and impermanence become so keen and so urgent that I am devoting every second to the pursuit of enlightenment? If you can answer 'yes' to both of these, then you have really understood impermanence."

(All passages taken from The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, written by Sogyal Rinpoche.)

Sunday Morning Ponderables

Unconditionality vs. Desires


Q: How do you reconcile "unconditionality" with having preferences and desires? If you're totally unconditional, shouldn't everything be fine the way it is?

A: Unconditionality doesn't mean having no preferences or desires; it means that you don't let the temporary absence of your preferred conditions prevent you from enjoying the present moment...

"When conditions are to my liking, I feel

great! (Obviously.) And when conditions are

not to my liking, I enjoy anticipating the

unfolding of my preferred conditions."

The idea that you can't enjoy this moment because of unwanted conditions is a LIE perpetuated by our conditional culture -- a lie that serves no purpose other than to keep people feeling powerless!

Unconditionality says, "Enjoying the here and now is my top priority, so I'm not going to use these conditions as an excuse to separate from my natural state of well-being."

So when your child "misbehaves," or your partner is unsupportive, or you're sleep-deprived, etc., use those unwanted conditions to help you clarify what you *do* want. Then practice unconditionality by accepting the present conditions AND joyfully anticipating the fulfillment of your desires.

- Scott Noelle, author of The Daily Groove (www.enjoyparenting.com/dailygroove)

Sunday Morning Ponderables

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you they belong not to you.


You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bow from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrow may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.


- Kahlil Gibran (excerpt from The Prophet)

Sunday Morning Ponderables

Buddha told a parable in a sutra:

A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger. He fled, the tiger after him. Coming to a precipice, he caught hold of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Trembling, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him. Two mice, one white and one black, little by little started to gnaw away at the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other.

How sweet it tasted!

(Excerpt from Sayings and Tales of Zen Buddhism: Reflections for Every Day by William Wray)