Month: January 2019

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January 20, 2019: Welcome to a New Year and New Season of Monday Night Class…

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JANUARY 14. 2019 MONDAY NIGHT CLASS

I so love the above quote from David Whyte. I think he says it so beautifully. There is simply no good reason for us to keep company with anything or anyone that does not bring us alive, with anything or anyone that tries to keep us small.

Choose your greatness…

Here are audio clips and readings from the first class of this new year.

Here’s opening chanting of Om Tara Tuttare Ture Swaha.

Here’s the opening dharana and my dharma talk.

Here’s chanting of Vakratunda II and the Surya Bija Mantra. These are fine for people who want to chant along, but the album tracks are way better for listening. You can find VakII on Sound Cloud and the Surya Bija mantra track is on our Sun Mantras album.

Here are this week’s readings.

TAO TE CHING

32.
The Tao can’t be perceived.
Smaller than an electron,
it contains uncountable galaxies.

If powerful men and women
could remain centered in the Tao,
all things would be in harmony.
The world would become a paradise.
All people would be at peace,
and the law would be written in their hearts.

When you have names and forms,
know they are provisional.
When you have institutions,
know where their functions should end.
Knowing when to stop,
you can avoid any danger.

All things end in the Tao
as rivers flow into the sea.

YOGA-SUTRA

1.1 Atha yoganushasanan  (Now, the study of Yoga.)
1.2 Yogah chitta vritti nirodhaha  (Yoga is the stilling of the thought waves in the mind.)
1.3 Tada drashtu svarupe avasthanam  (Then we rest in our essential nature.)

 

Here are the words to Vakratunda II.

vakratunda mahakāya
suryakoti samaprabha
nirvighnam kuru me deva
sarva kāryeśu sarvada

om gang ganapataye namaha

 

As always, the final word goes to Mary Oliver. Particularly poignant this week…

SUNRISE
Mary Oliver
 
You can
die for it —
and idea,
or the world. People

have done so,
brilliantly,
letting
their small bodies be bound

to the stake,
creating
an unforgettable
fury of light. But

this morning,
climbing the familiar hills
in the familiar
fabric of dawn, I thought

of China,
and India
and Europe, and I thought
how the sun

blazes
for everyone just
so joyfully
as it rises
under the lashes
of my own eyes, and I thought
I am so many!
What is my name?

What is the name
of the deep breath I would take
over and over
for all of us? Call it

whatever you want, it is
happiness, it is another one
of the ways to enter
fire.

 

 

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In Loving Memory of Mary Oliver

mary oliver

 

As I’m sure most everyone reading this knows, Mary Oliver left this world two days ago. And the world feels somehow different without her. Lonely.

I keep thinking about the way she looked and in her looking, saw so deeply.

She looked. She saw. She took in. She made communion, over and over again.

Who will look the way she did? Who will see the way she saw. We have lost a beloved poet-seer of our time. We have lost one of the great ones.

I never got to meet Mary Oliver. I did buy her books. Lots of them. And am thinking I must now buy the ones I don’t already own. I don’t have shelf space for them. But it seems the best tribute I can make.

She leaves the finest footprint on this earth, zillions of fans who love her and a trail of words, 37 books if I count correctly, imbued with such truth and beauty. Keats would approve. If there’s a poet’s heaven, they are no doubt sitting together, laughing…

Especially at her nose-in-the-air critics who call her poems too simple. Oh please. I read her poetry over and over and every time, discover something new. If her poems are too simple, let us have more and more of that simplicity.

She was a master.

I celebrate her life and grieve her death. She is gone just a couple of days and already so missed. The trees and the swans and the toads and the frogs. The songbirds and the fish and the deer. The dogs and the roses. The blueberries. The goldenrod. The light. Of everything and everyone she sang, to everything and everyone she sang.

I keep thinking of her final breath. I imagine her lying there, gazing at this world she loved so much, breathing it in one last time and smiling, as she slipped from the form of her body and merged into that ineffable spaciousness, that vibrant luminosity she somehow managed to gather and hold in her poems…

 

Messenger
-Mary Oliver

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird – 
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young and still not half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all ingredients are here,

Which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.