Assembled by Tovie Bentley
“We are participatory beings who inhabit a participatory reality, seeking relationships that enhance our sense of what it means to be alive. In terms of dharma practice, a true friend is more than just someone with whom we share common values and who accepts us for what we are. Such a friend is someone whom we can trust to refine our understanding of what it means to live, who can guide us when we’re lost and help us find the way along a path, who can assuage our anguish through the reassurance of his or her presence.”
– Stephen Batchelor, “Buddhism Without Beliefs”
(Email to Tovie Dec 1, 2008, 12:13 pm)
“In the heart of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
– Albert Camus
(Email to Tovie Dec 2, 2008, 10:11 pm)
“Compassion is the very heart and soul of awakening. While meditation and reflection can make us more receptive to it, it cannot be contrived or manufactured. When it erupts within us, it feels as though, we have stumbled across it by chance. And it can vanish just as suddenly as it appeared. It is glimpsed in those moments when the barrier of self is lifted and individual existence is surrendered t the well-being of existence as a whole. It becomes abundantly clear that we cannot attain awakening for ourselves: we can only participate in the awakening of life.”
– Stephen Batchelor, “Buddhism without Belief”
(Email to Tovie Dec 2, 2008)
“Your grief for what you’ve lost lifts a mirror
up to where you’re bravely working.
Expecting the worst, you look, and instead,
here’s the joyful face you’ve been longing to see.
Your hand opens and closes, and opens and closes.
If it were always a fist or always stretched open
you would be paralyzed.
Your deepest presence
is in every small contraction and expansion,
the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated
as bird wings.”
– Rumi
(Email to Tovie Dec 5, 2008, 4:06 pm)
My worst habit is I get so tired of winter
I become a torture to those I’m with.
If you’re not here, nothing grows.
I lack clarity. My words
tangle and knot up.
How to cure bad water? Send it back to the river.
How to cure bad habits? Send me back to you.
When water gets caught in habitual whirlpools,
dig a way out through the bottom
to the ocean.
There is a secret medicine
given only to those who hurt so hard
they can’t hope.
The hopers would feel slighted if they knew.
Look as long as you can at the friend you love,
no matter whether that friend is moving away from you
or coming back toward you.
– Rumi
(Email to Tovie Dec 12, 2008, 9:11 am)
‘Lo, I am with you always’ means when you look for God,
God is in the look of your eyes,
in the thought of looking, nearer to you than your self,
or things that have happened to you
There’s no need to go outside.
Be melting snow.
Wash yourself of yourself.
A white flower grows in the quietness.
Let your tongue become that flower.
– Rumi
(Email to Tovie Dec 28, 2008, 12:05 am)
“Stretch your arms and take hold the cloth of your clothes
with both hands. The cure for pain is in the pain.
Good and bad are mixed. If you don’t have both,
you don’t belong with us.
When one of us gets lost, is not here, he must be inside us.
There’s no place like that anywhere in the world.”
– Rumi
(Email to Buddhist House May 9, 2009, 4:20 pm)