Take 45 seconds and check out this video. What’s invisible now has form. Global warming pollution becomes vivid, graspable, close to home. People watch this ad and say, “Oh now I get it.” Do your friends get it? Do your parents and neighbors? Send them to The Alliance for Climate Protection or this blog entry itself so they too can understand the link between current energy use and the climate crisis. Larry King got it - he premiered the ad on his show last month.
Dusk surrounds the canyon
the wooden mallet’s clack
signals zazen–Mitsu Suzuki
Haiku is a Japanese poetic form written with seventeen syllables. Zazen is sitting meditation. Mitsu Suzuki was married to Suzuki Roshi, wrote many haiku, taught Tea Ceremony, and was influential in the establishment of Zen Buddhism in the West.
Monastery gate
huge wooden bolt
fragrant wind
–Mitsu Suzuki
Spiritual love is part humility and part surrender. It tames the human ego and pride. When we move into a space of inner experimentation we realize how much is yet to be known. Yet our ignorance is revealed to us with deep compassion and love. Why? Because we have made the first admission. To dismantle the structures of self-importance is a fearful process. When we come clean with ourselves and ask that the All is revealed, the fear subsides and love infuses our being. We still do not know the All, but the love so uplifts us that we become more useful human beings, both to ourselves and to others. In that love is all the knowledge and wisdom we seek.
© Pamir Kiciman 2007
At the confusing and fearful threshold of stepping into healing, love is the only choice to make.
Love simplifies all.
I love for I know only good comes to me.
Where there is love I am safe.
Where there is love I can trust.
Unconditional love fosters unconditional healing. Unconditional love is Divine love, and it permeates everything. Such love is hidden and scarce, yet contains all.
© Pamir Kiciman 2007
To uncover ever-present love is an individual process, with its personal synchronicities and elements. It is a call that resonates in the depths of being, constantly radiating a signal of homecoming.To ignore the call of homecoming is to miss the purpose of life. To heed it is to face the hurt. Free will generally prefers to stay in the static middle, unless it feels the presence of love.
Love is the only condition of healing, and that love must be unconditional.
© Pamir Kiciman 2007
The original prayer is creation itself. As created beings we are a prayer onto our own. Prayer here means the lived experience of sacredness, not its usual religious context.Sacredness isn’t confined to one aspect of life. Sacredness has always been the single thread that runs through life. Sometimes this thread is visible, consciously enhanced and cultivated. Sometimes it’s invisible and purposely ignored.
The call is that no matter what we’re primarily engaged in, there’s opportunity serve the people around us. This could be a service of education, financial help, empowerment, consciousness-raising, healing, community, family matters, the elderly, the disabled, the homeless, the addicted and so on. Within our respective fields also, even in seemingly unrelated environments such as business, service is readily available for seeing eyes.
To serve is a simple process of feeling and understanding suffering in ourselves and others.
Our feet are in the dust, i.e., the earth element. Our hands are at the level of the heart, the seat of compassion. Together with the feet, the hands carry out action or service once we’re willing.
There’s nothing we can’t overcome, personally or collectively, but we must become master blenders of the dust and the sacred, spinning at the precise pivot point of Divinity in expression and action.
Peace to the inner and outer environments.
Peace to the five elements within and without.
Peace to this body.
Peace to this mind.
Peace to this huge ocean of emotions and feelings.
By the power of the truth and for the happiness of all beings,
may we have a culture of peace,
a society of peace, a world of peace,
where we can have days of peace,
nights of peace, sleep with peace and dreams of peace.
By the power of the truth and for the healing of all beings,
may we have peace in all moments
and in everything.
