Fourteen Precepts in Fourteen Days: Day Two Second: Do not think that the knowledge you presently possess is changeless, absolute truth. Avoid being narrow-minded and bound to present views. Learn and practice non-attachment from views in order to be open to recieve other’s viewpoints. Truth is found in life and not merely in conceptual knowledge. Be ready to learn throughout your entire life and to observe reality in yourself and the world at all times. Being Peace, by Thich Nhat Hanh Since I’m not actually a Buddhist, although I’ve read pretty widely in the tradition, and have started sporadically sitting…
-
-
Fourteen Precepts in Fourteen Days Yesterday, while rereading Being Peace, I came across the fourteen precepts of Thich Nhat Hanh’s InterBeing order of Buddhists, and I thought that since it’s still Lent, and since we are at war, perhaps it might be a useful exercise to take a look at one of them each day. If nothing else, it’ll afford me the chance to keep working toward my goal of starting with peace in my own heart. Which I am finding difficult at the moment. First: Do not be idolatrous about or bound to any doctrine, theory, or ideology, even…
-
Being Peace In the peace movement there is a lot of anger, frustration, and misunderstanding. The peace movement can write very good protest letters, but they are not yet able to write a love letter. We need to learn to write a letter to the Congress or to the President of the United States that they will want to read, and not just throw away. The way you speak, the kind of understanding, the kind of language you use should not turn people off. The President is a person like any of us. Can the peace movement talk in loving…
-
My arborist agrees. My local arborist came by to give me a quote on taking out an overgrown juniper that is way too close to the foundation (and shades the porch too much), and we got talking about the war. He said he’s really frustrated because he feels like there’s nothing he can do now but pray. And pruning helps, he said. Doesn’t change anything but a body sure does feel better after a couple of hours of pruning. He said I did a pretty good job on the apple trees, too.
-
Seeds for Hope I sent off my seed orders the other day. Winter came late to Montana this year, but it’s here now, and with a vengence. It’s been snowing all week, and cold. The kind of grey winter weather where there is no horizon, just blowing white snow broken by the occasional grey-brown windbreak of dormant cottonwood trees. It is most certainly the dead of winter, and for the first time ever, now that I have a yard where I can really sink a garden in, I got to sit down and fill out the seed orders. I’ve been…
-
Crisis of Faith at LivingSmall Well, I’ve been having something of a crisis of faith about this whole blogging thing — not about blogging itself, but rather, about how on earth blogging about my own tiny little corner of the universe could in any way be a meaningful activity in the face of the global crisis into which our government is leading us. I mean really, we’re going to war and I’m blogging about cleaning? about floor machines? Compared to really insightful bloggers like Body and Soul, or Rittenhouse, or Blue Streak, or the Nielsen Haydens at Electrolite and Making…
-
Faith I went to Mass this morning for the first time in ages. The Cardinal Law/pedophilia scandal was the last straw for me for almost a year, and I’m still deeply ambivalent about my future as a Catholic. Somehow, the scope of the molestation, combined with the scope of the cover-up, sort of made it impossible for me, for a very long time, to ignore the clear message from the hierarchy that the Church is concerned first and foremost with it’s own power as an institution. This hit all my Big/Small buttons, and I just couldn’t go to Mass. Not…
-
Since Jeanne d’Arc was nice enough to post my response to her blog on the Vatican’s rush to cannonize Mother Teresa, and since I did say in the header that this blog would be partially about faith, you may want to look at The Stigmata Incident, a piece I wrote for the Salt Lake Acting company a couple of years ago.