"Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?"
- Mary Oliver, from her poem "The Summer Day"
This quotation arrived in my email, in a newsletter I subscribe to - it seemed serendipitous. Oliver's not a Buddhist, although she often sounds like one. (You can read some more samplings of her poems at http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/23988.Mary_Oliver.)
In a rare interview, in O magazine, March 9, 2011, the poet says, "When I was very young and decided I wanted to try to write as well as I could, I made a great list of all the things I would never have." It sounds like something an aspiring nun or monk - or a layperson serious about training in non-attachment - would do and reminded me of Gen-la's advice at the end of the Western Canada Dharma Celebration on how to finance a trip to Summer Festival: Every time you deny yourself something, you put what it would have cost into a box on your shrine. She said we'll be able not just to afford our own trip, but also to sponsor some of our Sangha friends: )
In Eight Steps to Happiness Geshe-la says "'Self' and 'other' are relative terms, rather like 'this mountain' and 'that mountain ... 'This' and 'that' therefore depend upon our point of reference. This is also true of self and other. By climbing down the mountain of self, it is possible to ascend the mountain of other, and thereby cherish others as much as we presently cherish ourself."
Friday, April 6, 2012
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