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‘Trungpa Rinpoche said that the ego wanting to experience enlightenment is like “wanting to witness your own funeral.” Yet try to convince the ego of this! The ego is not only present for the experience itself, but the moment this essential experience fades, ego is all that is left. The implicit realization and recognition of something Other and Beyond, which is true of the experience, is no longer present as a realization. The only thing left is ego, which proudly steps forth to take credit for the experience.’

Marianna Caplan, ‘Halfway up the Mountain. The error of premature claims to enlightenment.’

I came home today, laden with boxes of freshly-picked blueberries, to an unexpected disaster zone in my bedroom! My altar crushed beneath a small mountain of books, crystals and trinkets. The bookshelf nailed to the wall above had finally succumbed to the weighty wisdom of my collection of dharma books. Must’ve been some humonguous CRASH when that came down! Come to think of it though, if thirty-two dharma books fall on a shrine and no one is there to hear it…

I’d just been thinking recently that my shrine was looking dusty… I guess the dakinis thought so too! I must have had some merit amongst all that laziness though, ‘cuz they had mercy and only broke one small piece off of one of the many pretty glass, ceramic and crystal objects strewn helter skelter all over the floor.

So, today is all about blueberry delight and rearranging my room to make space for the sacred.

The blueberrification was entirely unexpected-this morning I took my car in to see Lope, my awesome new mechanic, a very friendly, articulate, expansive fellow. Sam was with me and we soon found ourselves gifted with a bag of blueberries and fresh blueberry watermelon smoothies as he told us all about this amazing U Pic blueberry farm he’d discovered out in Shohomish. Then it turned out, his wife wanted to go out there and load up again, so we joined forces and off we went!

It was so luscious-the plants were loaded with gorgeous, freshly rain-washed, immense berries and we bought a three dollar honey bear(from the hives overlooking the blueberry meadow) to go with. On the way home, I couldn’t resist popping by our local Javasti(crepe an’ coffee cafe) and having them crepe up some of our berries for lunch.

Mmmmmm…….

The nicely chatty farmer couple also gave us a stack o’ recipes for our eighteen pounds of fatties.

Blueberry crumble bar time!

I’m devouring Murakami books nowadays-amazing writer that he is.

Finally finished ‘Kafka by the Shore’ with all it’s amazing twists and turns, dangerous sexual liaisons and bizarre, magical wisdom. Plunged through ‘South of the Border, West of the Sun’, snacked on his short stories in ‘After the Quake’ and now ‘Sputnik Sweetheart’ is thrilling and chilling me through the moon-lapped night…

Such thoughtful, funny, poetic writing but at the same time disturbing as hell, raw, often horribly violent and even grotesque as it lurches about awkwardly, painfully, beautifully-just like life. Murakami has a tender way of making heroes out of stinky, ordinary people and always brings up way more questions than he ever, ever meanders and slithers his way around to answering.

‘What I’m getting at is that people have to come up with a clever strategy if they want what they know and what they don’t know to live together in peace. And that strategy-yep, you’ve got it-is thinking. We have to find a secure anchor. Otherwise, no mistake about it, we’re on an awful collision course.‘

and this, I love this one(such self-revealing words spilling from the floppy disk of his character, a young woman writer who has vanished mysteriously-as his women so often do):

‘Did you ever see someone shot by a gun without bleeding?
Which explains my own stance as a writer. I think-in a very ordinary way-and reach a point where, in a realm I cannot even give a name to, I conceive a dream, a sightless fetus called understanding, floating in the universal, overwhelming amniotic fluid of incomprehension. Which must be why my novels are absurdly long and, up until now at least, never reach a proper conclusion. The technical, and moral, skills needed to maintain a supply line on that scale are beyond me.’

Both excerpts are from ‘Sputnik Sweetheart’. I can’t wait to find out how it ends… May end up staying up all night reading.

Goddamn I wish I could discuss them with my own vanished sweetheart. He understands only too well the sum of our misunderstandings.

Brilliance, sheer brilliance. I’m so glad he’s a prolific writer-though I fear he’s outmatched by my voracious appetite.

I’d buy both of these beautiful books.

Sigh.

“Sitting practice is a way to be kind to yourself and to have the courage to find out and be who you are. It is a way to stop running from your anxiety, running to catch up or keep up with your neighbors, running to fulfill your own and other’s expectations for you, running away from knowing your own mind and heart, running towards your death and rarely ever tasting the richness of your life.”

‘Sacred World’ Jeremy and Karen Hayward

“Mindfulness is not a tool for therapy, a spiritual exercise, or an educational technique. It is a natural function. It is, more than anything else, what makes us human. We all have the capability to be mindful of our body, feelings, perceptions, and thoughts as they happen, unless we are diseased or brain-damaged. But most of us use this ability only partially and intermittently, hardly realizing we are doing it. There is no training for mindfulness in our upbringing, and we therefore do not realize the fullness of living and the creative potential that it’s practice can unfold. We practice mindfulness-’bringing back the wandering attention over and over again’-simply so that we can be present in our lives as they happen. Only when we are present can we begin to see our cocoon, to feel the fear that keeps it going, and perhaps be refreshed by glimpses of the sacred world.”

Sacred World, Jeremy and Karen Hayward.

“The Aboriginals told me they thought whiteys were sick. They were always trying to smoke me in a purifying fire or dump me in some sacred pool. They were very kind. Then they started asking me why I wasn’t in my own country with my own people. It made no sense to them, and pretty soon it made no sense to me.
One day, in a state of extremely heightened confusion, I walked a little from this bizarre desert settlement. I sat on the edge of an enormous cliff overlooking hundreds of mile of flat red desert dotted with mounds resembling large, nippled breasts. There was a tremendous expanse of sky, horizon, and air. Great expanses. And I heard my mind-it felt cramped, small and painfully claustrophobic. The space around me felt real. My mind felt sick. The thought arose that if I could just let my mind go into all that space, mix it with all that space, there would be relief. Let it go with the breath. Just that. Mix my mind with the vast space. Maybe I even did it for a moment, but it was fleeting. I knew I could not do it on my own and that I needed someone to teach me how to do this.”

excerpt from ‘Sacred World’ Jeremy and Karen Hayward.

‘We spend part of our life trying to get it together, and the other part watching it fall apart. As soon as we have time-’I have a whole hour free’-we are losing it. As soon as we make a friend, we are losing him. As soon as we have fame, it becomes tinged with notoriety. As soon as we have wealth, we’re losing it. Looking for something new to gain helps us forget to look but a few seconds back at the last thing we lost. Fabricating this chain of desire is how we keep ouselves in samsara. We are using this instability to try to make stability. We’re investing in hope and fear, banking on denial of a simple truth: all the pleasure the world can offer eventually turns to pain. Everything we gain is subject to loss.
Why do we put all that effort into gain when, in the end, we are going to lose it? Has anything we’ve gained brought us lasting happiness? Is there anything we own that we will be able to keep? What in our lives is not subject to the winds of gain and loss? Even this body will dissolve. In the face of death, there is only basic goodness. Gain and loss is just an illusion-one we have allowed to rule us.’

‘Ruling your world’ Sakyong Mipham

‘The only magic that exists is this life, this world, the particular phenomena we are experiencing right at this moment. Right now, right here, you are this magic. For instance, in giving this talk, I am a captive speaker and you are a captive audience. We can’t just walk out in the middle of a sentence-if we were to try and do that, the implications would linger with us for a long time. So we cannot wipe out our past, present, or future. Magic is direct and personal and lingers in our state of being. It is choiceless magic.’

Chogyam Trungpa, ‘Dharma Art’

“When I was away from Jean Claude, away from his body, his voice, I could be embarrassed, scratchy with discomfort that I was dating him. When I was away from him, I could talk myself out of him-almost. But never when I was with him. When I was with him, my stomach dropped to my feet and I had to fight very hard not to say things like golly.

I settled for: ‘You look spectacular, as always. What are you doing here on a night that I told you not to come?’ What I wanted to do was throw myself around him like a coat and have him carry me over the threshold clinging to him like a monkey. But I wasn’t going to do that. It lacked a certain dignity. Besides it sort of scared me how much I wanted him-and how often. He was like a new drug. It wasn’t vampire powers. It was good old-fashioned lust. But it was still scarey, so I had set up parameters. Rules. He followed them, most of the time.

He smiled, and it was the smile I’d grown to both love and dread. The smile said he was thinking wicked thoughts, things that two or more could do in darkened rooms, where the sheets smelled of expensive perfume, sweat and other bodily fluids. The smile had never made me blush until we started having sex. Sometimes all he had to do was smile, and heat rushed up my skin like I was thirteen and he was my first crush. He thought it was charming. It embarrassed the hell out of me.

‘You son of a bitch,’ I said softly.”

‘Blue Moon’, an Anita Blake, Vampire hunter novel.

Thank you, Laurell K Hamilton, it’s an odd, thoroughly enjoyable combination of corny and kickass and I must confess, you’re keeping me up, hooked, squirming, turning page after page(long after I ought by rights be asleep), creaming my sheets late, late into the vampiric hours.

Yeah, oh yeah, time for bed!