Compassion for all beings

I was in Hamburg over the weekend and while my partner was playing in his volleyball league, I was able to explore the city. It is a really wonderful and beautiful city and one of my first sights in the morning was seeing this woman feeding all of the waterfowl...and she had bags and bags of bread crumbs for them...you can see them behind her in the picture. I was amazed and the number of the birds and the loveliness of the scene as she sang and chatted to the birds as she fed them. Many other people were also enraptured and began to take pictures. It made the rest of the day seem really beautiful, to know that there is compassion around us at all time...we just need to look and SEE!

Things not being the way I want!

Neither wanting nor not wanting---

The Morning Glory

Opens

To the Sun's

Touch

(These pictures are from the window of our guest room which also serves as our meditation room.)

The past few days I've been suffering from a cold. First the feeling of being extremely tired with the scratchy throat, then the full sinuses, runny nose and watery eyes and now the cough that is trying to clear my lungs---and also making me crazy and miserable. NO ONE CAN SUFFER LIKE I CAN! Or so I think!

Usually I'm a person who has more of a problem of "pulling things in", of wanting to have...but this week I've been feeling the opposite extreme of wanting to push things away. ESPECIALLY THIS COLD! And it is interesting to take a moment and see that in both grasping and clinging and pushing away, the self becomes harder, more uncompromising and blind to what is around itself and others. The OPENING is gone. There is no STILLNESS in grumbling.

Then, yesterday, I read a line from Pema Chödrön: "When we get sick, for example, we don't usually think of the sickness of others." In other words, I become so centered on my suffering, without thinking of coming out of it and being open that I forget the suffering of others. The self becomes harder and harder. The self says: NO ONE CAN/ IS SUFFERING LIKE I AM AT THIS MOMENT! I have let myself become blinded and disconnected. The grumbling goes on.

However, the last lines of the chapter state: "This is the aspiration of a young Bodhisattva, one in the process of letting go. Even if we don't genuinely feel it, we're able to say 'May this seemingly negative connection be our link to waking up'".

And after that I started to wake up and then this morning after meditation, looking out the window, I saw the morning glories and other flowers and realized: don't grab onto things, don't push away. Happiness or unhappiness, stay STILL, stay OPEN, stay AWARE!

WAKE UP!

Expectations!

This morning my expectations were really high. For the past two weeks when I rode my bike to work there were always beautiful swans in the early morning on the river, floating among the mist with their long and graceful necks raised. I was completely ready and had my camera with me. However, this morning the swans decided to stay on the other shore and they were sleeping not looking graceful at all!

I felt very disappointed and being so focused on the swans, I had forgotten to be OPEN to what was around me. The thought came to me that I had closed myself off from the morning by only focusing on the swans. As I turned around with those thoughts, I saw a leaf hanging from a tree, being held by the small thread of a spider's web, in the first rays of the sun. It was an UNexpected beautiful sight!

Welcome each moment and be OPEN to what it brings!

hanging leaf,

held neither by branch or wind,

but by the broken woven thread of another,

golden

in morning light.