家 人 Chia Jên

 On Saturday my granddaughter, the daughter of my oldest daughter, turned seven years old;
Oh !The apple of my eye.
And on Sunday I attended the wedding my good friend's son. Many years ago I went to this same friend's wedding while four years ago I  also attended his wife's funeral.
Ob La Di - Ob La Da.........
How often do we find ourselves seeing people that we really like and have truly missed only to see them at birthdays, weddings, and funerals?
Busy, busy, we are. And spread out too.
Family, friends, community. They really are precious resources.
And much of my weekend had me thinking about how important family is and about how my experience of family has changed. Family can be a true example of grace.
Gaia Girl shed tears as we watched the father and the bride dance while for me, I felt a little anger at having been forced to keep away from my daughter's recent wedding. Life is so short.
Tears and anger should be short lived.

Chicken in the big house

TaoSpring - Chickens, potatoes, stew and trivia

 I know that it sounds derogatory but I assure you, we love Little Fattie. She is loud, brash and full of personality. Just like those girls from Jersey.
We're up to a dozen eggs a day now. The two Barnevelders that we introduced about six weeks ago? They segregate themselves like they're too good for the rest of the hen house. They strut about like a pair of aristocrats and stay so close to the coop and roost that they get top bunk most nights. They really threw the pecking order into a spin by their arrival. They're supposed to be great birds to have but I'm not sure I even like them! I imagine them wearing fancy coats and powdered wigs expecting preferential treatment.

 We harvested the last of the peppers and potatoes. The eggs and the V-dub bus sat quietly watching the scrub and dry process.
Last night we went to the local pub and joined in for a night of trivia. First timers, me and Pants were. I think it was the beards that did it. And damn! Does my face look fat! Gah!

I stacked wood today, fed and watered the girls, and tended to the new meat birds. They have tripled in size in less than two weeks. I tried to get up some of the leaves but the heavy rains from last week matted the leaves into the still very green grass. By noon the sun had warmed up the day into the low 60's so I took the Ghia out for a ride and looked for a present for my granddaughter who turns 7 soon. I quickly decided that a stack of one dollar bills should work just fine.



The day came to a close with chicken stew, cornbread muffins and an open fire. Flame, flame - crackle, crackle. Gaia Girl had a very busy day. She should be rewarded with a the full comfort of TaoSpring. And by that restful look on her face, a full tummy, and the glow from the 1977 Vermont Castings, I think my job here is done..............

Prayer

I was a man of prayer. In time, as my "beliefs" became less concrete, I knew that I did not know. The more knowledge that I gained the more I realized that I really knew nothing at all. And I also began to realize that I was not alone in this realization. I found it to be a very universal rung on the well traveled spiritual ladder. As Lewis Carroll once quipped, "If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there."
Prayer began to cease as I found that I no longer knew who or what to pray to. Almighty God, Heavenly Father, Lord Jesus? It felt so woefully inadequate. My view of God became more like that of the experience of Tao:

The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named is not the eternal name
The nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth
The named is the mother of myriad things
Thus, constantly without desire, one observes its essence
Constantly with desire, one observes its manifestations
These two emerge together but differ in name
The unity is said to be the mystery
Mystery of mysteries, the door to all wonders

What name could be named?


I began to pray like breath; natural and rhythmic. My prayers were built of gratitude, of asking for wisdom and compassion.  I did not question the vehicle of my transcendence. For doing so would be like stopping mid-dance in an attempt to investigate my dance moves. Or like stopping a song only to concentrate on a single note. Oh my delusion! Prayer? God?


Many mornings, as the sun rose over the trees and the birds began to move with the unseen rhythm of the day, I would find myself singing a doxology; 

Praise God, from whom all blessings flow

Praise him, all creatures here below.

Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

Amen, Amen.

I sang free of belief and with the sheer joy of it. It illuminated something within me. Saying that you believe in God or saying that you are an atheist are just two sides of the same coin. Both are belief. Yet there is that which exists beyond the limits of belief: it is a knowing. And you know that you know. It is a realization that lies beyond description and belief.


Is this God? Tao? It's laughable! Do you need to name it?

As Krishnamurti said, "I maintain that truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. This is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead ot to coerce people along any particular path. If you first understand that, then you will see how impossible it is to organize a belief. A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organize it. If you do, it becomes dead, crystallized; it becomes a creed, a sect, a religion, to be imposed on others".

Tracie's Farm

http://www.traciesfarm.com/

TaoSpring - Meat Birds

Here they are!!!

Our Jumbo Cornish birds arrived via the post today. We received the call this morning and within minutes they were here. Cute as buttons and closely examined by our two cats, they quickly settled down to eating, drinking and taking comfort under the heat lamp. A week or so before Christmas they will be sitting pretty in the freezer. Recently this little ditty was found in a news paper:

Outside, our brood is fairing well and we're up to ten eggs a day with fifteen birds. The Fort Seuss/TaoSpring/ Pallet coop withstood the wind and the rain of hurricane Irene and methinks a good old fashioned New England winter will be just what the Dr. ordered to break in the coop sufficiently. 

I am planning a hive in the future. I have a natural affinity for bees and with my planned expansion of raised bed gardens it will be advantageous.
While this has been a good autumn weather wise, wood needs to be stockpiled in anticipation of whatever the winter may bring. Meanwhile, my son in law will be leaving for a third tour of duty, this time in Afghanistan, the day after thanksgiving. My daughter will need to learn much about home-ownership and independence, something she severely lacks, as they're in a new home and there is wood to be burned, snow to be shoveled, plowed and pushed and with just her and the dog and two cats, adjustment abounds.

Tonight I made a zuchinni lasagna. Halfway through the layering of it I realized that the baking dish was too small. I flipped it into a bigger one and found that one also to be a little on the wee side too. But it smells and looks delicious. No front cover material but we will feast well nonetheless.

Adjustment abounds..........

Increasing awareness: The undetermined mind

I've spoken before about having an undetermined mind; A mind focused and aware: that understands and experiences life like a person climbing a staircase in the dark. Where each stair lights when you step on it and not before. No looking up at the top stair or looking two stairs ahead. It's one stair at a time. It is a state determined not by desire or aversion but through the clear force of equanimity.
But to get there I determined, (no pun intended) arrival at having an undetermined mind, or awareness, comes via a very determined awareness. An awareness with intention. Tools such as meditation are often used as an aid to help increase our level of awareness. Martial arts, dance, playing music, acts that produce a forgetting of the self, can help us to experience the now in its fullness. With practice, we slowly empty the cup of self focused mind and there is just, "Look". That is why we practice. For those times when life can get messy. Our suffering is lessened through a mind that takes one stair at a time - An acceptance and a non-judging view of the present moment.
But along with our practice comes a continual deepening. It's not like we just come to a place of heaven and we're all given halos and harps. Our practice allows us to push through to greater depths of wisdom, compassion and stillness. Once, the stress of losing a relationship stretched the bounds of our equanimity. Later, perhaps the loss of a job; a death, a divorce. We must press on and experience our This Being Human and see what it has for us.
Last night I was driving upon the road and had to pull to the side for an oncoming ambulance. Not an unusual occurrence mind you, but following closely behind was a police cruiser with it's blue lights on. There are times that I lock my basement door from the outside as I have done a million times before. What do these two experiences have in common? The pain of suicide. It insidiously slithers through your mind as an ugly viper. Multiple threats, cuttings and attempts are etched upon my mind. I guess they achieved their purpose: guilt, powerlessness, fear. Fear that it is her in that ambulance. Fear that I would find her in the basement. The volume of emotion that I would feel if in fact she were to succeed scares me deeply. I fear the ignition of a nuclear explosion. People who know nothing yet have inserted themselves into our relationship like some expert on our marriage and divorce. You who have been in my house less than five times and have plied my wife with alcoholic ambition.
People talk about moving on and I am comforted in knowing that the pain of divorce is universal although through the process you truly do feel all alone. But to move on, truly move on, you just do it. It is hard. No shit. But I like to think of the analogy of the Space Shuttle. At lift off, the greatest amount of power and strength is required at the start to have the Shuttle lift-off, move on. During the first two minutes of flight the two rocket boosters produce over 80% of the thrust needed to move the Shuttle closer to weightlessness. After the rockets are jettisoned there is still much work to be done to push her into position enabling the Shuttle to break through those last layers of atmosphere. Then, at long last she pushes through to orbit where she begins her move into Earth's gravity.
It is hard at the start: requiring all your strength to move on. There is a reason why they say that time heals all wounds. But time will not do it all. Moving on requires something of you. Thrust, power, might and intention. Or we can do nothing at all and we'll find ourselves stuck in anger and remorse finding our conversations littered with talk of divorce, pain, sadness.
TaoSpring is my moving on.
Stay tuned.

The Kings desire

The Love of money is the root of all evil - The Bible