I am animate.
I am an animal.
I am born from life and living,
And so, dear friend, are you.
Everything we experience reverberates with these truths.
Age and health; these days, my cells, and organs and muscles and bones are in a process of reorganisation. Faculties such as balance, sight and memory, once familiar and taken for granted, are increasingly fluid and unpredictable revealing our collaborative world-ing in new and wondrous ways. I feel kinship with Vimalakirti as the various sufferings of the world, or should we say the ‘growth spurts’ of the biosphere, reverberate in the workings of my body. I sense a symmetry in this. As an infant, my world was one of constant transformation and my life work was one of learning and relearning my body and it’s capacities in a living planetary process that seemed to be unimaginably vast and powerful. After puberty, things unwittingly settled into an assumed relatively stable continuum and, confident in our understanding of inter-beingness, we set about making a better world. Today, a new puberty and infancy is upon me and the rate of change is again accelerating. To survive, I need to continuously pay attention, learning this body, – this trikaya – again and again and yet again. The process seems endless; who I am now and what I’m capable of doing, and so, breath by breath we let go into something fundamental.
I am animate.
I am an animal.
I am born from life and living,
And so, dear friend, are you.
Everything we experience reverberates with these truths.
These days my geographic horizon has shrunk to a garden hermitage in the Bay of Plenty. The macadamia nuts are fattening. Ripe plums are dropping. Much of the vegetable garden is resting after a spring and early summer of bountiful growth. A thin trickle of people come to visit and enjoy some respite – a pause to remember – to refresh connection with this ever evolving, living mystery of birthing/dying that we are. All this, while internet messaging of calculated callusness, violence and neglect – these age old sagas of us and them-ism in myriad shapes and forms – remind us of suffering throughout the world.
I’m finding much of the news today whether political, social, or ecological, to be increasingly grim and disheartening. Granted, a certain amount of news can be enlivening – it can wake us up and realign and strengthen positive direction. But too much news of mindless exploitation, of rampant hatred, bigotry and madness beyond anything we could even dare to imagine is toxic to our bodies and our minds and ultimately to the world. With this come veils of blind forgetfulness, wilful ignorance, and stultifying finger pointing. Back in 1995, I birthed a poem that seems just as pertinent today as it did then.
My finger is pointing and my mouth is saying “ethics”
My finger is pointing , “Look at him and look at her.”
My finger is pointing and my mind feels very righteous.
My finger is pointing over here and over there.
My finger is pointing but it seems to be quite maddened,
It runs around in circles in a tanglement of parts.
My finger is pointing, it fascinates to watch it
My finger is pointing and it’s pointing to my heart.
My heart it seems is aching, it wants so much to care
Replaced by pointy finger, that scratches here and there.
It’s time to take that finger, and join it to a hand
To reach out with some goodness and help where helping can.
It’s time to see that ethics is not the finger part.
Its time to see that ethics rises only from the heart.
Given such a situation, which anyone reading this post will surely know and and to some degree painfully experience, I offer a potential antidote in the form of a bouquet of beautiful ‘mind’ flowers. Each blossom is very different, yet each of them can help us to remember our essential nature – our humanity, our capacity for forgiveness and love, for reverence and sublime gratitude.
Blossom #1
“Beethoven’s Ninth: Symphony for the World”
Liberation through music, the language that links all of us. This is a Youtube documentary that will surely pluck some deep strings and remind you of something truly precious. It can be found at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=il4N9v92T50>
Blossoms #2 and #3
We have recently added a new section to GDT called Sangha Sharings which can be found under ‘Resources’. Over the years, a growing number of people who have studied with me, are broadening their dharma explorations through actively sharing their skills and understanding with beings that comprise their local communities. In “Sangha Sharings” you will find writings of some of those people.
Blossom #2
Stillness, the Contemplative and Creativity
an essay by Bill Genat
With the humbleness of a serious practitioner and the clarity of an experienced university researcher, Bill reminds us of the heart of contemplative living. This essay is bound to be appreciated, both by thoughtful beings who are just beginning to explore meditation, and by more experienced people who are refining the craft of teaching contemplative arts to others.
Bill is a semi-retired professor in the field of Aboriginal public health. He lives with his partner Kathryn Shain near Melbourne, Australia.
Click here for Bill’s essay.
Blossom #3
Reflections on Aging, Words, and What is Meaningful
written by David French
Many of us are getting to the stage in life where memories are slipping and faculties are unpredictably failing. In the light of this, how does a dharma practitioner proceed? David, who is 84 years of age, crafted these reflections at the retirement community to which he recently moved in Vermont, after a long life of aspiring to help others, including working for the U.N. and other aid organizations in Africa and Asia.
Click here for David’s writing.
Blossom #4
A Seminar with Humberto Maturana
Through his writings, Chilean biologist, Humberto Maturana, has been a major source of inspiration throughout my many years of integrating Buddhist contemplative practice and ecological science. For me, he exemplifies the very heart of contemplative science as a path of natural awakening that emerges from the living process that we are. For those of you who delight in studying dharma through the language and metaphor of science, I have uploaded these eight classes on the Green Dharma Treasury Youtube site.
Click here for the full playlist.
This seminar was originally recorded on video tape and is not up to Youtube HD standards of today. However if you persevere through the occasional poor patches you will be rewarded with a master class in clear thinking about life and living and how we can make sense of the world particularly from an evolutionary perspective. Themes touched on include, the nature of scientific enquiry, autopoiesis, structural determinism, emotioning, languaging, the roll of culture, and the centrality of love in the process of evolution and particularly in the emergence of a fully functional loving human being.
For a more extensive study of his work, I recommend the following books:
The Tree of Knowledge (co-written with Francesco Varela)
The Origin of Humanness in the Biology of Love (co-written with Verden Zoller)
Autopoiesis and Cognition
From Being to Doing (a conversation between Maturana and Bernhard Poerksen)
Blossom #5
Luminous Presence: A Path of Bare Bones Awakening
This last blossom is an invitation for you to join us in a 16 day residential retreat at the Wangapeka Study and Retreat Centre from March 28 to April 13, 2025.
Click here for more information about the retreat and how to enrol.
There are no tricks, no shortcuts, no quick paths for realising a life of awakening. In some blessed way, we gather all the resources of our life; gradually learning the art of mingling interest and need, intellectual inquiry and feeling intuition, while all the time perfuming everything that we do with curiosity and wonderment – a life koan. Resting thus, the subtle teaching of mind practice is being learned. Releasing, arms open wide, heart warm, mind clear, the ordinary – as blessing – and we learn to live in the world we find, and come to do this well, with courage and luminous presence. Feeding the hungry, comforting the distressed, encouraging delicate shoots of goodness wherever and however we find them. May all beings be graced with opportunities for learning these sacred arts of wonderment and love.