Green Dharma Treasury — The web-library of Tarchin Hearn

Deep Roots and Fearless Compassion

by Tarchin Hearn on June 1, 2011

I read the following two paragraphs during a recent weekend retreat in Auckland and it seemed to touch people deeply. One of the participants asked that it be put on Green Dharma Treasury, hence this posting. The writing was originally part of an extensive e-mail reply to some questions about using anger in compassionate ways. It’s not uncommon today for people to aspire to explore dharma and to live awarely and compassionately and yet to experience frustration when people they care for don’t seem to value and cultivate these same interests. Our friends, or relatives, or co-workers, might appear to be asleep or hypnotised and we, the frustrated dharma practitioner, sometimes get irritated and (out of compassion!) want to break through the dullness in order to wake them up. There is even a category within Buddhism to describe this and it’s called wrathful or fierce compassion. I wanted to shine a different light on such situations and the following words arose.

Dear (you might like to fill in your own name here)
You are a tree. If your experience of roots is shallow and the wind is strong, you need to be very flexible and accommodating in order not to be blown down. You bend with every little puff, and that can be tiresome, and tiresomeness breeds irritability. You restrict the growth of your leaves and branches so that your small public face can be secure with your small hidden roots. If you feel your roots running vast and deep, even if the wind is threatening, you can be very strong and upright and you still will not be blown away. The deeper your roots, the broader can be your branches (and the more numerous your leaves and the heavier and richer your fruit). Trees with deep roots might not bend as much as trees with shallow roots but trees with deep roots provide support and stability for more shallow rooted plants that grow all around and hang epiphytically from bark and limbs.

Fierce compassion is not about using anger in compassionate ways. Fierce compassion is actually fearless compassion. (The word padma, in the mantra of Guru Rinpoché, represents “fearless compassion”.) Fearless compassion arises from deep rootedness; an experiential knowing of oneness and embeddedness in life. This is a richness of being and natural engagement that leaves nothing and no-one out – that is profoundly inclusive. With fearless compassion there is less fussing and concern for ‘self’ and more a tendency to stabilize and provide supportive inspiration for others. Using anger/ill-will or directing anger for compassionate reasons is the action of a shallow rooted tree. The tree with deep roots may stand uncompromising, implacable, upright and strong, and that may be felt by more shallow rooted ones as threatening, but the steadfastness of the deep, broad rooted one, ultimately stabilizes the earth and air and water content for all around and so in the end, such a being will be appreciated for their integrity.

Praise for “Becoming Animal”

by Tarchin Hearn on April 20, 2011

Praise for Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology
written by David Abram, published by Pantheon Books, 2010

“Magic doesn’t sweep you away; it gathers you up into the body of the present moment so thoroughly that all your explanations fall away: the ordinary, in all its plain and simple outrageousness, begins to shine – to become luminously, impossibly so. Every facet of the world is awake, and you within it.”

These are words by David Abram in his most recent book, Becoming Animal. (Some of you will have read his The Spell of the Sensuous that came out in the mid 90s.) Becoming Animal is a glorious sadhana for becoming truly human(e) and rediscovering our membership in and with the living community of earth. The entire book is a song of awakening, that frequently draws on his rich and personal experiences, both with non-human creatures and humans. His writing, which often flows like a great braided river of poetry, opens up fresh understandings of perception, language and the workings of mind, and places them right in the midst of communally lived embodied life.

Here are a few excerpts to give you a feeling for his style.

“When we allow that mind is a luminous quality of the earth, we swiftly notice this consequence: each region – each topography, each uniquely patterned ecosystem – has its own particular awareness, its unique style of intelligence. Certainly the atmosphere, the translucent medium of exchange between the breathing bodies of any locale, is subtly different in each terrain. The air of the coastal northwest of North America, infused with salt spray and the tang of spruce, cedar, and fir needles, tastes and feels different from the air shimmering in the heat of the Southwest desert. Each atmosphere imparts its vibrance to those who partake of it, and hence the black-gleamed ravens who carve loops through the desert sky speak a different dialect of squawks and guttural cries than the cedar-perched ravens of the Pacific Northwest, whose vocal arguments are often instilled with liquid tones. Likewise, the atmosphere that rolls over the Great Plains, gathering now and then into swirling tornadoes, contrasts vividly with the blustering winds that pour through the Rocky Mountain passes, and still more with the mists that advance and recede along the California coast. The specific geology of place yields a soil rich in particular minerals, and the rains and rivers that feed those soils invite a unique blend of grasses, shrubs, and trees to take root there. These, in turn, beckon particular animals to browse their leaves, or to eat their fruits and distribute their seeds, to pollinate their blossoms or to find shelter among their roots, and thus a complexly intertwined community begins to emerge, bustling and humming within itself. Every such community percolates a different chemistry into the air that animates it, joining whiffs and subtle pheromones to the drumming of woodpeckers and the crisscrossing hues of stones and leaf and feather that echo back and forth through that terrain, while the way these elements blend is affected by the noon heat that beats down in some regions, or the frigid cold that hardens the ground in others.

“Each place has its rhythms of change and metamorphosis, its specific style of expanding and contracting in response to the turning seasons, and this, too, shapes – and is shaped by – the sentience of that land. Whether we speak of a broad mountain range or of a small valley within that range, at each scale there is a unique intelligence circulating among the various constituents of the place – a style evident in the way events unfold in that ecosystem, how the slow spread of a mountain’s shadow alters the insect swarms above a cool stream, or the way a forested slope rejuvenates itself after a fire. For the precise amalgam of elements that structures each region exists nowhere else. Each place, that is to say, is a unique state of mind, and the many powers that constitute and dwell within that locale – the spiders and the tree frogs no less than the humans – all participate in and partake of, the particular mind of the place.

Later, he says,
“Of course, I am writing of these earthly elements, or moods, from an entirely human perspective. Indeed, I’m writing from the subjective perspective of a single human creature – myself. Nonetheless, I write with the knowledge that there cannot help but be some overlap between the direct, visceral experience and the felt experience of other persons – whose senses, after all, have much in common with my own. Moreover, I’ve confidence that my bodily experience is a variation, albeit in many cases a very distant variation, of what other, non-human, bodies may experience in the same locale in that season, at a similar moment of the day or night. For not only are our bodies kindred (all mammals, for instance, sharing a common ancestry), but also we are all of us, at the present moment, interdependent constituents of a common biosphere, each of us experiencing it from our own angle, and with our own specific capabilities, yet nonetheless, all participant in the round of life of the earth, and hence subject to the same large-scale flows, rhythms, and tensions that move across the wider life.

“The world we inhabit is not in this sense, a determinable set of objective processes. It is our larger flesh, a densely intertwined and improvisational tissue of experience. It is a sensitive sphere suspended in the solar wind, a round field of sentience sustained by the relationships between the myriad lives and sensibilities that compose it. We come to know more of this sphere not by detaching ourselves from our felt experience, but by inhabiting our bodily experience all the more richly and wakefully, feeling our way into deeper contact with other, experiencing bodies, and hence with the wild, intercorporeal life of the earth itself.”

Becoming Animal is one of the most beautifully written and inspiring books I’ve come across for a long time. It evokes a rich intermeshing, a kind of synaesthesia, of sensing, empathizing, and intuitive understanding. Each page exudes the perfume of profound reverence for life. From a Buddhist perspective, Becoming Animal points to a practice of kayanupassana (awareness of the body and a deepening appreciation for the mystery of embodiment) taken to a very broad and rarely appreciated level of refinement. It points to our rediscovering our living relationship with all beings both animate and inanimate, which is something we desperately need to bring back into focus in order to creatively move with the many ecological, social, political and economic problems that face us today.

This is not a book to read in a hurry. It’s a treasure of contemplations to have with you in retreat or on the lived journey of your life. You could think of it as a kind of puja, a daily remembering to question and notice and actively participate in the vast mysterious community of unfolding creatureliness, that is what we all are.

Paraphrasing Abram’s words; “Becoming Animal doesn’t sweep you away; it gathers you up into the body of the present moment so thoroughly that all your explanations fall away: the ordinary, in all its plain and simple outrageousness, begins to shine – to become luminously, impossibly so. Every facet of the world is awake, and you within it.”

Enjoy!

Earthquakes and Living Dharma

by Tarchin Hearn on March 12, 2011

March 12, 2011, 10am
Orgyen Hermitage, N.Z.

As you may have heard there has been a huge earthquake in Japan accompanied by catastrophic tsunamis. We have had word from Doug Sensei and John Munroe that our sangha friends there are okay. Right now, less that 24 hours since the earthquake struck, the situation in parts of Japan is dire. Our hearts and empathy go to everyone there.

Here in New Zealand, folks in Christchurch and increasingly throughout the country, are still moving with aftershocks, geological, social and economic, propelled into depth of being and becoming that few would voluntarily ask for, yet is life affirmingly real.

Please look around you. Everything you see is alive – this living dharma. Everything you see is extraordinarily delicate, ephemeral and unique. Look deeply into that leaf, that child, that neighbor, that cricket, that bird on the fence and that mould growing on the edge of the compost bucket. Whatever you see, it involves a whole universe of growing and supporting. Worlds of lived experience interbeing with worlds of living otherness. We shape each other. We live for, and with, and in, and through each other, and still, our understanding is so meager. Breathe for a few moments opening into that extraordinary place of receptivity and silent waiting. Allow your grief, your awe, your sense of wonderment and reverence to bless you with nameless grace. Then touch that leaf, that child, that neighbor, that cricket, bird and mould, with love and gratitude. We are alive – and we live for each other.

may we all unfold together in love
with warm good wishes
Tarchin and Mary

A Story of Stories

by Tarchin Hearn on January 31, 2011

A Story of Stories
© Tarchin Hearn Dec./00
revised and extended Jan. 2011

MY FATHER USED to make up fabulous bedtime stories for my brother, sister and I. He would craft a particular theme for each of us which continued, sometimes for weeks or months. I had stories from Greek and Norse myths, along with occasional tales of gothic horror told in a risqué tongue in cheek manner that always led to release in laughter. My brother had swashbuckling adventures with pirates and my sister had an amazing series placed in ancient China with a magic princess, dragons and a character named Wung Ping. These were an important part of my childhood. I was lucky to have such a gifted story telling dad.

Story telling is not merely for entertainment. We are constantly telling ourselves stories, interior verbalizings, daydreamings, enactments and re-enactments of situations that have happened and ones that might happen. By and large, story telling is the way we humans give meaning, context, and a moral or ethical dimension to events. It’s our homo sapient way of making sense of relationships, the world and the universe we find ourselves in. Of course, we often become so entranced with a particular story that we believe it to be solid fact if not ‘Eternal Truth’. The story tellers of today have found lucrative professions in media, advertising and education. They regale us with tales of consumption leading to happiness, of the moral necessity of progress and the naturalness of devoting huge amounts of our lives to worrying about money. Most of the plots unfold in a mechanistic universe where only humans have a soul or consciousness and where the rest of nature exists primarily for the purpose of sustaining human beings and more specifically oneself and one’s immediate family group. Exaggerated tales, which are closer to fantasies, are narrated in sombre and serious tones about unlimited growth and development. This, in spite of being part of a limited planet with finite resources. Stories we don’t like to hear are dismissed as propaganda or proselytising. Stories we like to hear we call common sense and the way of the world

Science too has its stories though they are usually called theories. The word comes from the Greek theoria which originally meant spectacle or view and gave rise to the word theatre. Most of the time good old fashioned, but still powerfully active, hubris makes it difficult for us to accept that the scientific ‘facts’ of today will likely morph into the art and archetype, the myths and legends of tomorrow. The idea that the myths we associate with ancient civilisations might have been regarded in their day as generally accepted fact, on par with today’s scientific fact, strikes us as deluded or at least rather quaint; symptoms of a simpler and more primitive age. If humans survive the next two thousand years, I wonder what they will think of our current views of the universe and our human place in it.

Story-making is a living process and we need to constantly re-examine and refresh it, allowing our stories to evolve and keep pace with our actual experience of the world. One of the oldest human stories is the story of “The Beginning”. I’d like to have a go at telling it in my own fashion. Perhaps it will entertain you. Even better, it might inspire a new way of being.

CYBERSPACE IS NOT an ideal place for story telling. It’s too sterile. Our experience is curtailed by software constraints and screen limitations. We can’t feel the weight of our father sitting close to us on the edge of the bed. We can’t feel his warmth and caring. We can’t smell him or feel him startle at a sudden change in the pace of the action. The opportunity to weave the sound of a bird outside the window or a clatter of a pot falling in the kitchen into the ongoing flow of the story never arises. Never-the-less, let’s try. As you read these words, please use your imagination to help set the scene, for the real beginning is a story of great magic and mystery.

A camp fire is crackling. Flames are leaping and dancing, throwing sparks and shadows against the surrounding rocks and trees, pushing back the evening chill while above and around float uncountable diamond clear stars clothing us all in a garment of vastness.

You sit out
at night
under the stars

The milky way
winding herself
around the
bowl of the world
like a starry shawl of caring,

And the river
sings in your cells

And the earth scent
floods your brain

And the near zero air
pricks your surfaces
into fresh awakeness
And the mystery
sounds symphonies
of reverence and love
weaving messages of meaning.

This moment
this blessed moment
this always available intimacy

Illumined in the dark.

An owl hoots in the distance and another replies. The sound of the river blends with the passing whirl of insect wings and the murmur of leaves gently rustling in the trees. Come nearer my friends. Sit close. Wrap yourselves in your blankets, hot chocolates in hand, and I will tell you how this all began.

The beginning is actually more extravagant and fantastic than most beings ever imagine. More awesome than the big bang. More powerfully magical than any act of creation. It is so simple yet so extremely elusive, for the beginning, my friends, is now! And ‘now’ involves a huge amount of not knowing and a vast expanse of never to be known.

The beginning is now. The end is now.

Isn’t it interesting that the difference between now and know is just one ‘k’.
‘K’ or ka is the Sanskrit syllable for space, the sound of the raven.
So ‘now’ with lots of space, a spacious nowing – is knowing!

Within now/know, our story unfolds. The past is now. The future is now. Our story is shaping and reshaping, moment by moment. It is shaped by our DNA, by geo-tectonic pressures and dissipating heat. It is shaped by the lap of waves on the shore, the warming of summer sun, the infinite pushes and pulls of hungers and satisfactions. The story is shaped by cultures and teachings and cosmic events. It is shaped by hopes and fears and the creative attempts of myriad organisms to survive. This story is shaped by the experience that is all of me –– bumps and lumps, inspirations and burstings of beauty, gross stupidities and common banalities, neurophysiologies and musculoskeletal dancings, inner and outer, micro and macro, –– all of me being shaped by the experience which is all of you, a mutual crafting; an unending flow of creation.

The story is also flavoured with expectations. Expectations of the atom looking for an electron to share; of the tree, reaching up through the undergrowth, seeking light; of the psychic masochist expecting to always fail; of the obsessive controller seeing a universe needing control. The story is a revealing of views and understandings. A view of evolution, a struggle towards greater refinement and complexity; a view of survival of the fittest; a view of co-operative co-creation. As the story changes, everything changes. A beginning, before now, is a plotline device to serve and justify the present action. An end, after now, is a theatrical convention giving the patrons what they’ve come to expect. Suffering arises in not seeing we are caught in a story of our own making. Suffering arises in not seeing our story is also the making of others. It also arises when we believe the story should be fixed for all time and we struggle to keep it so and to get others to keep it so.

Artful spider that I am
Waiting in the golden web to catch my dinner now.
I spin connections all around
The twig, the step, the gutter strong,
Then thread to thread
A brilliant maker of connections
that I am.

And gradually the sky grows dim
the threads to cloth and fabric strong,
my mind arranged around me fast
Like laundry hanging out to dry.

The web grows thick, a ball of yarn and I
in centre, yarning still, entangle
all the spacious things
And trap myself within my yarning story.

In this tiny globe of imagined campfire light, surrounded by stars of possibility and the vast darkness of yet to be known and yet to be told, pause and feel the texture and rhythm of your breathing.

Please do this right now. Look up from the screen or the page and take as much time as you need. Breathing in and breathing out, gradually relax your body and allow all your senses to be open, alert, and responsive.

Widen the gaze of your knowing, the gaze of your nowing, to include everything that is happening around you and within you. Eyes seeing myriad colours and forms – shifting, changing, dancing, standing solid. Ears hearing myriad sounds – the subtle rhythms of rain on the roof, the wind in the trees, the harmonics pulsing in the sound of city traffic. Nose, tongue and body, savouring smells, and tastes, and responding to a huge variety of tactile sensations. Notice the panorama of thoughts and mental activity; stray random arisings associated with ‘yesterday’; feelings, judgements, fantasies and imaginings –– huge dollops of implication and meaning plastered all over each object of sensing, sometimes plastered so thickly that the object disappears from view and all we have left are our cherished desires and opinions.

Stay with your breathing –– very still inside. Eventually you will merge into a lucid awakeness, a spacious play of knowing that knows no limits, yet ‘sees’ translucent shimmering outlines of infinite distinction. Form in emptiness. Unity in diversity. Wherever you are, right now, appreciate the unbroken fluidity, the wondrous creative patterning, the dance of knowing that is you in this very moment. Each conscious being is a story teller, weaving magus magic in the infinite warp and weft of Being. Each conscious being is a character in the story of their own telling.

NOW, BEFORE WE get carried too far into poetic imagery, take a few more moments to notice something that is so obvious that many people can live their entire lives without ever appreciating it. Notice how, in a very ordinary and natural way, you experience the world of inner and outer sensations as three dimensional or, if you include time, four dimensional, with ‘you’ somewhere near the centre. Turn your head and look around. It feels like a real world with depth and dimension, yet photons, not trees and houses, are entering your eyes. This is your universe and it is rich and vast and filled with meanings that, when examined in detail, are utterly unique to you. This is your knowing; not anyone else’s and it is a knowing that is a living technicolour wrap-around experience; a virtual reality we usually assume to be the reality.

This knowing, this saga, this story, constantly ripples and reflects back on itself, adjusting and reinterpreting the earlier building blocks to suit present needs. Then it shoots forward again, reshaping the goal in order to make sense of the action to date. This is the story of push and the story of pull and the light in the trees, the sound of the stream and the birds chattering in the bushes. It is the story of me and the story of you. It’s even the story of stories. The objects we see are not separate from the ‘meaning’ we give to them. The ‘meaning’ is a reflection of our own understandings which continuously modify our sensing of the object, bending the world of perception to our own, largely unconscious, needs and wishes.

Feeling the stories
Running from far away places
Dreaming . . . Oh the vastness of the dreaming!

Perhaps our task is to be storytellers
Not custodians of the ancient lore
but creators of future lore
The stories we tell is the world
our children will see . . .

Realising that we inhabit a vast miraculous universe of seeing, hearing smelling, touching, tasting and thinking is rare enough but here is another simple yet challenging thought. Consider the possibility that we don’t so much inhabit such a universe as we are this universe. Consider that every object in your field of perception is, within its own experience, an equally vast universe of sense and meaning. Experiment with living the next 24 hours with some degree of awareness that every other person you see is also experiencing themself as the centre of a universe of sense and meaning that they, like almost every other being, assume to be the one real universe. How strange! How rarely thought about! The you that I see is very different than the experience you are having of yourself.

Try sitting with a group of people and all of you simultaneously examine a particular object. Then have each person describe what they are experiencing. It will become obvious that there are as many ‘seeings’ of the object as there are people. If you then include the trees and birds, the worms and micro-organisms and fish in the sea, you may discover the Great Ocean of Stories. Stories within stories shaping stories; a universe of intelligence shaping itself. With this kind of experience we might begin, as Thomas Berry so eloquently put it, to cease thinking of the universe as a collection of objects and begin to experience it as a communion of subjects. (“The Great Work” by Thomas Berry p 16)

In one sense, what we are considering here might seem intellectually obvious but intellectually obvious can be quite different from experientially obvious. The difference is like reading a Lonely Planet Guide about a country you haven’t visited, compared to actually living there. The Tibetan teacher, Kalu Rinpoché used to say that meditation was more a matter of acclimatisation than anything else. Try acclimatising to this way of being that sees a universe filled with sensing, feeling, intelligences who’s subjective experiences become factors shaping one’s own subjective existence. This is very different from a universe of senseless, sometimes inanimate objects where I alone, often very alone, am the only ‘sensible’ being around. Where all other objects are seen only in the context of how they affect me. Are they a threat? Can they be utilised? Will they augment me? Will they diminish me? Where they are primarily things – objects to be manipulated or controlled.

Look deeply and sensitively at a friend, at strangers on the street, at your cat, at the bird perched on the branch outside your window and realise that they are each experiencing a vast cohesive universe, every bit as complete and as meaningful as the universe that is uniquely yours. All these stories are interpenetrating and interrelating without obstruction. The scholars of the middle ages used to ask, how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. We might ask, how many universes can dance in the story of your mind?

A number of years ago, during a forest-walk meditation at Wangapeka, I ‘saw’ in a very fresh way. We were moving along the path, coming out from the trees, into the open space by the pagoda. I was in a very tranquil state, wonderstruck by the dancing of the senses, weaving a continuously birthing now. I thought for a moment of how rich in colour, texture, sound, smell, and tactile sensation the world is. I thought for a moment how all of this was arising in my experience in a unique and wondrous way. As we turned a corner, I glimpsed the other meditators walking mindfully in a long drawn out line and suddenly I ‘saw’ that inside each of their brains was assembling a universe as rich and complete, (and ultimately unknowable to me), as the universe that I was so richly appreciating. My mind opened to sensing all these different ‘worlds’, bobbing up and down walking the uneven pathway. Worlds containing worlds. Worlds reverberating in and with other worlds.

I saw a Tui alight in a tree and call forth its beautiful bell-like notes and I sensed a world of Tui assembling in its brain. The gum trees swayed in the breeze and I saw that they too were experiencing a world that was unique and meaningful within the context of gum tree experience. Once this began, the contemplation stayed with me for the next three weeks. Now, merely by remembering it, I sense a world of interpenetrating universes; the fox gloves, the beech trees, the mountains, the river, the clouds, the rabbits, the keyboard under my fingertips, the strangers on the bus.

So where does this story of stories begin and where does it end. It is beginning and ending continuously in myriad moments, in myriad minds. A universe of infinite intelligence. Each part is an alive whole, contributing to every other living knowing part. Being such a universe invites a knowing that has no need to grasp at absolute beginnings and ends. This is life appreciating itself.

I wake
Spontaneously sprung from the foaming of see.
My history’s fresh as I bake it each morning.
Mourning the death of a life barely lived
constantly reaching and where is it going
this nectar of knowing
this potion of caring.

Mobious strips turning slowly in space
The stories loop backwards
Radiating wonderment to all ears that hear
Love from the heart
heart filled with grace
this is my face.

And so, my friends, we come to the end of our story of stories. The fire in your heart is still crackling and dancing, radiating in all directions, filling the world with the light of understanding which, in turn, creates the shadows of your own hopes and fears. The light then shrinks inward, plunging everything into darkness which becomes it’s own strange kind of illumination, no light, no shadows, an immensity of unknowing, a space of immeasurable wonderment. The rocks and trees and stars, the schools of fish and the micro-organisms in the soil, the people in the flat next door, everyone and everything are themselves other modes of knowing that dance with our stories; stories within stories, mingling and merging, syncopations of earth poetry and song, together creating the universe symphony –– this one great Ode to Joy.

THE MOST IMPORTANT CRITERIA for stories, be they very individual and personal, or the shared stories of a culture, is not whether or not they are true but whether or not they are functional. Stories of isolation and solitude, desperately grasping a universe of objects in an attempt to settle fear and end loneliness; how useful are such stories? Do they help to sustain life in all its richness? Are stories of intelligent, righteous me and unintelligent everyone else very functional? Are stories of intelligent humans and sub-intelligent everything else very functional? We need a new story, a story much vaster and more inclusive than that of one struggling hero called ‘me’ or even called humanity, trying to survive in a world of danger, obstruction and fundamental entropy. Every object is the hero of its own dreams. Each part of my body, every part of the world, is intelligence unfolding. Each story contains every other story. Waking up to this changes everything.

In Praise of Aimless Contemplation

by Tarchin Hearn on November 30, 2010

Notes of a Dharma Farmer © Tarchin Hearn, Green Dharma Treasury, 2010

When away from our land; travelling, teaching, living in cities and on the road, I read, I study and I am seduced by microscopes and telescopes and imaging technologies that reveal worlds of creative activity that are often outside the range of my unaided senses. Yet, as a gardener, an important part of my work, actually an essential part, involves wandering aimlessly on and through the land, with senses open; observing, listening, smelling, touching, and tasting. Standing and surveying a meadow of grasses and wild flowers. An orchard. A mound of potatoes. A row of carrots. Getting closer; kneeling in the earth, down on all fours. Not-knowing, – just inexplicably interested. Woven in. Becoming part. Entering this family. Welcoming in – all the members.

In the midst of this blessed joining, come occasional specific impulses for action, an urge to do. And so, I do! A flurry of activity. A whirl of busyness. The leviathan throws around his crude clumsy vastness; a great oaf in a museum of delicacy. Eventually, the weather front of impulse passes. Winds of desire and compulsion subside, and the sun of rest and rightness warms my bones. I feel a bit fatigued. I put down my doing and again wander along the path, and sometimes off the path. Off the path is good. Ha! What is that yellow? A new flower? I hadn’t noticed that one before. Bending closer, seeing flecks of red and myriad dewy magnifiers. Tiny hairs and delicate fragrance colouring my mind, texturing the fields of knowing. Studying the soil, the various neighbours; a carnival, a pilgrimage, a convocation. This wild and elegant community. Did it just appear? or, have I been walking by it, oblivious, for days?

Meditation can be like this. A dharma farmer of the meditative life, at least a wise green thumbed and fingered dharma farmer, spends much time wandering aimlessly; bemused in this orchard of wonder. A daily practice of worship and reverence. Wandering forth and freshly touching the myriad creatures and beings that together, are weaving into existence the garden of one’s experience. I need to do this frequently, just as I need to frequently wander on the land. Once a week is not enough, nor is once a day. Within this seeming patchwork quilting of discrete events, I sense a continuity of happening that slips deftly away from all my attempts to grasp it. Here is a skin pattern, a muscle tension; a texture of attentiveness, of being and becoming. Sensing a shiver of thought, I kneel with it and marvel at the feelings and memories, the soil textures and shifting climates of body and mind. My daily wandering is unscheduled; no particular agenda. I’m on holiday – every day a wholyday! Loafing in the fields of nowness. Bowled over by what I find. Was it already here? If so, how is it I never saw it before?

Dharma farmering and two-acre farmering are similar disciplines. Mostly reverence, care-filled observing, astonishment and gentle, loving, bafflement in the face of life in all its fecundity, its grandeur, its tear popping, intellect challenging, impossibility. Then, rippling through all of this, a need to do precipitates a flurry of digging, pruning, or composting; changing the landscapes, stirring dust, and accelerating the shifting of worlds.

Reflecting further on this natural impulse to activity. In a garden, the desire to do can be part of a deep yearning to immerse oneself in the ultimate creative venture, a dancing that weaves together the living gifts of everything and everyone; life-lines of creatureliness flowing with and through and around each other; conversations of becoming – world making in action. Deep contemplation is also like this; a blessing of communion, a reverential participation in something mysterious and beyond.

I enjoy watering the garden. I find it healing and strangely satisfying. Other creatures that make up our garden: plants, birds, insects and soil critters; even the earth and air, seem to enjoy it too. Some well meaning friends have urged me to install reticulated water systems. They say I could use my time more creatively, but I like standing and waving the hose, a life moistening contemplation. Meditation has a similar feel. I pour attention and wonderment and kind appreciation on the wildly blossoming garden of now. And all the while, I notice things. I contemplate the intertwining lives of myriad beings and becomings, each of us environment for the other, all of us dancing and breathing together this mystery of existence, our ancient tryst of belongingness.

Meditation and gardening , both require a relaxing of rush; a valuing of the meander; a willingness to pause and then to head in new and sometimes unexpected directions. Both thrive best with frequent ‘aimless’, wonder filled contemplative observation; watering the flowerings of appreciation for living and relating – a mystery too big to grasp but not too big to be. Action emerges from this deep well of recognition and respect – a homing instinct calling us into life. Good gardening and good meditation are cornucopias, universes of edible bounty, inviting all beings to partake in the banquet. Me food for you. You food for me. Us food for everyone.

May this food be prepared in the space of love
and may it be eaten in the space of love.

A Student of the Earth

by Tarchin Hearn on November 30, 2010

Notes of a Dharma Farmer © Tarchin Hearn, Green Dharma Treasury, 2010

You are the soil of my being.
I am the soil of your being.
We are the ground support of each other.
A good farmer is someone who grows soil.
A good farmer is a student of the earth.
A good farmer is the land looking after itself.
The same things could be said of a student of dharma.

For the last 15 years, Mary and I have been associated with 2 acres of land on the eastern lea of the Kaimai Range, a few kilometres southwest of Katikati, in New Zealand. When we first saw this small section, cut off from a larger farm by a land owner who needed quick cash, it was a neglected cow paddock with mixed grasses, copious amounts of blackberry and clumps of intimidating gorse. We began planting native trees for wind shelter and found the soil to be amazingly compacted – nary an earthworm to be seen. Underneath five centimetres of hard, grass-root matted top soil, the light-brown volcanic ash seemed to go on forever. We found out later that the substance of our land fell from the sky about 26,500 years ago. In those distant times, a volcanic eruption blew a massive hole in the centre of Aotearoa creating the lake known today as Taupo, and raining ash to the north and east to depths, in places, of tens of metres.

We planted native trees and shrubs on half the property, choosing plants that birds like to eat and nest in. We let the gorse (which fixes nitrogen) and blackberry run wild, doing only the minimum to clear space around the trees until they grew tall enough to shade out the prickly squatters. Five years ago, after tenting and making do with garden-shed shelters, we built a small house. This was an amazing shift for two people who had lived itinerantly for many decades. Much time was freed up from the basics of survival and we are now able to put more efforts into gardening. In doing so, I have an increased appreciation and understanding of how colossally ignorant I am!

In spite of being educated in Buddhist philosophy and contemplative practice, along with various other disciplines of science and art; dharma teacher in many countries; well read and widely travelled; I am discovering how little I know about how food comes to me. About which plant lives well with whom. When to sow. When to harvest. How to sow. How to harvest. Who pollinates what. Which bugs are ‘friendly’ and which are ‘pests’, and what do you do, or not do, about them. In addition to such specifics I found myself wondering in a very visceral, almost muscular way, what is soil and what is plant? Where does one begin and the other end off. What am I and how am I connected with the soil and the atmosphere – and what is community? All these questions, and more; quivering, blown open with awe and wonder. I realised that left to my own devices, I’d likely starve to death. Wondrously humbling, blessed yet again, with a fresh glimpse of beginner’s mind.

To get started, I bought a lot of books on organic gardening and fed my newly discovered enthusiasm with the words and understandings of others. I built raised vegie beds and a four metre long compost bin and then, wanting quick results, ran off to the local farmer’s market to buy seedlings and bung them in and then water them like mad. I had a vision of what an organic garden/farm should look like and I did what I thought would bring about these looks. Amazing that in spite of teaching the necessity of caringly and discerningly observing and learning from our direct, here and now experience, I so easily failed to apply to the relationship I found myself entering with the land, what I had urged others to do in their own lives. Ah – so!

I think my initial approach to gardening paralleled many beings’s approach to dharma. Instead of books on organics and one acre natural farming, they buy publications on dharma practice and spiritual affairs and feed their hopes and aspirations with the words and understandings of others. Through study, reading and listening, they might visualise what healthy living could, or should, look like. Then they would do what they assume would most quickly produce these looks in the gardens of their lives. Does any of this resonate for you? Did it work for you?

Perhaps due to the misused and unloved condition of our land, I became curiously obsessed with compost. Although we were planting flowers and vegetables, fruit and nut trees, I had a sense that what we were really doing was growing soil! I think this will take quite a few years, if not generations. Of course, in the most inspiring gardening books, there is much talk about no tilling, about farming or gardening in ways that don’t disturb the soil. It sounds a bit like the pointing out instructions of Mahamudra or other advanced forms of meditation that sing praises to letting everything be as it is, celebrating the merit of effortless not-doing. These hints are direct and profound when the ecology of our living is rich in diversity and harmonious balance. They can be problematic however, when we discover that the soil, the earth or ground within which and from which we grow, is either a mat of kikuya grass or so compacted, that water and oxygen cannot penetrate. People can be like this; compacted with defensiveness or a snarly weed-lot of cherished opinions and confused understandings to the point where no subtle feeling and sensation can penetrate.

Eventually, I found myself giving away my gardening book ideals in order to address the reality of the land as we found it. In farming and dharma farming, at the beginning it’s sometimes appropriate to work roughly; to loosen the ground, turn it over and break it up; to let in light and moisture and air. Over the years we have accumulated an armoury of forks, spades, mattocks, hoes, machetes, loppers, secateurs and so forth. All of them, tools of destruction and mayhem that we use in the name of growth and fecundity. It’s amazing. I say we are growing fruit trees, flowers and vegetables but all we do is wield these weapons of mass destruction. We chop and churn and encourage a little space for fresh understanding to creep into the compacted soil of our lives. Then nature does the growing!

I think modern monks, yogis, and dharma practitioners, academics, scientists, and professionals, we could add to this list pretty much all people living in urban situations, all of us would be blessed by rediscovering the dance of learning that comes to us by way of honest dirt under finger nails. Gradually, working with and in the earth, we begin to actually realise, in ways that books and meditation are rarely able to teach, that everything is alive. That living beings are weavings of relationship, lives flowing through lives. It slowly dawns that gardening is about facilitating flow, not about obstructing or controlling. Meditation is also like this.

Gardening or meditating, we learn many things we never initially sought. We discover the secrets of patience and timing. Every ripening being, whether plant, creature, thought or feeling; each one is a fluid multilayered web of responsiveness. Atoms, molecules, cells, creatures, clans and ecosystems; the wild internal mystery of living bodies, intermeshing with external conditions and communities; streams of relating, a complex merging of myriad rhythms and timings. It’s what we are. It’s who and how we are. It’s the is-ness of your experience, of my experience, of our experience, of all experience.

In contrast with this rich complexity of interbeing, it is painfully clear that the 24/7 schedules and timetables of urban living, the expectations of instant gratification, the relentless, clock driven demands of modern life, obscure the rhythmic ways of the natural world. Last year, we had the worst drought in living memory. You can’t schedule your way out of a drought. Throwing money at a field doesn’t make a bountiful garden. There are seasons of being and becoming, and activities that are appropriate to those seasons. The dawning of life affirming patience is grounded in this knowing, this deepening appreciation of time and timings. Healing and awakening have their own timings as well.

In Buddhism it is said that all beings live by nutriment. There seems to be a common tendency to assume that this means that all beings live by eating. But this is only half the story. The reverse is also true, that all beings are simultaneously nutriment for others. In gardening, we eat the fruit of our communion, a symbiosis of earth and sky and sun and rain and farmer and living creatures, all of these flowing with and through each other in a miraculous dance of relating – and the result is nourishing. The substance of our bodies, our thoughts and feelings and understandings, flow back into the world around us. Through eating and being eaten, we weave and re-weave ourselves deeper and deeper into the fleshy fabric of our living world, our nowful here-ing, sensing, feeling, home; the only home we have.

Gradually, we begin to enter the flow of ‘do-nothing’ farming, in which we learn from what is happening, rather than thinking that learning is about begging, borrowing or stealing ideals from others and then aiming at these ideals. A story of ends justifying means. As we learn, our observation becomes more refined and discerning. Learning the exquisite art of being a participant, with the humbleness of appreciating that we are nothing special – beyond the extraordinary uniqueness that we and each living being already is.

Gardening and meditation are both arts. We begin looking for rules and techniques, concerned with results and the ego gratification of being seen to be successful, or at least good at the task. Gradually, moulded by the needs of the living moment we soften expectation and enter a phase of wonderment with everything we find. We experiment with this, and learn from that. Who is doing the gardening? What is the garden? This earth growing itself. This union, or harmony, of ‘no-self’ and care filled engagement.

This Day is for Living

by Tarchin Hearn on May 22, 2010

(If you would prefer to read this essay in a PDF format please click here)

“In an era when metaphysical and existential certainties are in a state of crisis, when people are being uprooted and alienated and are losing their sense of what this world means, ideology inevitably has a certain hypnotic charm. To wandering humankind it offers an immediately available home: all one has to do is accept it, and suddenly everything becomes clear once more, life takes on new meaning, and all mysteries, unanswered questions, anxiety, and loneliness vanish. Of course, one pays dearly for this low-rent home: the price is abdication of one’s own reason, conscience, and responsibility, for an essential aspect of ideology is the consignment of reason and conscience to a higher authority.”
– from “The Power of the Powerless”, by Vaclav Havel, 1978.

“The Bodhisattva acts as a great reservoir of truth for all beings.” – from The Avatamsaka Sutra

I began this essay with a modest intention of paralleling a single session of meditation with the way one might live through a day. As with many of my writing projects, in the process of picking it up and putting it down, time went by, I had fresh thoughts, and the world changed. The financial collapse of 2008, in spite of its challenge to so many people, did offer a glimmer of hope that we might re-evaluate where we (an exponentially growing species) are going and what we are doing. Now as the financial institutions re-group and stock markets and techno-gadget sales soar, it seems that we may have passed through a fever and instead of healing the disease, have just slumped back to where we were before the crisis. The situation is dire. Recently I read a some essays by writer, former ‘dissident’, and first President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel, called Living in Truth.¹ I warmly recommend them to anyone who is still alive and creative enough to be questioning how we humans are living. Havel’s writing has energised me to finish this piece and make it available for reading.

‘Organized religion’ could be viewed as a social system based on largely unquestioned and unprovable beliefs and assumptions about human beings and their relationship with the rest of nature. Each religion is woven together with formal and informal, rituals and practices that tend to reinforce its particular assumptions. At times, organised religion can function in a positive fashion, acting as a glue that holds the many apparently diverse parts of a society together and helping individuals to find meaning in the vast, mysterious complexity of transient life. In its negative expression, it can take on the character of an ideology and become a barrier to living in the flow of truth.

Observing the news media and popular culture in these early years of the 21st century, one might think that the most globally, widespread ‘religion’ of our time has at its heart a belief in a fundamentally mechanical universe made up of countless interacting bits and pieces. It is a universe where ‘machine’ parts are interchangeable; where people are work-force components: service providers, consumers, tax-payers, investors and so forth; and where all other living beings, plants, fungi, micro-organisms and animals, are seen as potential resources to be used by humans. It is a universe where money is a powerful sacred symbol and where desire for immortality and fear of death drives a compulsive need to make sure the machine keeps running, regardless of the cost to living creature, including ourselves. It is a universe where it is believed that all problems can be resolved with better technical, can-do and know-how.

This machine or machinery – it’s sometimes referred to as a machine for producing wealth – is the machinery of economic rationalism. The invisible agents of this secular ‘religion’ are named ‘market forces’ which operate in capricious and reactive ways, reminiscent of angels or devils or the behaviour of the mythical gods of Mt. Olympus. Its human priests and acolytes are often designated as C.E.O.s, corporate board members, cabinet ministers and middle managers, along with the myriad ordinary people whose official, public role, frequently involves large amounts of accounting, record keeping, and exercising red tape and control, all sanctioned by the need to uphold the law. (In this situation, justice too often falls by the way with irrational and sometimes even immoral actions being protected because they are technically within the ‘law’.)

Of course, the servants of the ‘gods’, always skimmed off some perks of money, power and prestige, justifying their actions as necessary, in order to oil the workings of this less than sublime mystery! ‘Market forces’ is just the latest name for the age-old vanities of greed, conceit, pride, fear, anger, general delusion, and a perennial dream, on the part of people who feel insecure, of being effective and powerful. It seems that whether we are considering skulduggery in the halls of power of religious traditions, or in the boardrooms of financial institutions, the pattern is still the same; human beings trying to survive in an ocean of lies, half-truths, abstractions and utopian concepts.

Fortunately, in bright contrast, there have always been renegades: courageous thinkers, outsiders, rebels and wise seers, who have, through the direct examples of their lives, called into question the main-stream religions of their time. These have been the mystics, shamans, yogis, contemplative poets, artists and healers of their day. They have also been the ordinary, unpretentious, basically good people that have shunned the inanities of socially idealized ‘success’ and given themselves to living in ways that feeds what is creative and alive, both in themselves and in everyone that they meet.

The Sanskrit word bodhisattva refers to such a being. Bodhi means awakening. Sat is short for sati which means mindfulness or recollection. Va is variously translated as air, wind and weaving. Together, sattva means a ‘being’ or ‘one in the process of becoming’. A bodhisattva is ‘one in process of becoming awake’. If we play with the derivations we can come up with a number of rich alternatives: an ongoing breathing recollection of awakening; an awakening weaving of mindfulness; an awakening of understanding; an awakening mindfulness of how we – all the living creatures of the earth – are, together with the mountains and streams and the physical forces of the universe, weaving into being the fabric of existence. We are all co-participants; weavers, designers and appreciators of the weaving – each one of us. Bodhi or budh also means to blossom or bud, so the word bodhisattva points to someone who is a flowering, in other words a living process of beauty and fecundity unfolding – not a machine!

Some texts translate bodhisattva as ‘spiritual hero’. Such a person would have the courage and strength; again borrowing words from Havel, to intentionally “live within the truth”. A bodhisattva may be someone who feels deeply moved to turn away from the deceptions and lies of ‘modern life’, the consumerism, the extractive economy, the narrow vision of human chauvinism, and the tragic blindness to life as a planet-wide ecology of becoming and all that this implies. It is through the ordinary acts of daily living that we find the quiet heroism of today’s bodhisattva; honouring the intelligence, the sentience and the ultimate unknowableness of each being that we meet, and continually engaging with life, however we find it, with attitudes of love, patience and active curiosity.

Some years ago in Calgary, I wrote a poem that described a day in the life of a machine human, homo consumer marketplaciensis, or because there is still debate as to this creature’s actual taxonomic category, it is also sometimes referred to as homo lost its wayiens, or, by some more sharp tongued, homo delusiens. The poem, called ‘Samsara in Calgary’, goes like this.

Each day he rises in a box
Descends the stairs
Undoes the lock
And eats the crisp
Dropped in a bowl
And drinks his coffee, newsprint fresh.

He drives his metal chariot forth
His mind in gear
Fuel tank brimming
And meets the fifty storied mirror of
his own collective making.²

He rises into the sky upright
With seventeen others dressed in grey
And sits down in his contoured chair
The mountains gleaming in the west

And buys and sells and wheels and deals
And figures dance within long lists
While emptiness eats out his core.

At four he walks with fellow twins
The mountains swallowed in the dark
To enter in and then descend
To find his car
– not who we are –
And drive in ant lines
stop and go
Ascends the stairs
Undoes the locks
Continuing in his box.

In Gaza heartless rockets fall,
Far away, sweatshops leaking blood,
Tears of heartache,
Working children,
The unheard plunk as the last
Spotted Owl hits the ground,
– none of this disturbs his sleep.
– or does it!

That’s a day in one life. Now let’s consider a different possibility, a day in the life of an awake and compassionately engaged human being – a bodhisattva. By ‘day’, I really mean a flexible unit of time. It could be a 24 hour circadian cycle, what we normally call a day. It could, however, be a lifetime, where the divisions of the ‘day’ reflect the unfolding stages of maturing experience: birth, infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, old age and death. It could also refer to a single session of meditation in which the progression of stages clearly outline a form of practice. Though I will write about different parts of a metaphoric day, I don’t mean to suggest an arbitrary dividing up of the day. Life is an infinitely creative, seamlessly flowing process. It isn’t something done by recipe, or by techniques or stages. What follows, are suggestions for becoming more thoroughly alive and authentic, and in the world of homo consumer marketplaciensis, becoming thoroughly alive and authentic is a radical and sometimes status quo disturbing thing to do! “None of this disturbs his sleep – or does it!“

Waking Up – Remembering Our Roots – Releasing Into Refuge

Begin your life, begin each day, begin a session of meditation, nourished by the experience of being seamlessly part of a vast living world. Before even getting out of bed, pause for a few moments to feel the rhythm of your breathing and settle into the deep interior sensations of your body, an extraordinary community of tens of trillions of cells – all ‘talking’ to each other. Imagine uncountable cellular beings, each of them replicating, travelling, repairing, maintaining, eating, breathing, excreting, forming alliances and symbiotic associations, all functioning together in the process that is your body. You are alive! Not only that, but the community that is you, at this very moment is interbeing with myriad other communal beings. Feel this billion year unfolding of embodied mystery. In Buddhism, to enter this remembrance is to touch the essence of what is called ‘refuge’; a deep sense of belonging; a vivid acquiescence to participating in a living process that can never be completely mapped out. Everything that you think, do and feel, has an affect on other beings. You matter. We matter. Everyone matters. Remembering our roots, or releasing into refuge, can bring a sense of abiding in a way of deep acceptance, wonderment and utter inclusiveness. This moment before you roll out of bed is a time to feel your own unique sense of being enmeshed in and supported by, the living community of everything and everyone that makes up this world.

A favourite teaching metaphor in both Sufi and Zen traditions is that of the host and the guest. The guest is forever travelling; a tourist on the move, perpetually seeking, yet never quite finding, and often uncertain as to whether or not they are welcome. Can I stay? Should I leave? How should I behave so that I am accepted, tolerated or, at least not thrown out? The guest is frequently concerned with what others think about them while in the back of his or her mind hovers a barely noticed yearning for eventually, somehow, finding their way home. We become guests in our work places, guests in our houses, guests in our families and guests on earth. Granted, being a tourist can have its moments of excitement, but even the most fanatically dedicated tourist will eventually find themselves yearning for roots, wondering “Where do I belong?”

The host, on the other hand, is already at home. There is no question of being turfed out. With the deep-rooted strength of being grounded in place, really belonging with this particular time and environment, the host welcomes whoever arrives at the doorways of perception. Hello, welcome, would you like to rest a while? Have you eaten? For the host there is no question as to where they belong. Moment by moment they feel solid and at home. Wherever they are is it!

What is your refuge? Where is your sense of belonging? Where is your real home? Where is your feeling of authenticity and presence? Can you let go into the rich fabric of what is already occurring? If love is your refuge, rest in the flowing of love. If a sense of being a beginningless, endless, inter-becoming of life is refuge, rest in the experience of being this living matrix. If wisdom, compassion and awareness are refuge or Buddha, Dharma and Sangha, allow time to marinate in these qualities and feel them manifesting in your body, speech and mind. Taking refuge is much more than a prayer or a hope. The real taking of refuge, going for refuge or being in the flow of refuge, is always coupled with an indescribable letting be into faith and trust and wonderment.

Every morning is a birth, a new beginning. Every session of meditation is a fresh opportunity. Every meeting, every new project, is a dancing of life unfolding. Wake each morning and feel the groundedness of being and belonging. This is very different from waking up to list making, driven by undercurrents of worry or planning or the hyper-vigilance of fussing over what one has to do today.

Breakfast – Nourishing the Bodhicitta

For billions of years, life has been unfolding in myriad interwoven structures of co-operation and discernment. Atoms gathering as molecules. Molecules linking in extraordinary arabesques of space and time, to lend their lives to miraculous living societies called cells. Cells selecting, replicating, repairing, joining, transforming and linking into organs and organisms. Organisms interpenetrating other organisms. Eating each other. Being homes for each other – environments for each other. Nurturing, playing, living and dying; a dancing of life bursting forth in ever changing forms of symbioses and embodied knowing. This is what you are! It is what politicians are, what philosophers, artists, sales clerks, carpenters, teachers, nurses, soldiers, drop-outs and slum dwellers, labourers and bank managers are, what believers and sceptics, agnostics and atheists are, what scientists, mystics, conformists and mavericks are. It is the true work and working of everyone. In Buddhism, this vast, cosmos-wide journeying of aliveness-unfolding is called bodhicitta; a heart/mind awakening in action.

Having woken up and reconnected with a deepening sense of belonging, now it’s time for ‘breakfast’, time to feed this delicate sense of belonging, this gestating wisdom. In Buddhist traditions there are numerous prayers for nourishing or reflecting on bodhicitta however, this ‘breakfast’ doesn’t necessarily call for the reciting of traditional prayers. For some people, prayer might provide a framework for contemplation but you could have this breakfast in the silence of wordless appreciation. One way of doing this is to take to heart the intent behind one or more of the following verses of bodhisattva heart-commitment.

However innumerable beings are, I aspire to meet them with kindness and interest. Breathe with this intent. Meeting each being with kindness and interest. How would your body meet beings with kindness and interest? How would your speech meet them? How would your attitudes and mental activity meet them? Explore the possibilities in this. Meeting people with kindness and interest. Meeting inner feelings and sensations; memories and emotions, happiness and sadness, elation and boredom, success and failure. Everything is ‘being’ exactly what it is. Meeting all ‘beings’ with kindness and interest. Meeting creatures, micro-organisms, plants and fungi with kindness and interest. Meeting your boss, your employees, your children, your spouse or a stranger on the street. How might doing this bring something fresh into your day?

However inexhaustible the states of suffering are, I aspire to touch them with patience and love. In the process of living; illness, death, grief and dissatisfaction are inevitable experiences. As sentient beings, we are sensitive beings, and this sensitivity will sometimes arise in the form of difficult emotions which in turn can shape the workings of our bodies and minds. Reflecting on the immensity of suffering that is happening in all spheres of life, all over the world, feel a determination that when you touch and are touched by the suffering of living, whether it is your own suffering or the suffering of others, that you do so with patience and love and a deep well of caring. Allow this mysterious commitment to life, to fill your entire being.

However immeasurable the manifestations of nature are, I aspire to explore them deeply. Aspire to move through the day with curiosity and a passion for exploration. What am I? What are you? What is mind, emotion, perception, and health? What is education? How do we relate? How do we support each other? – hinder each other? What experiences support co-operation and wholeness? What experiences support a sense of fragmentation and conflict? Nourish this mind of curiosity that moves in the direction of deepening understanding.

However incomparable the mystery of interbeing I vow to surrender to it freely. Contemplating the living network of relating, the interpenetrating lives of myriad creatures in so many vastly different dimensions of being: atoms, molecules, cells, multi-celled collectives, creatures we can see and living eco-systems we can only intuit. We are part of all of this. How could we be separate? Where did we begin? What is it all about? Explore the possibility that all lives are inter-meshings of ultimately unknowable mystery. As the Vietnamese teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh has said, “We inter-are!” With trust and wonderment, find a way to surrender into this ‘mystery of interbeing’.

Any one or combination of these four contemplations can be a nourishing start for a day, for a life, or for a single session of contemplation or exploration. Each one, when fully unfolded embraces and contains the spirit of the other three. Resting in the healing space of what is refuge for you, nourish the great aspiration to embody these wholesome ways of being throughout the coming day. How might these affect your relationships, the way you earn your living and the way you see the world? Do they have any implications for our education system, our approach to healing, policing, law, business, social cooperation and so forth?

Mapping the Day – Reflecting on Adhitthana

Having touched the ground of refuge and belonging, and been nurtured with a breakfast of wholesome aspiration, now we get on with the ‘day’. In terms of a life, this phase might correspond to adolescence. What will I be when I grow up? What will I do today? Adhitthana is a Pali word meaning intent or determination. If you are a list maker, this is your moment. Solid in refuge and well breakfasted on bodhicitta aspiration, consider in detail what you intend to do or explore in this session of meditation, in this day, in this life. Now is the moment to be quite specific. For example, today, using the sensations of breathing for a support, I am going to explore resting in a continuity of awareness in the midst of whatever is happening. Or, I am going to explore this particular sadhana or meditation practice, giving special attention to this or that part. Or, I am going to drive to work, meet with so and so, remember to pick up such and such and not to loose my temper.

Essentially, reflecting on adhitthana is a moment for clarifying what you are intending to explore in the coming day. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you will succeed in doing these things, such is the unpredictableness of life, it does however mean that you begin the session with some clear intent and this includes intent for how to engage the unexpected!

Going to Work

Having woken up and refreshed in a remembrance of deep connection, having breakfasted on nourishing bodhicitta and breathed your intent about what you aspire to explore today, now you enter the adult stage of life and ‘go to work’. By work, I’m not suggesting a lot of huffing and puffing with sweat and struggle, and I don’t mean work as opposed to play. Your real work is simply and profoundly you, all of you – functioning well, working smoothly, a humming of myriad, living, intelligent beings, from cells to ecosystems, seamlessly fitting together and shimmering for a moment through time, as you.

From a certain point of view there are only two places where bodhisattvas work. One place is the laboratory and the other is the hospital. The laboratory is a place of curiosity and experimentation. It is a place for investigation and enquiry; for measuring and weighing, timing and quantifying, for studying connections and patterns. What, where, when, how, who and why, are our lab assistants and we work silently together, drawn into a community of wonderment that involves muscle and metabolism, feeling and memory, categorizing and conceptualizing, focus and amazement. It is a mind curious about living in all its richness and un-pin-downableness. It is life touching life; a communion of generosity and deepening understanding. Our commute to work doesn’t take long. This lab is located right in the midst of our immediate experience and can be entered as soon as we care to be there.

The hospital is a place of healing, of caring, of hospitality. It is a place for rest and recuperation, a place to cry, to grieve and to cradle the pain of disrupted lives. It is a place for hunkering down, for waiting; a place to invite a nameless breath of blessing to softly, gently, caringly, bring us back into the world of the living. This bodhisattva-hospital is stocked with medicines of forgiveness, empathy and profound acceptance. It’s floors and rooms are regularly disinfected with the timeless skills of all doctoring: love, compassion, deep listening and an ocean of patience arising out of realising that every living being grows and unfolds with its own unique and wondrous timing.

Actually every good lab has at least a first-aid room and every good hospital has a laboratory. The two go together. Sometimes we find ourselves in the lab, curious, experimenting, probing, questioning. This is the alertness and attentiveness of life. In Buddhist teaching it is called the process of insight or vipassana. Sometimes we find ourselves in the hospital of our life situation where the emphasis is on kindness, caring, patience, and spaciousness. This is the deep process of healing, both for oneself and for others. When the hospital work works well, it supports increasing degrees of well-being, peace, ease and acceptance. This is the cultivation of tranquil abiding, called samatha.

It doesn’t matter where you outwardly work, be it an office, a factory, a garden, or a meditation cave. It doesn’t matter what particular technique or skills your employment requires. As a bodhisattva you will find yourself either working in the hospital or in the lab or in a combination of both. You arrive at work, ready for action. You never know what the day or the needs of the moment will bring forth. The public address system of your body/mind sounds, “Will doctor, (fill in your own name), please report to the cardiac unit!” “Will professor, (fill in your name), please report to the particle accelerator.” A bodhisattva’s true work is both exploration that unfolds ever deepening appreciation and wonder about this universe and the work of looking after that which is doing the exploration, caring for it, supporting its innate process of healing and whole-ing. The deeper we look, the more we understand that we are all profoundly coupled together, a seamless interweaving of aliveness. How does it work? How does it all fit together? How can I help? Your lab work helps me and my hospital work helps you. Your hospital work helps us and our lab work helps all beings; each one a unique and precious part of this unbroken living wholeness.

Review – Retirement

After the day’s work, a rich life of working well, a our career begins to draw to an end and we enter the retirement phase of our journey. The end of a life, the end of the day, the end of the meditation session is a time to relax and review what happened during the preceding ‘day’. By review, I don’t mean critical analysis. This is a time for quiet integration, for coming to understand the extraordinary rightness of how it all flowed together, whatever it was. Let the day’s experience wash through you and allow yourself to reverberate with whatever implications: philosophically, morally, ethically, or meaningfully, that might arise for you. Allow a wordless intuition to bless you with a sense of life richly lived or a session well explored; with a sense of being immersed in a vast ongoing mystery that involves every being on this planet. Create some space for the whole day/life/meditation, to reveal itself as a mandala of unexpected wonder.

Letting the Energy Flow – Sharing the Merit

As old age moves towards death and the day eases into night, we finish with a spontaneous meditation of loving-kindness, profound respect, or of caring and reverence, for the living mystery all around. Sitting in the glow of your review, allow the creative energy that has bubbled forth during the day, during the meditation, during your life, to continue to flow. Appreciate everyone, everything, every place and situation that has nurtured you. Appreciate how the flow of you, your own unique life, has nurtured everyone that you have met, physically, emotionally and mentally, in ways you know, as well as in ways you can hardly imagine. Feel the reverberations, the wake of your journey, rippling with the lives of other beings: beings you know, beings you don’t know; other species you know and a vast numbers of life forms you don’t know; beings you like and beings you dislike. With a deepening faith/trust in the unbroken wholeness of this transforming community that we call life, rest in confidence that all that was good about this day of exploration is continuing to enliven myriad others, resonating their own innate capacities for authenticity, presence, and compassionate engagement in this extraordinary world of becoming.

Such is another day, a life-affirming possibility that is in dramatic contrast to that day in Calgary. It involves a very different creature from homo consumer marketplaciensis or homo delusiens. To be the fullness of human animal that one is – to recognize and then to interact from an experience of deeply alive, seamless interdependency with all living beings – is to enter a mystery that can be both hair-raisingly awesome and, at the same time, utterly ordinary.

We began this essay with a brief consideration of organized religion. We seem to have forgotten that ‘organ’-ized begins with ‘organ’ and organs are complex living communities of cells that, in communion with other organs, make up organisms. They are not mechanical parts. The organ-ization of life gives rise to all the physical and conceptual social structures in which we participate. Perhaps this is the basis of true religion. If we were able to experience the world this way, there may come a day when, taxonomists will chronicle how homo lost its wayiens, a sub-species of homo sapiens, evolved into such a dramatically different way of being that a new category became necessary. It might be something like homo bodhisatviens.

Endnotes:

1. Havel’s collection of essays called “Living in Truth” was edited by Jan Vladislav and published by Faber and Faber 1986. Two of the essays “The Power of the Powerless” and “Politics and Conscience” I feel should be required reading by anyone deeply moved by social issues and the well-being of this living world. These two essays are available from Havel’s website <www.vaclavhavel.cz> They are, however, full of typographic errors. I have cleaned up these two essays. If you would like a PDF of either or both of them, contact us at greendharmatreasury and we will send you them.

2. The downtown core of Calgary has huge skyscrapers, mostly banks and oil companies, which are clad in reflective glass.

Deep Healing

by Tarchin Hearn on May 22, 2010

© Tarchin Hearn
written in response to a request from Chani G. to support
a community in which a mother of three has recently been diagnosed with breast cancer.

If there are a group of friends that care for each other and wish to meditatively support each other it can be good to periodically come together in a circle and meditate.

To support the flow of contemplation, create an arrangement of beauty and inspiration, (flowers, offerings, candles, a bowl of water and so forth) in the centre of the circle.

Someone can read the following on behalf of everyone and, if you have one, they can sound a gong or bell between each section. As the reverberations feather into silence, everyone can settle with their breathing and allow the contemplation deepen.

Read slowly, giving time for the meaning behind the words to sink in.

———————————————————-

Sometimes the most wonderful things to do are the simplest. Sitting together with friends. Breathing with the world and feeling our deep connection with all of nature.

Life is a mystery. When we try to grab it, it slips from our fingers. Delicate, fragile and poignant in its transiency. So precious. So easily over-looked or taken for granted. Yet when we surrender in faith and trust and wonderment, everything seems readily available and utterly here and extraordinarily perfect in all its ‘just as it is-ness’. Let’s breathe with this for a while.

Our physical substance is deeply flowing through each other, breath through breath, carrot through human, human through trees, mother through child, child through mother. You are part of my environment. I am part of your environment. We shape each other. We are made with and for each other. Me, you, carrots, trees – all of us.

Our emotions – the rich, constantly dancing shifting of metabolism, cell chemistry, muscle/bone balancings and more – are coupling in intimacy with the emotional shiftings of those around us. We are co-emotioning, languaging and linking at myriad levels of feeling and response. Dancings of empathy and deep shared knowing. What you do affects me. What I do affects you. What we do affects each of us. What we do together as a community affects the world.

Our thinking, dreaming, imagining, remembering, and associating is mutually dancing with the mental processings of countless other beings. Opening to the immensity of these linkages. Our lives swim through each other in myriad wondrous ways.

Our bodies, emotions and mental abilities are profoundly and irrevocably interwoven within themselves and with countless other beings. Let’s breathe for a while and open into a deepening direct knowing of this living mystery.

Resting, breathing, present;

We feel, within us and around us, the presence of our teachers, guides and mentors, those particular beings who have inspired us to grow in the direction of wisdom and compassion.

Resting, breathing, present;

We sense the great braided river of history, a backwards branching tree of ancestors that eventually includes every being and creature that has lived; a river of talents and abilities, flowing through the landscapes of time, this beautiful world unfolding.

Resting, breathing, present;

We experience our intimate connection with all living beings. Breathing in, – gifts from the green plants. Breathing out, – gifts to the green plants. Feeling the moisture in our bodies and knowing that it was once a cloud, a drop of rain, a snow field, and a tear. Breathing with a deepening sense of gratitude and connection. We are all parts of a living earth.

Looking into the whole of yourself, feeling the magnitude and mystery of all the connections and linkings that are necessary for you to be you, you discover you are immeasurable.

Looking into the whole of another living being, and sensing the magnitude and mystery of all the connections and linkings that are necessary for them to be them, we see that that they too are immeasurable.

We finish the meditation by breathing softly, gently, caringly and respectfully, and releasing into a place of warmth and wonderment in our hearts – hearts as big as the world.

Feel the presence of _______ (the name of the person needing healing) and _______ (the names of their close family members).

Feel the presence of each of us with them and them with us, and breathe with the aspiration that we may accompany each other and support each other in this precious journey of unfolding life and love.

Sitting in this stillness, imagine everyone being bathed in a radiance of healing and whole-ing.

(gong 3xs)

Recite together:

By the power of these wholesome activities,
May our lives be rich with awakening.
Living thus, may we abandon all unwholesomeness.
Within the endless river of birth, illness, old-age and death
May we help all beings to realise their true nature.

Sarva Mangalm, Sarva Mangalam, Sarva Mangalam

All is Blessing

Reflections on Owning Land

by Tarchin Hearn on January 26, 2010

There was a time when the land was experienced as alive and sentient.
It was not property. It was not even environment.
It birthed all beings and at the right time,
received each and everyone, back into her fullness.
It was both matrix and mystery and a source of wonder, reverence and awe.

Today, in our culture of commerce, land has become property.
It is seen as a commodity; something to be bought or sold,
a resource to be used or abused or at best enjoyed.
What happened?

A few months ago, people across the road began to dig up a two acre paddock to create an off track motor cycle track. This caused a considerable upheaval amongst many of the neighbors who were very concerned about the noise. The issue of the noise was eventually resolved but the issue of tearing up a living meadow was never even addressed. This interaction stimulated a lot of thoughtful discussion and these reflections on owning land, have arisen as a result.

Tens of thousands of years ago, with the emergence of thinking, remembering and story telling, the gregarious cultural creatures that were our ancestors, experienced the living earth as something created by an ineffable, essentially nameless mystery; a mystery eventually pointed at with words such as God, Allah, Atman or the Divine Spirit. The land was given to nourish and sustain all creatures. Back then, people lived lightly on the earth and their sense of ownership was probably very unformed. At that time, most humans were nomadic hunters and gatherers, learning the skills of observation, knowing when this plant ripened and when that shrub suggested the presence of water, and when a particular pattern of weather indicated the migration of the animals they depended on for food. We shared in the mystery with each other and with the other creatures living here with us.

About eighteen thousand years ago, animal husbandry and plant cultivation began to appear. Patterns of land use associated with sedentary agriculture, blossomed in the natural world and humans began to accumulate things, leaving traces to intrigue the archeologists of today.

Ten thousand years ago, towns, and division of labour: builders, gardeners, warriors, merchants, priests and so forth, began to leave their marks. Attitudes and understandings about life slowly but surely changed. In the course of time, ‘kings’ were seen to hold the land in trust for God. Piecing together from archeology and mythology, it seems likely that there was often a sense of responsibility, what later became known as a noblesse oblige,⁽¹⁾ on the part of the rulers towards their subjects. A shared system of cultural beliefs linked the king’s moral foundation and the health and welfare of the land and all its inhabitants.

In more recent years, as the human population expanded, land was sometimes bestowed by the king on other men who had given him service. (There was not much evidence of land being bestowed on women.) Perhaps this was the beginning of sub dividing and real estate investment. Now we see a proliferation of little kingdoms within a larger single kingdom, and all of these within the kingdom of god, which itself was within the matrix and mystery of un-namable becoming.

By the late 1800s, the European social system was disintegrating. Revolutions, wars, accelerating growth of human population and the birth of a merchant class that measured wealth in terms of money and power, began to rapidly change the shape of our relationship with the earth. No longer the rule of nature, no longer the rule of god, no longer the divine right of kings or the rule of justice; now we begin to see the rule of law; and law was almost always something imposed by the rich and physically strong.

Following the two world wars of the twentieth century, the ideal of ‘owning’ land became realizable by large numbers of people. Perhaps even readers of this essay. The living earth, a dynamically evolving matrix of becoming, a loam of sentient beings, was gradually transformed in our beliefs and understandings. It became solidified, objectified and then carved up into parcels that are now owned by countless little kings and queens.

In New Zealand today, as in many other parts of the world there is a cherished assumption that when one ‘owns’ a section of land, one can then do anything one likes on it, or to it, as long as it doesn’t contravene the local human made laws. We seem blithely unconcerned about the natural order of life unfolding. My home is my castle. No-one has a right to tell me what I can or can’t do on ‘my land’. The owner has all rights and virtually no obligations, beyond paying taxes. Certainly no obligations, no noblesse oblige, to the sentient beings living on, in, and through, the land. By and large, these assumptions and beliefs about ownership and the right to do as one wishes, are deeply internalized and very rarely questioned.

When Mary and I began to hold the title for a two acre section of rural land near Katikati,⁽²⁾ we were told that a local attitude about owning land was expressed with the phrase, “a good fence is the first step to good neighborliness.” The idea was that, by clearly defining what was and what was not your property, this would diminish arguments since it was none of your neighbor’s business what you did on your property and none of your business, what they did on their’s.

The whole idea of owning land is deeply and tragically flawed. The land that we think we own, is in fact an extraordinarily dense community of living beings that have been evolving with each other and through each other for millions of years. It is a summation of the birthing and dying of uncountable numbers of beings. What on earth could it mean to own another living being or to own whole communities of beings?

I was about five or six years old when I first registered of the size of the human population. It was approximately two and a half billion. Today, it is approaching seven billion. An extraordinary number of people aspire to rule a kingdom. Everyone is touched by the ideal of owning their own land. Large properties are being further sub-divided at a staggering pace. Sections of land are becoming smaller and smaller and yet this deeply cherished belief, that owning land entitles us to do anything we want with it, is stronger than ever. We can dig it up or pave it over. We can clear cut the trees or plant mono-culture crops. We can poison, maim and destroy virtually any non-human beings that live there, with legal impunity. We can ‘develop’ the property and then sell it on for a short term profit. We can do virtually anything we like with it.

The concept ‘owning land’ is now so deeply woven into the structure of present day human cultural beliefs and assumptions, that it almost carries the power of a religious conviction. To question it is risky. So many of our understandings about ourselves and our place in nature are tied up with it that, depending on where you live, to seriously raise these issues for debate can leave you open to being accused of being a marxist or an anarchist, or to be dismissed as a flaky animal rights person, or an idealistic greenie. Politicians are always in the news but question that is not being debated by our law makers and parliamentarians is our relationship with the rest of the living world.

Much of our ideas and ideals about owning land are undoubtedly based on emotional needs for security and control which are sometimes extended into needs for prestige and power. Perhaps ‘property’ is something that ‘props’ us up. Once God looked after us. Then kings. Then nobles. And now it’s everyone looking after him or herself, and sometimes their immediate families. This way of relating to the land has become a disaster for every living being. A fantasy of commercial real estate has replaced the deep experiential knowing of our real estate. Emotional assumptions and legal frameworks are blinding us to the reality of this living world, of which we are all part.

What we do on this piece of land affects all the surrounding land and the water and the atmosphere and the living beings that comprise it. They make up our environment. We are a dynamic part of their environment. Our mutual shaping over vistas of time reveals the shape of evolution. Even to speak of a ‘piece’ of land is potentially misleading as it can reinforce so many illusions and delusions. The ‘piece’ or ‘block’ or ‘section’ may exist in a registry of the local municipality but it is really nothing more than a conceptual construct. In reality, that block of land, this piece of earth, is continuous with the rest of the planet; an extraordinary living sphere, perhaps even a living organism, floating in space. Sectioning off pieces of land as functionally independent from everything else is perhaps analogous to identifying and dissecting out parts of our body. My liver isn’t a piece of body to be bought or sold. It is a living organ that is part of a community of organs each with their own whakapapa⁽³⁾ weaving its way backwards through time for billions of years. It is also a bit mad to say that I can pour alcohol into my liver to the point of cirrhosis and it is not the business of my heart, or lungs or neurons that I do.

In this age of i-phones, social networking and global finance we humans need to find ways to stay in touch with our deep, trans-species, communal nature. This is a moral imperative that is necessary for our survival. We need each other. We arise from each other. We are food for each other and, as Gary Snyder⁽⁴⁾ has written, through the act of eating each other we touch an extraordinarily basic level of communion; they becoming us and we becoming them, a daily demonstration of our tangible union and need for each other.

I hope this essay doesn’t sound like utopian ‘pie in the sky’. I’m writing it as an invitation for all of us to think deeply on these issues and to allow the possibility of a fresh way of being what we are, and of being with each other. The idea of owning land has evolved in our minds over the course of thousands of years. Its pedigree is inextricably interwoven with who and what we think we are and with our place in the world of people and the world of other creatures and landscapes. Political revolutions, or law changes won’t make make such a pervasive concept go away.

If we must retain the concept of ‘owning land’ then it surely needs to be infused with a profound breadth of ecological understanding. These days, there is much talk about sustainability. The only thing that is truly sustainable is life. If there is to be a future for us then ‘ownership’ of land must go hand in hand with a deepening sense of responsibility. To drive a car, one must first take a test that proves a basic degree of competence and only then do we get a license. Perhaps we need to have licenses to ‘own land’. Like the noblesse oblige of by-gone eras, land owners should be obliged to acquaint themselves with the immense diversity of living beings and processes that together compose their land and then to interact with these particular beings, the land, this living matrix, in ways that, in the words of biologist Aldo Leopold,⁽⁵⁾ “tend to support the integrity, the stability and the beauty of the (entire) biotic community.”

There was a time when the land was experienced as alive and sentient.
It was not property. It was not even environment.
It birthed all beings and at the right time,
received each and everyone, back into her fulness.
It was both matrix and mystery and a source of wonder, reverence and awe.
May we realise that time, is now.

Endnotes:

(1) – noblesse oblige, Oxford English Dictionary => privilege entails responsibility

(2) – We have a reluctance to think in terms of owning this land, hence the phrase ‘holding title’. Having written these words, it strikes me that the phrase, ‘to hold title’ probably hearkens back to the times when kings awarded land and along with the land went a title. What alternatives do we have? Instead of ‘owning land’ we could say that we pay for the privilege of being ‘custodians’ or ‘guardians’ of the land, but this implies we have the knowledge and skills to do what until recent times was the juridiction of God or Mother Nature. The more I contemplate the question of land ownership, the more I feel that in order to support a truly sustainable world we will need a revolution of understanding and attitude towards the land and the world of which we are part.

(3) – whakapapa; a Maori word meaning genealogy, family tree or cultural identity

(4) – Gary Snyder, “The Real Work”, New Directions Books 1980

(5) – Aldo Leopold, “A Sand County Almanac”, Oxford University Press 1989

Welcome to Green Dharma Treasury

by Tarchin Hearn on September 18, 2009

It’s spring. Just beyond my window is a network of bare branches crowned with huge, luscious, magenta-rose magnolia blossoms. The bees have been with us for the last two summery days, gathering nectar from the cherries, wattles, native fushia, rhododendrons, camellias, azalias and others. The pines are in the throes of their annual orgy. A few days ago, it looked as if great plumes of yellow/green smoke were swirling out of the radiata stand. Now everything is thickly coated with pine pollen, which is probably very satisfying for pine trees, but not so good for allergies. The birds are joyous in their hormonally induced, spring fever and the mornings are deafening with their ebullience. Meditators are happily coming towards the end of a fruitful three months of exploration and today I have the satisfaction of welcoming you to Green Dharma Treasury, an archive of my various writings and a place for writings yet to come. They are offered with the hope that some of them may inspire your exploration and unfolding and also act as a resource of themes and methods for people who are teaching, facilitating and actively helping others.

Green Dharma Treasury has emerged

For more than ten years, I have sent out two or three e-mail articles per year, along with my teaching schedule, to a growing list of interested people. This is only a fraction of the writings that have flowed out in moments of inspiration or in response to enquiries and I’m not sure that an e-mail article list is the right forum for a greater volume of material or for meaty pieces of greater length and specialized topics. Green Dharma Treasury has emerged through the persistent requests on the part of numerous people in different countries for more on-line material. It has also grown from my desire to share these writings with people who might appreciate them. Most immediately it has come into being through the generous encouragement and support of Terry Walton and Clare Murphy, who have nudged ‘greendharmatreasury.org’ into being. It is through their collaboration with me on this project that you are now reading these words. May our aspirations for greendharmatreasury flower as nourishing food for the well being of all of us.

Vital necessities for sustainable living

Over the years, I have come to feel that the study, practice and teaching of dharma must address the needs and concerns of people grappling with the many difficulties that face us today. To live well in this time of climate change, shrinking bio-diversity, exponential human population growth, dysfunctional economic and political systems, disintegrating social systems and a rising wave of fundamentalist thinking, is challenging, to say the least. We could try to continue on, as if nothing untoward was happening, believing that more technology and expertise, along with another economic stimulus package will get the system back on its feet. Or we could wake up and admit to what many of us know in our bones; that love and curiosity and wonderment and sharing and creativity and compassion and community, are not just important, but are vital necessities for sustainable living. Green dharma treasury will provide me with the opportunity to link Buddhist philosophy and practice, and a view of interconnectedness and inter-responsibility, with explorations of science, art, education, ethics, personal healing, deep ecology and social action — all together; the art of wise and compassion filled living — ‘green dharma’. May we nourish these qualities in ourselves, in each being that we meet, and in all of us together as a living, caring, community.

The art of wise and compassion filled living — ‘green dharma’

Some time ago, we were in the Australian outback, exploring the opal areas of Coober Pedy and White Cliffs. In the early days of mining, people smashed through the rock, looking for obvious chunks of opal and they threw the rubble, along with many quite decent pieces of gem material, into huge mounds beside the diggings. Today, tourists visit these places and are often seen ‘noodling’ for opal. That is to say, they carefully rake through the rubble and delight in finding jewels amidst the rock and dust. Green Dharma Treasury is a kind of tailing heap from the opal mine that is my life. These words are shards and rubble; tailings from my own diggings and investigations. I invite you to ‘noodle’ through them. Any gems you find are yours to keep and share around. May the rubble from your digging, one day, become a treasure trove for others.

Happy Noodling!

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →

The web-library of Tarchin Hearn

Deep Roots and Fearless Compassion

Praise for “Becoming Animal”

Earthquakes and Living Dharma

A Story of Stories

In Praise of Aimless Contemplation

A Student of the Earth

This Day is for Living

Waking Up – Remembering Our Roots – Releasing Into Refuge

Breakfast – Nourishing the Bodhicitta

Mapping the Day – Reflecting on Adhitthana

Going to Work

Review – Retirement

Letting the Energy Flow – Sharing the Merit

Endnotes:

Deep Healing

Reflections on Owning Land

Welcome to Green Dharma Treasury

Green Dharma Treasury has emerged

Vital necessities for sustainable living

The art of wise and compassion filled living — ‘green dharma’

EXPLORE GREEN DHARMA TREASURY

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