good old buddhist wisdom

Not so long ago I read Present Moment, Wonderful Moment by Thich Nhat Hanh and shared some of my favorite verses from it here.  To share them and largely to have them written down for myself to look back on in the future.

I'm about to do the same thing.  I just finished reading hand wash cold by Karen Maezen Miller and found so many wonderful passages throughout the book that I just don't want to forget, some for their humor and all for their wisdom and simple messages.  If you are interested in the words that I found to be so lovely in the pages of her book, read on:




page 6, on how we like to think life, meaning, fulfillment are "out there" and not part of our ordinary routine and life


"You might think, for instance, that the life you have is not at all the life you had in mind and so it doesn't constitute your real life at all.  Your real life is the life you pine for, the life you're planning or the life you've already lost, the life fulfilled by the person, place, and sexy new front-loading washer of your dreams.  This is the life we are most devoted to: the life we don't have" 




page 68, reflecting on a solo trip to Italy that was meant to be with her ex and on how she'd hoped it'd go but didn't


"This was not how it was supposed to be, this trip of a lifetime to northern Italy, the ripened hills that had awakened a thousand years of passionate appetites.  I should have been accompanied.  I should have been accompanied by a man, preferably younger and fashionably bohemian, someone who would stir my fearlessness.  As fantasies are prone to do, my imaginary companion had failed to materialize."




page 80, on parenting


"We expect it to be the way we want it to be; and the way we want it to be is the way we call right.  In other words, my way.  My way is what you have before you have children.  There is no right way to parent; there is only a right-now way.


Like it or not, this is the offering that children give us, over and over: right now.  We reflexively swat it from their hands- I can't deal with that right now!- since we are, after all, busy strategizing their brilliant futures.  They return with the gift again, in fresh packaging.  Children always show us the present moment unfolding.  Our full attention is the only thing of value we can give them in return.  Good thing too, because it is the only thing that makes a lasting difference."




page 99, remembering her grandmother


"My mother's mother set her bread to rise each day before the sun had yet dared to dawn, wrestling two loaves into the oven before a shadow had stirred.  She saved a handful of the dough to roll into the morning's coffee cake and topped it high with buttery streusel.  By the time I tramped into her ancient kitchen on summer mornings, the air bloomed with the sweetly sour greeting of yeast.  It was breakfast time.


Her house is flattened, ground into the dust of the earth's eternal crust.  She is gone and the time has passed.  But what she fed me still ferments on my tongue, and I recognize my place and lineage.  Having the good life can be so simple when you savor the one you have."




page 106, on living in the moment


"The truth is, there is not a single person on this planet who is living anywhere but in the moment.  It's just not the moment we have in mind.  The moment we aspire to live in is a different kind of moment, a better kind.  A moment of solitude, perhaps, of quiet satisfaction, of thrilling accomplishment or satisfying retribution, of deep confidence and unshakable certainty, with children asleep and ducks lined up and ships come in and gravy, yes, that extra spoonful of gravy on top.  That's the moment we are waiting to relish.


In the same way that we misapprehend "the moment" as any time but now, we misconstrue "the now" as any place but here.  Calling it "the" now suggests a certain kind of now, a different now, a better special-edition now that is attained by secret knowledge or effort.


It is the effort of lifting your eyelids.


No one has to master living in the now.  It is impossible to live anywhere else.  Just as you can never leave now, no one will ever take away your past or withhold your future.  Effortlessly, your past accumulates.  Instantly, your future arrives.  What matters is that you notice your life while you can still call it "alive".  That's now.


"Now" might not be all it's cracked up to be, but the real problem with it, I suspect, is that we think it's not enough."




page 154, on life and death


"Death serves as the notice of life.  And when we notice life, really notice, it is the birth of everlasting goodness.  We might see through the illusion we've created for ourselves, as separate and inviolable, and do something nice for a change."








And there you go.  Now I won't have to search through scraps of paper when I want to find one of these passages scribbled down for safekeeping.  Thanks computer.