wild-willed and traveling clematis vine

With all my master gardening training, I have realized that I need to take time to research how to encourage a clematis vine to climb a trellis. My vine decided to snake its way across the top of my lupine and cone flowers and bypass the trellis that I wanted it to form a bond with for life.

This pink-flowering vine is a free spirit, and since it's not choking the plants below it to death, I watch its progress with some joy; I have also chosen to take a road less travelled.

become porous: open to life

Let the barriers of your personality become porous and open to life.

The only way to achieve maximum openness is to arrive at every moment without a single preconception, judgement, fear or foregone conclusion, forget bias. We must step into the mystery of life naked and undefended.

We can learn to encounter life directly, without anything to mediate its intensity. When we truly hate what's happening, our instinct is to flee from it like a house on fire. But if we can learn to turn around and enter that fire, to let it burn all our resistance away, then we find ourselves arising from the ashes with a new sense of power and freedom.

-Raphael Cushnir, from 365 Nirvana, Here and Now by Josh Baran - May 10, 2008

I am spiritually digging the "open to life" theme of the recent Daily Dharma readings.

identify & stop the delusions: Daily Dharma: May 7, 2008

May 7, 2008
Tricycle's Daily Dharma

Stop Pretending

The great teachings unanimously emphasize that all the peace, wisdom, and joy in the universe are already within us; we don't have to gain, develop, or attain them. Like a child standing in a beautiful park with his eyes shut tight, there's no need to imagine trees, flowers, deer, birds and sky; we merely need to open our eyes and realize what is already here, who we already are--as soon as we stop pretending we're small or unholy. I could characterize nearly any spiritual practice as simply being: identify and stop, identify and stop, identify and stop. Identify the myriad forms of delusion we place upon ourselves, and muster the courage to stop each one. Little by little deep inside us, the diamond shines, the eyes open, the dawn rises, we become what we already are. Tat Twam Asi (Thou Art That).

--Bo Lozoff, from 365 Nirvana, Here and Now by Josh Baran