The second goal is to see each individual thing
as unified, as one, with all the other
ten thousand things.
In this regard, a little wine helps a lot.

The third goal is to grasp the first and the second goals,
to see the universal and the particular,
simultaneously.
Regarding this one, call me when you get it.

by David Budbill

Wow, what a clear setting out of the human endeavour to live wisely! So simply and concisely stated – and yet as the last sentence indicates, anything but straightforward and worth knowing about when it’s achieved. I loved the combination of sage instruction with the down-to-earth commentary, the dry humour and the teacher-student familiarity I felt in it. This was not an aloof wise one diseminating wisdom – here is an friendly and encouraging fellow human who knows his way around the great endeavours and their challenge.

As so often happens, reading this poem made me curious about the person who the words travelled through, and the life that led to this expression. It came from one of the eight books of poetry written by David Budbill (1940-2016) with a title that intrigued me: ‘Moment to Moment: Poems of a Mountain Recluse’. His life was summarised on his website as ‘humble, engaged, and passionate’, and he brought his poetry into the world with others in musical collaborations reaching diverse audiences. Diving a bit more into the traces he’s left on the great web made me feel this almost childlike excitement: the world is full with wonderful people living what Lama Yeshe would call a ‘joyful and useful’ life, I only know of such a small fraction of them and yet they’re everywhere and here is another one!

Photo by Jametlene Reskp on Unsplash

Rare are those moments
And thoroughly hidden

Searching hardly
Pays off, but
Finding does

The art is to live 
So that it comes to pass

That clarity, now and then

by Martin Bril
translated from Dutch by Kristine

This poem, by the Dutch writer and poet Martin Bril, has been hanging in my mum’s bathroom for years, and when I was looking for a poem with the theme of ‘clarity’, it came to mind. But in Dutch of course! So this is my attempt at translating it, which of course is harder than it seems…

It’s always struck a chord with me, that sense of finding rather than searching for, and creating the conditions rather than engineering the thing itself. It reminds me of Rob Nairn’s instructions for meditation: a bit like letting yourself fall asleep, not trying too hard because that only makes it more illusive.

I remember a teaching he gave on Holy Isle, where one participant, a well-spoken English gentleman, asked a question about what he called ‘actual meditation’, which I think we could translated as ‘moments of crystal clarity’. What enabled it to happen? Rob started to speak and then turned the question back to the gentleman, what did he think it was enabled by? “The grace of God”, said he without missing a beat, and for once the ever eloquent Rob only nodded.

The art is to live so that it comes to pass…

PS … but we can help the chances of that happening through training in mindfulness! There’s a new course in-depth course for beginners or refreshers starting soon…

Photo by Katherine McCormack on Unsplash