bodhi tree swaying

At the source, at the very source are live streams.
Through my body trickles air like birch sap.
And the buzz of bees, the midsummer sun
Ripple inside me and ripple above.

At the source—living streams…
I won’t ask where they flow.
Only blend into the floating shadow of a tree,
wrap myself in a bird’s tremulous melody.

At the very source is a glow.
I don’t ask whither flows the stream.
At the deepest source is a glow.
Through me ripple grasses and the sky,
Birch trees and the midsummer sun.
What am I in this eternal flow?

From “Intermezzo,” by Janina Degutytė, translated by Gražina M. Slavėnas

Who doesn’t love rainbows? This is one I snapped a couple of weeks ago when my friend Dassini was over for a visit.

The rainbow can be used to investigate how we impose our divisive concepts on the unbroken world of flow and change. The spectrum of colors in the rainbow is a continuum, and yet we find that the mind skips over the intermediate colors in order to see only red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.

 But Xenophanes only described three colors, and saw the rainbow as "a cloud that is purple and red and yellow." Aristotle too saw the rainbow as three-colored, but in his case the colors were red, green, and purple, although he admitted that orange could sometimes be seen between red and green [Meteorologica III, 2. 371-372]. The tri-colored rainbow persisted for a long time in Europe, probably because of the

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A while back I received a request to answer some questions for a book on “surrender.” Here’s the first draft of my response:

> 1. How would you define surrender? Who or what is one surrendering to, in
> your opinion? God, Universe, Self, Soul, What Is, present moment…?

Surrender is an important part of all spiritual practice. Ultimately it’s what we’re aiming to accomplish in practice.

What we’re surrendering to is the reality of impermanence and non-separateness. In reality, everything changes and nothing (including ourselves) is separate or self-contained. But we have deep-rooted assumptions that we exist separately from the rest of the world, that there is something in us (and others) that is permanent and static, and that happiness can be found outside of ourselves. We believe that happiness is to be found in external conditions, rather than in changing our relation to the external conditions in which we live — …