Let’s try an experiment. Pick up a coin. Imagine that it represents the object which you are grasping. Hold it tightly, clutched in your fist and extend your arm, with the palm of your hand facing the ground. Now if you let go or relax your grip, you will lose what you are clinging onto. That’s why you hold on.
But there’s another possibility. You can let go and yet keep hold of it. With your arm still outstretched, turn your hand over so that it faces the sky. Release your hand and the coin still rests on your open palm. You let go. And the coin is still yours, even with all this space around it.
So there is a way in which we can accept impermanence and still relish life, at one and the same time, without grasping.
— Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, pp. 34-35
This weblog will be changing a little starting now. Everything that has gone on before will continue to go on, but something else will be added. This is why.
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More homes destroyed last night in Kelowna. It seems this summer like the whole province is on fire. The Red Cross is looking for donations, so read this story and follow the links to give.
Good luck to my friends in Kelowna and Naramata.
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Folks have been asking, but I’m here to tell you that there is no news on the HaidaBucks Cafe situation. Last time we looked at this story, HaidaBucks had asked Starbucks to basically stop lying to its customers.
I sent a note to Starbucks about that debacle, and haven’t heard anything back from them. Customer Relations suddenly disappears when your company starts lying to people.
HaidaBucks wants an apology, which seems reasonable, and Starbucks has not been forthcoming with that.
So the absolute latest on this situation is, in the words of one of the HaidaBucks guys, “Starbucks is still trying to wish the whole thing away. Should have news soon.”
Anyway, I’m still forgoing Seattle based lattes in favour of independant coffee shops, and I haven’t been disappointed yet.
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Why does it take me so long to stumble over websites like U B U W E B? In the ethnopoetics section lives some translations of Vietnamese folk poems, including this one:
Leaving the Village
Even when cross planks are nailed down,
bamboo bridges are shaky, unsound. Hard going.
Hard going, so push on home to tidal flats to catch crab,
to the river for fish, to our sandy patch for melons.
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You won’t believe this, but I just signed up as a Bush Team Leader for the Bush/Cheny ’04 campaign.
Apparently, they don’t care whether or not you are an American, or whether you even live in the USA.
Am I the first left-wing Canadian Bush Team Leader? I guess that fills a niche in the “coalition groups” section of the website. I’ve always prided myself on being a party of one.
Thanks to John Dumbrille for putting me on to this site that led me to signing up. May I should join him in the zendo to clear a bit of the insanity from my monkey mind.