そのほかにも sonohokamino

Futhermore….In addition.. Also…

It’s been hot, hot, hot in my part of the world. Suffolk hit temperatures of 38 degrees this week. So I retreated indoors mostly, with blinds closed. Mornings and evenings were superb though and we had just completed our Japanese garden (built with my husband’s redundancy money - good out of bad as it were) and it is the most sublime place to be. I’ve been doing yoga and qigong in the garden morning and evening. And of course meditating there. There is something about meditating outside that feels so much more alive and present. Birdsong and breezes become part of the whole texture and experience.

Here’s a round up of the last few weeks of various things that have caught my attention.

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Japanese Film Theatre Free Offerings

I love that JFF bring the world Japanese cinema. I’ve just finished watching Shodo Girls, about a group of girls competing in a calligraphy competition. The new offerings coming up in July look great too.

Shikoku Chuo City is known as the “City of Paper” a place where the long recession has worn out its former glory. Ikezawa is a substitute teacher assigned to the Shikoku Chuo High School calligraphy club. Ikezawa and club captain Satoko are like oil and water but when She and the other club members catch sight of him writing on the floor along to music, they all come up with a plan to revitalize their flagging community through calligraphy performances. And then a small miracle occurs.

Grief & Loss, People & Planet

In the middle of all the heat I started to read this and it couldn’t have been more timely.

The Snag is a radical ecosystem of a book. Love and loss, death and renewal, seeds and snags; the intimately personal and the globally political are all delicately balanced here. Tessa McWatt holds us unflinchingly close in this singular and universal story of a mother’s decline, and demands that we face up to the grief of all that we stand to lose in our collective planetary home’s demise.’

Marchelle Farrell, author of Uprooting

On being dull

I loved this celebration of the ordinary.

A unique approach to alertness and posture in meditation

I admire Will Johnson’s deep dive into meditating through posture. He has some interesting approaches to help us feel aligned and awake through the body, this being one of them.

Just let go

And finally, this gem from Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo

Photo by Jamie Haughton on Unsplash

There is a story—some of you must have read it in various Buddhist books—about a trap for monkeys in Asia. There is a way of trapping monkeys where you have a coconut nailed to a tree, and in the coconut there is a little hole which is just big enough for a monkey to put his hand into. Inside this hollowed-out coconut, there is some sweet. When the monkey comes, he smells the sweet, he puts his hand inside the hole and he clutches the sweet. Now he has a fist, but he can’t get the fist out of the hole. So he is stuck there, with the greed in his mind making him unable just to open up his hand and relinquish the sweet. The hunters come and they pick him up. Nothing is holding that monkey there; the monkey just has to let go and he’s free. But the clinging, grasping mind will surmount even his fear of the hunter. He cannot let go. He wants to be free, but he wants to hold onto his sweetie too.

This is a perfect example of our predicament. Oh yes, we want to be free, we want to be enlightened, but we don’t want to let go. We want to be free and enlightened and keep everything else with us at the same time. We want our clinging mind, our greedy mind. We like it because we are deluded, and we think this clinging, greedy mind is what will give us happiness if only all our greedy wishes can be fulfilled. We don’t understand that our genuine happiness lies in letting go of that type of mindset so that when things come—nice things—we appreciate them, we enjoy them, but we hold them lightly: when they’re not there, that’s fine too. But we don’t believe it.

- Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo