The Guest

The Guest

Friend, hope for the guest while you are alive.
Jump into experience while you are alive!
Think...and think...while you are alive.

What you call 'salvation' belongs to the time before death.
If you don't break your ropes while you're alive,
do you think
ghosts will do it after?

The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic
Just because the body is rotten -
that is all fantasy.

What is found now is found then.
If you find nothing now,
you will simply end up with an apartment in the City of Death.

If you make love with the divine now, in the next life
you will have the face of satisfied desire.

So plunge into the truth, find out who the Teacher is,
Believe in the Great Sound!

Kabir says this: When the guest is being searched for,
it is the intensity of the longing for the Guest that does all the work.
Look at me, and you will see a slave of that intensity.


Kabir

(trans. Robert Bly)

for Jeremy while we are away

 

Bizarre nightmare sugar story #2

ok, well, remember it is your choice to read this story just as it is my choice to divulge such information about this life.....
This actually happened about 2 months ago but since it is now complete I will write.
Temo and I visited some friends on their farm and we got a ride with some new friends and their baby Florian who is 4 days older than Temo.
It was a typical Tipp day...windy, dark and persistent rain. During afternoon tea I decided to eat a piece of sponge cake that had some kind of icing and peaches on top. Everything was ok, we trapsed back to the car through the muck'n'mud, said our goodbyes and departed. I was feeling ok. Suddenly the urge to vomit came over me and before I knew it, there I was sitting in the back seat wedged between two babies in their carseats with a mouth full of vomit. What to do, what to do.....would these people understand? Is body language universal? It was stormy weather by that stage and at the time of obviously needing to stop the car, Andre was navigating through a flooded country lane on a pitch black night. So I decided to not do anything and empty the contents of my mouth into my raincoat!! I thought everything was contained but then I felt the warm goo flowing down the side of my leg and onto the seat. By that stage the babies were puzzled and Temo perhaps a little distressed as to what was going on. I sure was anyway. And then there was the smell. And it wasn't a big car. And yet nothing was said, everything remained quiet in the car yet this absurd event had just taken place and my mind was reeling as to what on earth to do or say or how to do it or say it. I decided to stay quiet and proceeded to repeat the vomitting into the jacket another 3 times before we got home. I felt so incredibly ill by the time we did get home that I couldn't even speak properly. They had to ask "pardon?" when I tried to say "goodbye". Getting out of the car with Temo and a jacket full of vomit and having cleaned up the mess is another story in itself. Also the atmosphere in the car and out of the car, the quiet, everything, another story....
I was so embarrassed about what had happened that I wanted to avoid Andre and Mika like the plague. However after choosing the right moment recently to be honest I decided to tell them the whole story about what had happened and why I may have seemed more than strange. I was even going to write the story, translate it into German and give it to them so they understood. It turned out that they didn't notice anything at all. They even apologised for being wrapped up in their own world and not noticing a thing! And that's the funny part of the story.
The culprit was the sponge cake for sure.

Links via Byron Child Mag

http://www.byronchild.com/arts34.htm
creating learning communities

http://www.byronchild.com/arts8.htm
vaccination

http://www.naturalchild.org/gallery/
natural child art gallery

http://www.byronchild.com/arts44.htm
breastfeeding - a mother at a play group I take Temo to told me her husband pressured her not to breastfeed because of it harming his financial status to other people! 30% of mothers breastfeed in Ireland when they leave hospital.

Big Cook, Little Cook

While I cooked last night, Jeremy showed Temo how to take a photo, here are 2 of what he took:

 

Gratitude

Clonmel

Cluain Meala, home of 'Bulmers' cider.

 

All Saints' Day

Today no breath
Of life's allowed
For Autumn spins
Her silken shroud

Thread upon thread
The earth is bound
(November's needle
Makes the round).

No wind may lift
The fallen leaf,
No flower, split
The face of grief.

No flight of birds
Distracts the eye
Across the smooth
Unraveled sky.

So still the day,
So pure, so bare;
Imprisoned in
Her crystal stare,

Earth waits a miracle -
Man too;
This is the day
All saints pass through.
- Anne Morrow Lindbergh
The Unicorn and Other Poems

Louise Bourgeois

Maman, by Louise Bourgeois, is a 30-foot-tall spider. This copy of the bronze sculpture was photographed outside the National Gallery of Canada.