Happy Now Year

"Everything is as it is. It has no name other than the name we give it. It is we who call it something; we give it a value. We say this thing is good or it's bad, but in itself, the thing is only as it is. It's not absolute; it's just as it is. People are just as they are."
-Ajahn Sumedho, "The Mind and the Way"
We place values and assign positive or negative thought and emotional states to everything that enters our field of consciousness. This is due to our conditioning and mental habits. It is not because there actually is an intrinsic value to any thing in particular.
We live our life with an emotional laundry marker between our ears. Light load. Dark load. We lose the incomperable beauty of the moment because we are always dealing with our cognitive dissonance concerning the impurity of our predetermined happy happenstances vs. our unhappy happenstances. I'm going to work. OK. I'm glad I have a job but I'd rather be sailing therefore I can't be happy now,,, maybe when I make it to the weekend.
We name the moment "a not happy moment" and our fate (for the moment) is sealed. What if we changed our perspective to "I'm still alive right now! So I get to practice the dharma, the mindfulness, the discipline, the art of happiness. What luck! Watch me as I navigate all the frowny-faced distractions that want to pull my attention from the infinite bliss state that under pins everything.
Can we feel for the lost soul we give a dollar to on the street, witness the self-rightious cruelty of the zealot to the infidel, get cut off in traffic without being knocked off kilter and turned into the all-day sucker of curmudgeonliness? Find the escape route through the watching. Everything's fine. Keep watching. Keep seeing. Keep being. The mind is quiet. the mind is agitated, returns to the breath and is quiet again. Not naming, Not blaming. This is the way we live the life, live the life, live the life... of the bodhisattva. Celebrate the New Year but ask yourself, "As opposed to when? What moment is not brand-spanking new?" Celebrate a Happy Now Year every single moment.

Fabulous Beast

Walking the dog can be a walking meditation of sorts Dogs wake us up to the preponderance of the invisible. They are so interested in things we take for granted, things we never think about… or… are ever aware of.

You’re treading the levee at sundown with your trusty terrier by your side. The wind has stilled and all that’s blowing across the fallow fields and pear orchards are those warm-hued photons sweeping toward you from the soft orange glow on the horizon.

Then a slight tug on the leash releases you from your daydreams and an electrical impulse completes the circuit between your brain and Whitley’s nose… and a whole new world opens up for you, rife with traces of organic presences, evidence of events hitherto unknown. — all thanks to that vital, primordial intelligence pulsating just beyond your fingertips.

You’ve become like a fabulous beast from Greek mythology— half-man, half-canine prowling the moors at dusk, the powers of two joined as one.

Dogs are our periscopes into a world apart from ordinary human perceptions. They broaden our sensibilities. They humble us with their graceful navigation of invisible worlds. They are our teachers.