The good man is the friend of all living things.
Gandhi
*****************************
It's noon, I just filled up my bird feeder so the finches and other small winged creatures with feathers can enjoy the cuisine. Even though the birds scatter whenever I approach they are entertaining to watch from a distance. I realize there are many other birds too large for my feeder and some of them are predators who would eat my finches if they had the chance.
How can one be friends with "all living things"? It's easy to like a rose or a violet. But who can be friends with the cat tails, and skunk cabbage? We can make friends with a kitten, a puppy, even a sheep or a horse. But how can we be friends with a cock roach, a bat or a rattle snake. The only creature who thinks a wart hog is beautiful is another wart hog.
During hunting season in the north country, men go out and bag one deer as a limit. It's a device to keep down the overpopulation of the deer. But then there are the others who come up from elsewhere dressed head to toe in shocking orange garb, enough to frighten away any creature, start drinking and waiting for the deer to show up. If they haven't killed one by Sunday afternoon they get desperate and shoot anything, goats, cows, horses, each other and themselves, in the foot. Some will even try to buy a local hunter's catch because they would be ashamed to arrive back home Sunday evening without a deer strapped to their fender. What a joke.
Then there is the man who is the full time killer. To him anything with fins, scales, fur or feathers is to be summarily dispatched. To him, apparently, the animal kingdom is to be wiped out. Is he a "good man"? He probably thinks so.
We can't take the world's animals into our homes and hearts. But we can respect their rights by protecting their environments and leaving them to take care of themselves in the own natural ways. That's the best kind of friendship one can show to animal or human.
Besides we had better be "the friend to all living things." I think some of them are evolving faster than we are.
Never give up
DB - The Vagabond
***********************
SUMMER QUESTION
It's a long, hot, sticky summer, so here's a hot, sticky question for you. Don't let the recent New York State decision rob you of your thunder.
Same sex marriage. Should it be legal or not? If so, why? If not, why not?
dbdacoba@aol.com
10 answers so far.
You have until the last day of summer, but don't dally.
I eagerly await your answer.
DB
************************
Showing posts with label Gandhi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gandhi. Show all posts
Monday, July 18, 2011
Monday, July 26, 2010
Molasses In January
Anything worth doing is worth doing slowly.
Mae West
********************
A certain poet once said that even if he knew every word in a dictionary it would still be a fascinating book to read. I have a Random House/Webster Unabridged dictionary and on long winter evenings I sometimes sit at my desk under the warm lamp, open it anywhere and read about words like absolutism, exiguous, homiletic, palimpsest and proleptic.
Why waste time with a big heavy dictionary? Why not just use Google? It's faster.
Because you have to know the word you're looking up before Google can help you and it doesn't give you a page of words with which to discover new ones.
I get ads and offers through AOL and others for gadgets and programs that will make my computer run faster. That's nice, but I don't want it to run faster. It operates a little bit faster than I do and that's fine with me.
Gandhi wrote "There is more to life than increasing its speed." It would seem to me that everyone is late for work, anxious to get home or rushing to get away from other people. There's an exit from the New York subway at Columbus Circle where the stairway makes a turn and there's a bit of the platform half way up, to the side of the stairs. I came up the stairs one morning with a whole mob of people. I stepped aside on that section of the stairway to let them pass. A moment later a young man joined me. I said to him "Everybody's in a big old hurry to get there." He laughed and said "Well I'm not." I replied "Neither am I." So the two of us stood and waited until the crowd was gone and then made a leisurely exit up the stairs and into the daylight.
Don't get me wrong. I think it's great that you can get from New York to LA in 6 hours and bask in 4, once you get on board the plane that is. I once waited 3 hours to board a 2 hour flight. But it isn't so much a matter of how long it takes to get there, it's a matter of what you going to do once there. You're probably going to iphone someone to tell them you arrived. Instant communication. Great stuff. But I enjoy taking my time, a few hours, to write something you're going to spend 2 minutes reading. That's okay with me. My pleasure is in the doing and it's worth doing slowly.
DB - The Vagabond
*********************
SUMMER QUESTION
(This is not a contest.)
Who are the 2 (two) most important people alive today? Why?
Only 5 responses so far.
dbdacoba@aol.com
Thank you.
DB
********************
Mae West
********************
A certain poet once said that even if he knew every word in a dictionary it would still be a fascinating book to read. I have a Random House/Webster Unabridged dictionary and on long winter evenings I sometimes sit at my desk under the warm lamp, open it anywhere and read about words like absolutism, exiguous, homiletic, palimpsest and proleptic.
Why waste time with a big heavy dictionary? Why not just use Google? It's faster.
Because you have to know the word you're looking up before Google can help you and it doesn't give you a page of words with which to discover new ones.
I get ads and offers through AOL and others for gadgets and programs that will make my computer run faster. That's nice, but I don't want it to run faster. It operates a little bit faster than I do and that's fine with me.
Gandhi wrote "There is more to life than increasing its speed." It would seem to me that everyone is late for work, anxious to get home or rushing to get away from other people. There's an exit from the New York subway at Columbus Circle where the stairway makes a turn and there's a bit of the platform half way up, to the side of the stairs. I came up the stairs one morning with a whole mob of people. I stepped aside on that section of the stairway to let them pass. A moment later a young man joined me. I said to him "Everybody's in a big old hurry to get there." He laughed and said "Well I'm not." I replied "Neither am I." So the two of us stood and waited until the crowd was gone and then made a leisurely exit up the stairs and into the daylight.
Don't get me wrong. I think it's great that you can get from New York to LA in 6 hours and bask in 4, once you get on board the plane that is. I once waited 3 hours to board a 2 hour flight. But it isn't so much a matter of how long it takes to get there, it's a matter of what you going to do once there. You're probably going to iphone someone to tell them you arrived. Instant communication. Great stuff. But I enjoy taking my time, a few hours, to write something you're going to spend 2 minutes reading. That's okay with me. My pleasure is in the doing and it's worth doing slowly.
DB - The Vagabond
*********************
SUMMER QUESTION
(This is not a contest.)
Who are the 2 (two) most important people alive today? Why?
Only 5 responses so far.
dbdacoba@aol.com
Thank you.
DB
********************
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Grounding Grasp 5/07/09
First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.
Gandhi
****************
Knocking.
--------------------
Nothing is ordinary. Everything is strange. Every day, every hour there are shocks, surprises and delights. It's no use folding oneself up into a warm blanket of habit in life or in the mind. "Wake up" is the perpetual call of life. It pounds away outside your door and will keep knocking until you open up.
I have no use for habitual thinking, for old ideas and for the refusal to grasp the ever-evolving measures to find the never changing truth of existence and for those who deny the basic instinct to explore and learn, but replace it with some creed.
I will continue to write, even if, until or after I have no readers left, because it is in the process of writing that I uncover the strange things of knowledge, the extraordinary things. Every serious writer knows about that. Even as I sit here now my mind is at work searching for the pure and peaceful waters of enlightenment. The journey is more of an adventure than I would have imagined. Nothing is really what you think it is. It is only by uncovering the seeming that the reality appears.
I don't care if I offend the thinkers of old worn out ideas. One cannot achieve a grasp on the real by trying to please people. I wouldn't even try except that, since I started to investigate the real, the various voices in my head have begun to agree with each other and have been graciously inviting me to come out and climb the hills. If to follow means to leave people behind then that's what it means. Amen and amen.
I have more to write now than I have time or journal space to write it. I have gilded the philosophic pill and few have swallowed. I have kicked down rotten doors and walked through. Few have followed. I have left the security of the shore and taken the hard, dangerous sea route to new lands. Who is with me?
I hold on with as firm a grasp as possible to what I have learned as if it was Prospero's book and I will not drown it until the new shore is reached and the old prophets come out to greet me.
Let them ignore me, laugh at me, fight me. Right now, at this silver toned point in my life, it doesn't matter.
DB
****************
Hi, Come here often?
----------------------
Gandhi
****************
Knocking.
--------------------
Nothing is ordinary. Everything is strange. Every day, every hour there are shocks, surprises and delights. It's no use folding oneself up into a warm blanket of habit in life or in the mind. "Wake up" is the perpetual call of life. It pounds away outside your door and will keep knocking until you open up.
I have no use for habitual thinking, for old ideas and for the refusal to grasp the ever-evolving measures to find the never changing truth of existence and for those who deny the basic instinct to explore and learn, but replace it with some creed.
I will continue to write, even if, until or after I have no readers left, because it is in the process of writing that I uncover the strange things of knowledge, the extraordinary things. Every serious writer knows about that. Even as I sit here now my mind is at work searching for the pure and peaceful waters of enlightenment. The journey is more of an adventure than I would have imagined. Nothing is really what you think it is. It is only by uncovering the seeming that the reality appears.
I don't care if I offend the thinkers of old worn out ideas. One cannot achieve a grasp on the real by trying to please people. I wouldn't even try except that, since I started to investigate the real, the various voices in my head have begun to agree with each other and have been graciously inviting me to come out and climb the hills. If to follow means to leave people behind then that's what it means. Amen and amen.
I have more to write now than I have time or journal space to write it. I have gilded the philosophic pill and few have swallowed. I have kicked down rotten doors and walked through. Few have followed. I have left the security of the shore and taken the hard, dangerous sea route to new lands. Who is with me?
I hold on with as firm a grasp as possible to what I have learned as if it was Prospero's book and I will not drown it until the new shore is reached and the old prophets come out to greet me.
Let them ignore me, laugh at me, fight me. Right now, at this silver toned point in my life, it doesn't matter.
DB
****************
Hi, Come here often?
----------------------
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Gacious Gaffs 11/20/08
Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.
Gandhi
************************
Alas, with senior citizenship come regrets. In youth all of our errors we tend to take little notice of, quickly forgive ourselves for and pass them over for the next adventure But they turn out to have done nothing more than stack up under the proverbial carpet. Then comes the house cleaning time when we lift up the carpet and have to clean up the mess.
Isn't it a shame that we can't go back and undo all the dumb things we did? Why weren't we perfect at the time? Why did I forget to do this, failed to do that and did the other thing wrong? Maybe I thought I was doing the right thing at the time.
The fact is that there has never been a human who didn't make mistakes. How do they get by without taking a hatchet to their heads?
"To err is human, to forgive, divine," goes the old saying. Sure, we have to learn to forgive those who have done us wrong, either intentionally or by accident. That's a divine thing to do. But what about forgiving ourselves?
Some of my past mistakes still haunt me, and they will attack me unexpectedly, like mosquitos. I mentally dig a hole and bury them and some of them stay buried, some don't. Others are too big to bury. What to do, what to do?!
Gandhi is telling us that we have the freedom to make mistakes. Well, it seems to me that if we have the freedom to do that then we also have the right and freedom to forgive ourselves for those mistakes. Most of us don't exercise that right often enough. And so we live with the memory of errors that should have been discarded into the trash heap and left to rot somewhere long ago.
You will be surprised at what other people think of you when you realize how often they don't. So when the next regret pops into your head, look it right in the eye and say "I forgive you."
DB
Gandhi
************************
Alas, with senior citizenship come regrets. In youth all of our errors we tend to take little notice of, quickly forgive ourselves for and pass them over for the next adventure But they turn out to have done nothing more than stack up under the proverbial carpet. Then comes the house cleaning time when we lift up the carpet and have to clean up the mess.
Isn't it a shame that we can't go back and undo all the dumb things we did? Why weren't we perfect at the time? Why did I forget to do this, failed to do that and did the other thing wrong? Maybe I thought I was doing the right thing at the time.
The fact is that there has never been a human who didn't make mistakes. How do they get by without taking a hatchet to their heads?
"To err is human, to forgive, divine," goes the old saying. Sure, we have to learn to forgive those who have done us wrong, either intentionally or by accident. That's a divine thing to do. But what about forgiving ourselves?
Some of my past mistakes still haunt me, and they will attack me unexpectedly, like mosquitos. I mentally dig a hole and bury them and some of them stay buried, some don't. Others are too big to bury. What to do, what to do?!
Gandhi is telling us that we have the freedom to make mistakes. Well, it seems to me that if we have the freedom to do that then we also have the right and freedom to forgive ourselves for those mistakes. Most of us don't exercise that right often enough. And so we live with the memory of errors that should have been discarded into the trash heap and left to rot somewhere long ago.
You will be surprised at what other people think of you when you realize how often they don't. So when the next regret pops into your head, look it right in the eye and say "I forgive you."
DB
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