a transparent envelope

from swann's way by marcel proust

"but then, even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is a creation of the thoughts of other people. even the simplest act which we describe as 'seeing someone we know' is to some extent an intellectual process. we pack the physical outline of the person we see with all the notions we have already formed about him, and in the total picture of him which we compose in our minds those notions have certainly the principal place. in the end they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks, to follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously in the sound of his voice as if it were no more than a transparent envelope, that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is these notions which we recognise and to which we listen."

". . .'she's only an actress, if you like, but you know i don't believe very much in the 'hierarchy' of the arts.' (as he spoke i noticed, what had often struck me before in his conversations with my grandmother's sisters, that whenever he spoke of serious matters, whenever he used an expression which seemed to imply a definite opinion upon some important subject, he would take care to isolate, to sterilise it by using a special intonation, mechanical and ironic, as though he had put the phrase or word between inverted commas, and was anxious to disclaim any personal responsibility for it; as who should say "the 'hierarchy,' don't you know, as silly people call it." but then, if it was so absurd, why did he use the word?)"

"i loved her; i was sorry not to have had the time and the inspiration to insult her, to hurt her, to force her to keep some memory of me. i thought her so beautiful that i should have liked to be able to retrace my steps so as to shake my fist at her and shout, 'i think you're hideous, grotesque; how i loathe you!'"

summer night

by louise gluck from the seven ages

orderly, and out of long habit, my heart continues to beat.

i hear it, nights when i wake, over the mild sound of the air conditioner.

as i used to hear it over the beloved’s heart, or

variety of hearts, owing to there having been several.

and as it beats, it continues to drum up ridiculous emotion.

so many passionate letters never sent!

so many urgent journeys conceived of on summer nights,

surprise visits to men who were nearly complete strangers.

the tickets never bought, the letters never stamped.

and pride spared. and the life, in a sense, never completely lived.

and the art always in some danger of growing repetitious.

why not? why not? why should my poems not imitate my life?

whose lesson is not the apotheosis but the pattern, whose meaning

is not in the gesture but in the inertia, the reverie.

desire, loneliness, wind in the flowering almond --

surely these are the great, the inexhaustible subjects

to which my predecessors apprenticed themselves.

i hear them echo in my own heart, disguised as convention.

balm of the summer night, balm of the ordinary,

imperial joy and sorrow of human existence,

the dreamed as well as the lived ---

what could be dearer than this, given the closeness of death?

that thing we want to name but can't

from there there by tommy orange

"dene walks to the next train car. he stands at the doors and looks out the window. the train floats alongside the freeway next to cars. each of their speeds is different: the speed of the cars is short, disconnected, sporadic. dene and the train slither along the tracks as one movement and speed. there's something cinematic about their variable speeds, like a moment in a movie that makes you feel something for reasons you can't explain. something too big to feel, underneath, and inside, too familiar to recognize, right there in front of you at all times. dene puts his headphones on, shuffles the music on his phone, skips several songs and stays on 'there there,' by radiohead. the hook is 'just 'cause you feel it doesn't mean it's there.'"

"the trouble with believing is you have to believe that believing will work, you have to believe in belief. i've scraped out the little bowl of faith i keep by the open window my mind has become ever since the internet got inside it, made me a part of it. i'm not joking. i feel as if i am going through withdrawal. i've read about residential internet rehab facilities in pennsylvania. they have digital-detox retreats and underground desert compounds in arizona. my problem hasn't just been with gambling. or gambling. or incessantly scrolling down and refreshing my social media pages. or the endless search to find good new music. it's all of it. . .

this edwin black, me here on the toilet, can't get there, on the internet, because yesterday i dropped my phone in the toilet, and my computer froze, same fucking day it just stopped, not even the mouse cursor moved, no spinning wheels of promised load. no reboot after unplug, just a sudden and mute black screen - my face reflected in it, staring first in horror at the computer dying, then at my face reacting to seeing my face react to the computer dying. a little part of me died then, seeing my face, thinking about this sick addiction, all this time i've spent doing almost nothing. four years of sitting, staring into my computer at the internet. i guess if you don't count sleep, it's three, if you don't count the dreaming, but i dream of the internet, of keyword search phrases that make complete sense in the dream, are the key to the dream's meaning, but which make no sense in the morning, like all the dreams i've ever had."

"i type 'the brain and constipation' and hit enter. i click on several links, scroll through several pages. i read a lot and come away with nothing. this is how time skips. links just lead to links that can lead you all the way back to the twelfth century. this is how it can all of a sudden be six in the morning, with my mom knocking on the door before she goes to work at the indian center -- where she keeps trying to get me to apply for a job. . .

lately i've become a little obsessed with the brain. with trying to find explanations for everything as it relates to the brain and its parts. there's almost too much information out there. the internet is like a brain trying to figure out a brain. i depend on the internet for recall now. there's no reason to remember when it's always just right there, like the way everyone used to know phone numbers by heart and now can't even remember their own. remembering itself is becoming old-fashioned."

"for how many years had i been dying to find out what the other half of me was? how many tribes had i made up when asked in the meantime? i'd gotten through four years as a native american studies major. dissecting tribal histories, looking for signs, something that might resemble me, something that felt familiar. i'd made it through two years of grad school, studying comparative literature with an emphasis on native american literature. i wrote my thesis on the inevitable influence of blood quantum policies on modern native identity and the literature written by mixed-blood native authors that influenced identity in native cultures. all without knowing my tribe. always defending myself. like i'm not native enough. i'm as native as obama is black. it's different though. for natives. i know. i don't know how to be. every possible way i think that it might look for me to say i'm native seems wrong."

"'what i'm here to talk about is how our whole approach since day one has been like this: kids are jumping out the windows of burning buildings, falling to their deaths. and we think the problem is that they're jumping. this is what we've done: we've tried to find ways to get them to stop jumping. convince them that burning alive is better than leaving when the shit gets too hot for them to take. we've boarded up windows and made better nets to catch them, found more convincing ways to tell them not to jump. they're making the decision that it's better to be dead and gone than to be alive in what we have here, this life, the one we made for them, the one they've inherited. and we're either involved and have a hand in each one of their deaths, just like i did with my brother, or we're absent, which is still involvement, just like silence is not just silence but is not speaking up. i'm in suicide prevention now. i've had fifteen relatives commit suicide over the course of my life, not counting my brother. i had one community i was working with recently in south dakota tell me they were grieved out. that was after experiencing seventeen suicides in their community in just eight months. but how do we instill in our children the will to live? at these conferences. and in the offices. in the emails and at the community events, there has to be an urgency, a do-whatever-at-any-cost sort of spirit behind what we do. or fuck the programs, maybe we should send the money to the families themselves, who need it and know what to do with it, since we all know what that money goes toward, salaries and conferences like this one. i'm sorry. i get paid outta that shit too, and actually, shit, i'm not sorry, this issue shouldn't be met with politeness or formality. we can't get lost in the career advancements and grant objectives, the day-to-day grind, as if we have to do what we do. we choose what we do, and in that choice comes the community. we are choosing for them. all the time. that's what these kids are feeling. they have no control. guess what kinda control they do have? we need to be about what we're always saying we're about. and if we can't, and we're really just about ourselves, we need to step aside, let somebody else from the community who really cares, who'll really do something, let them come in and help. fuck all the rest.'"

"'getting fucked up seems like the only thing left to do,' harvey went on. 'it's not the alcohol. there's not some special relationship between indians and alcohol. it's just what's cheap, available, legal. it's what we have to go to when it seems like we have nothing else left. i did it too. for a long time. but i stopped telling the story i'd been telling myself, about how that was the only way, because of how hard i had it, and how hard i was, that story about self-medicating against the disease that was my life, my bad lot, history. when we see that the story is the way we live our lives, only then can we start to change, a day at a time. . . i get that shame too. the kind that's made of more years than you know you have left to live. that shame that makes you wanna say fuck it and just go back to drinking as a means to an end. i'm sorry to all the people i hurt all that time i was too fucked up to see what i was doing. there's no excuse. apologies don't even mean as much as just. . . just acknowledging that you fucked up, hurt people, and that you don't wanna do that anymore. not to yourself either. that's sometimes the hardest part.'"

"we are indians and native americans, american indians and native american indians, north american indians, natives, ndns and ind'ins, status indians and non-status indians, first nations indians and indians so indian we either think about the fact of it every single day or we never think about it at all. we are urban indians and indigenous indians, rez indians and indians from mexico and central and south america. we are alaskan native indians, native hawaiians, and european expatriate indians, indians from eight different tribes with quarter-blood quantum requirements and so not federally recognized indian kinds of indians. we are enrolled members of tribes and disenrolled members, ineligible members and tribal council members. we are full-blood, half-breed, quadroon, eighths, sixteenths, thirty-seconds. undoable math. insignificant remainders."

 "dene convinced blue to let calvin do his interview for the storytelling project during work hours. calvin keeps crossing and uncrossing his legs and pulling at his hat by the bill. dene thinks calvin is nervous, but then dene is nervous, he is always nervous, so maybe it's projection. but projection as a concept is a slippery slope because everything could be projection. he is regularly subject to solipsism's recursive, drowning affect."

*                                *                                  *

"'long time ago they didn't have a name for the sun.' she pointed up to the sun, which was in front of us. 'they couldn't decide if it was a man or a woman or what. all the animals met about it, and a badger came out of a hole in the ground and called out the name, but as soon as he did, he ran. the other animals came after him. that badger went underground and stayed there. he was afraid they would punish him for naming it.' fina flipped on her blinker and switched lanes to pass a slow truck in the right lane. 'some of us got this feeling stuck inside, all the time, like we've done something wrong. like we ourselves are something wrong. like who we are deep inside, that thing we want to name but can't, it's like we're afraid we'll be punished for it. so we hide. we drink alcohol because it helps us feel like we can be ourselves and not be afraid. but we punish ourselves with it. the thing we most don't want has a way of landing right on top of us. that badger's medicine's the only thing that stands a chance at helping. you gotta learn how to stay down there. way deep down inside yourself, unafraid.'

i turned my head. looked down at the gray streak of road. it hit me somewhere in the middle of my chest. all that she'd said was true. it hit me in the middle, where it all comes together like a knot. . .

'so? we all fuck up. it's how we come back from it that matters.'

'i don't know what the fuck i'm supposed to do then. i can't get him back, i can't get them back. i don't know what the fuck any of this is about.'

'you're not supposed to,' she said. 'you're not ever supposed to know. not all the way. that's what makes the whole thing work the way it does. we can't know. that's what makes us keep going.'"

to use life

from on the shortness of life by seneca

"people are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy."

"how stupid to forget our mortality, and put off sensible plans to our fiftieth and sixtieth years, aiming to begin life from a point at which few have arrived!"

"finally, it is generally agreed that no activity can be successfully pursued by an individual who is preoccupied - not rhetoric or liberal studies - since the mind when distracted absorbs nothing deeply, but rejects everything which is, so to speak, crammed into it."

"the greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today."

"it used to be a greek failing to want to know how many oarsmen ulysses had, whether the iliad or the odyssey was written first, and whether too they were by the same author, and other questions of this kind, which if you keep them to yourself in no way enhance your private knowledge, and if you publish them make you appear more a bore than a scholar. but now the romans too have been afflicted by the pointless enthusiasm for useless knowledge. recently i heard somebody reporting which roman general first did this or that: duilius first won a naval battle; curius dentatus first included elephants in a triumph. so far these facts, even if they do not contribute to real glory, at least are concerned with exemplary services to the state: such knowledge will not do us any good, but it interests us because of the appeal of these pointless facts."

"even their pleasures are uneasy and made anxious by various fears, and at the very height of their rejoicing the worrying thought steals over them: 'how long will this last?' this feeling has caused kings to bewail their power, and they were not so much delighted by the greatness of their fortune as terrified by the thought of its inevitable end."

"so it is inevitable that life will be not just very short but very miserable for those who acquire by great toil what they must keep by greater toil. they achieve what they want laboriously; they possess what they have achieved anxiously; and meanwhile they take no account of time that will never more return. new preoccupations take the place of the old, hope excites more hope and ambition more ambition. they do not look for an end to their misery, but simply change the reason for it."

"there will always be causes for anxiety, whether due to prosperity or to wretchedness. life will be driven on through a succession of preoccupations: we shall always long for leisure, but never enjoy it."

"every great and overpowering grief must take away the capacity to choose words, since it often stifles the voice itself."

"the body's needs are few: it wants to be free from cold, to banish hunger and thirst with nourishment; if we long for anything more we are exerting ourselves to serve our vices, not our needs."

"for to be afflicted with endless sorrow at the loss of someone very dear is foolish self-indulgence, and to feel none is inhuman callousness."

"he will live badly who does not know how to die well."

"inevitably the mind can cope more easily with the distress arising from disappointed longings if you have not promised it certain success."

"there is also another not inconsiderable source of anxieties, if you are too concerned to assume a pose and do not reveal yourself openly to anyone, like many people whose lives are false and aimed only at outward show. for it is agonizing always to be watching yourself in fear of being caught when your usual mask has slipped. nor can we ever be carefree when we think that whenever we are observed we are appraised; for many things happen to strip us of our pretensions against our will, and even if all this attention to oneself succeeds, yet the life of those who always live behind a mask is not pleasant or free from care. on the contrary, how full of pleasure is that honest and naturally unadorned simplicity that in no way hides its disposition! yet this life too runs a risk of being scorned if everything is revealed to everybody; for with some people familiarity breeds contempt. but there is no danger of virtue being held cheap as a result of close observation, and it is better to be despised for simplicity than to suffer agonies from everlasting pretence. still, let us use moderation here: there is a big difference between living simply and living carelessly."

hybridity

from new world border by guillermo gomez-peña

"i also oppose the old colonial dichotomy of first world / third world with the more pertinent notion of the fourth world -- a conceptual place where the indigenous peoples meet with the diasporic communities. in the fourth world, there is very little place for static identities, fixed nationalities, 'pure' languages, or sacred cultural traditions. the members of the fourth world live between and across various cultures, communities, and countries. and our identities are constantly being reshaped by this kaleidoscopic experience. the artists and writers who inhabit the fourth world have a very important role: to elaborate the new set of myths, metaphors, and symbols that will locate us within all of these fluctuating cartographies."

"people with social, racial, or economic privilege have an easier time crossing physical borders, but they have a much harder time negotiating the invisible borders of culture and race."

"in reaction to the transculture imposed from above, a new essentialist culture is emerging, one that advocates national, ethnic, and gender separatism in the quest for cultural autonomy, 'bio-regional identity,' and 'traditional values.' this tendency to overstate difference, and the unwillingness to change or exchange, is a product of communities in turmoil who, as an antidote to the present confusion, have chosen to retreat to the fictional womb of their own separate histories. even our so-called 'progressive' communities are retrenching to a fundamentalist stance."

"my version of the hybrid is cross-racial, polylinguistic, and multicontextual. from a disadvantaged position, the hybrid expropriates elements from all sides to create more open and fluid systems. hybrid culture is community-based yet experimental, radical but not static or dogmatic. it fuses 'low' and 'high' art, primitive and high-tech, the problematic notions of self and other, the liquid entities of north and south, east and west."

"the artist who understands and practices hybridity in this way can be at the same time an insider and an outsider, an expert in border crossings, a temporary member of multiple communities, a citizen of two or more nations. . . s/he assumes the role of nomadic chronicler, intercultural translator, or political trickster. s/he speaks from more than one perspective, to more than one community, about more than one reality. [their] job is to trespass, bridge, interconnect, reinterpret, remap, and redefine; to find the outer limits of [their] culture and cross them.

the presence of the hybrid denounces the faults, prejudices, and fears manufactured by the self-proclaimed center, and threatens the very raison d'etre of any monoculture, official or not."

"the borders keep multiplying. it just doesn't cut it anymore to pretend that the enemy is always outside. the separatist, sexist, racist, and authoritarian tendencies that we condemn others for perpetuating also exist within our own communities and within our own individual selves. we can't continue to hide behind the pretext that 'straight, white men,' or the all purpose 'dominant culture' are the source of all our problems. every community must face this fact: dominance is contextual. we all, at different times and in different contexts, enjoy some privileges over other people and perform the ever-changing roles of victim and victimizer, exploited and exploiter, colonizer and colonized."

"the absurd premise behind this belief is that if we are truly committed to our communities, we must be marginal, poor, angry, and anti-intellectual. . . this is contemporary america: a land of diversity where no one tolerates difference; a land of bizarre eclecticism where everyone must know their place."

"spanglish poetry reading in a public bathroom (cal arts, 1979)
this piece was another attempt to bring performance and language into unusual contexts, and to disrupt people's sense of the quotidian. for twenty-four hours, i sat on a toilet and read aloud epic poetry describing my journey to the united states. whoever happened to come into the bathroom - for whatever reason - experienced the piece. through this and other experiments of its kind, i became interested in the notion of performing for 'involuntary audiences.'"

"performing for the media: the cruci-fiction project (1994)
in early '94, roberto and i crucified ourselves for three hours on sixteen-foot-high crosses at rodeo beach (in front of san francisco's golden gate bridge). the piece was designed for the media, as a symbolic protest against the xenophobic immigration policies of california's governor pete wilson. inspired by the biblical myth of dimas and gestas (two petty thieves who were crucified alongside of jesus), roberto and i decided to dress as 'two contemporary public enemies of california': i was an 'undocumented bandido,' crucified by the INS [immigration and naturalization service], and roberto was a generic 'gang member,' crucified by the LAPD.

our audience of over 300 people each received a handout, asking them to 'free us from our martyrdom as a gesture of political commitment.' however, we had miscalculated their response. paralyzed by the melancholia of the image, it took them over three hours to figure out how to get us down. by then, my right shoulder had become dislocated and roberto had passed out. we were carried to a nearby bonfire and nurtured back to reality, while some people in the crowd rebuked those who were trying to help us, saying, 'let them die!'"

everywhere or nowhere

from there there by tommy orange

"in 1621, colonists invited massasoit, the chief of the wampanoags, to a feast after a recent land deal. massasoit came with ninety of his men. that meal is why we still eat a meal together in november. celebrate it as a nation. but that wasn't a thanksgiving meal. it was a land-deal meal. two years later there was another, similar meal meant to symbolize eternal friendship. two hundred indians dropped dead that night from an unknown poison. . .

in 1637, anywhere from four to seven hundred pequot gathered for their annual green corn dance. colonists surrounded their village, set it on fire, and shot any pequot who tried to escape. the next day the massachusetts bay colony had a feast in celebration, and the governor declared it a day of thanksgiving. thanksgivings like these happened everywhere, whenever there were what we have to call 'successful massacres.' at one such celebration in manhattan, people were said to have celebrated by kicking the heads of pequot people through the streets like soccer balls."

"getting us to cities was supposed to be the final, necessary step in our assimilation, absorption, erasure, the completion of a five-hundred-year-old genocidal campaign. but the city made us new, and we made it ours. we didn't get lost amid the sprawl of tall buildings, the stream of anonymous masses, the ceaseless din of traffic. we found one another, started up indian centers, brought out our families and powwows, our dances, our songs, our beadwork. we bought and rented homes, slept on the streets, under freeways; we went to school, joined the armed forces, populated indian bars in the fruitvale in oakland and in the mission in san francisco. we lived in boxcar villages in richmond. we made art and we made babies and we made way for our people to go back and forth between reservation and city. we did not move to cities to die. the sidewalks and streets, the concrete, absorbed our heaviness. the glass, metal, rubber, and wires, the speed, the hurtling masses -- the city took us in. we were not urban indians then. this was part of the indian relocation act, which was part of the indian termination policy, which was and is exactly what it sounds like. make them look and act like us. become us. and so disappear. but it wasn't just like that. plenty of us came by choice, to start over, to make money, or for a new experience. some of us came to cities to escape the reservation. we stayed after fighting in the second world war. after vietnam too. we stayed because the city sounds like a war, and you can't leave a war once you've been, you can only keep it at bay -- which is easier when you can see and hear it near you, that fast metal, that constant firing around you, cars up and down the streets and freeways like bullets. the quiet of the reservation, the side-of-the-highway towns, rural communities, that kind of silence just makes the sound of your brain on fire that much more pronounced.

plenty of us are urban now. if not because we live in cities, then because we live on the internet. inside the high-rise of multiple browser windows. they used to call us sidewalk indians. called us citified, superficial, inauthentic, cultureless refugees, apples."

"urban indians were the generation born in the city. we've been moving for a long time, but the land moves with you like memory. an urban indian belongs to the city, and cities belong to the earth. everything here is formed in relation to every other living and nonliving thing from the earth. all our relations. the process that brings anything to its current form - chemical, synthetic, technological, or otherwise - doesn't make the product not a product of the living earth. buildings, freeways, care -- are those not of the earth? were they shipped in from mars, the moon? is it because they're processed, manufactured, or that we handle them? are we so different? were we at one time not something else entirely, homo sapiens, single-celled organisms, space dust, unidentifiable pre-bang quantum theory? cities form in the same way as galaxies. urban indians feel at home walking in the shadow of a downtown building. we came to know the downtown oakland skyline better than we did any sacred mountain range, the redwoods in the oakland hills better than any other deep wild forest. we know the sound of the freeway better than we do rivers, the howl of distant trains better than wolf howls, we know the smell of gas and freshly wet concrete and burned rubber better than we do the smell of cedar or sage or even fry bread -- which isn't traditional, like reservations aren't traditional, but nothing is original, everything comes from something that came before, which was once nothing. everything is new and doomed. we ride buses, trains, and cars across, over, and under concrete plains. being indian has never been about returning to the land. the land is everywhere or nowhere."

"'how can i not know today your face tomorrow, the face that is there already or is being forged beneath the face you show me or beneath the mask you are wearing, and which you will only show me when i am least expecting it?' - javier marías"

"one time she used the word devastating after i finished reading a passage from her favorite author - louise erdrich. it was something about how life will break you. how that's the reason we're here, and to go sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples fall and pile around you, wasting all that sweetness."

giving and taking

quotes from sadness love openness by chokyi nyima rinpoche

"whenever we don't feel like sharing with others, we are narrowing the scope of our minds. stinginess makes us feel tense and unnatural. it's painful to be that way; our lives become rigid. on the other hand, whenever we are able to share with others or give something away, this immediately frees the mind. it's almost like magic. sharing and giving create an immediate sense of spaciousness, joy, and freedom. in fact, the mere intention to share is as powerful as the act itself.

there is a meditation practice known as giving and taking. in this meditation, we mentally give away all our most cherished possessions and accomplishments, offering them to all beings. at the same time, we take upon ourselves all their problems -- all their sadness, confusion, and suffering. this is a very powerful practice. if we engage in it sincerely and with an open mind, we naturally develop all the wonderful qualities that come with being generous. training in that kind of exchange will enable us to realize the nature of reality and the wisdom that lies at the core of our being."

"if we can avoid causing other beings any kind of pain or distress, then we are keeping the vows of the foundational vehicle, which are focused on achieving freedom for ourselves. next, if we not only avoid hurting others but also work for their benefit and happiness, then we are keeping the vows of the great vehicle, which is committed to bringing all beings to the awakened state. finally, if we additionally acknowledge the fundamental purity of all things and if we are capable of living in accord with that realization, then we are keeping the vows of the vajra vehicle that bring complete awakening in this very life."

"the buddha tells us that we shouldn't accept his words just because they are his. this sets buddhism apart from many other religions. some religions consider it a sin to question anything at all that is taught in their holy scriptures. other religions may encourage their followers to investigate things a bit more closely, but only up to a point. and if we happen to cross the line, we'll soon find out. . .

however, in buddhism there is no limit to what we may question. there are no dogmas that must remain unchallenged. this is a special feature of the buddhist teaching and the buddhist path. practicing the dharma is a hands-on, concrete activity that begins by observing the world and ourselves."

"news comes to us about people falling ill and dying. we learn that suddenly people can't seem to get along. we find that things have been destroyed, broken, and torn apart. in such cases, the underlying reason is always impermanence. and impermanence hurts. but we need to recognize life for what it is. that's the only way we can develop an approach to life that is realistic as well as constructive. in fact, if all the pain and sorrow seem paralyzing, we haven't quite gotten it yet. getting stuck is getting it wrong. getting stuck means getting depressed, and becoming depressed just makes a tough situation worse. so, we need an approach that recognizes the fact of impermanence but uses it as an opportunity to develop the qualities of love and insight."

"we'd rather not consider or talk about impermanence. we'd prefer to forget all about it as soon as possible. we certainly don't want to look at death, deal with death, or talk about death! when something is unpleasant and painful, we want it to disappear instantly. nobody wants to hold on to a source of pain. on the other hand, whenever we find something that is enjoyable and gives us pleasure, we want to keep it as long as possible, preferably forever. we pick flowers and arrange them in a vase, but when they are no longer fresh and beautiful, we throw them away because their ugliness turns us off. we wish only to enjoy their beauty and lovely scent. but ugliness doesn't suddenly descend onto the flowers. ugliness, decay, and the smell of rot are just as intrinsic to the flowers as their beauty. all are equally the results of impermanence."

"people who are not religious often regard religious beliefs and convictions as mere superstitions, and they feel a kind of pity for those who subscribe to them. meanwhile religious people pity nonbelievers, thinking of them as lost souls. so, everybody pities each other, back and forth.

faith in a buddhist context lies between these two positions. buddhist faith arises through understanding, and what we need to understand is dependent origination and impermanence. it can be very simply put: buddhist faith arises as one becomes clear about the links that constitute these processes."

"six aspects of bodhisattva training -

1. generosity: generosity is the practice of giving. it's the training in being generous with things, food, money, protection, and care. generosity is born from love. we are already generous toward the ones we love, so generosity is a natural expression of love. but unlike ordinary people, a bodhisattva is generous toward everybody.

2. discipline: discipline is the next quality, but what is discipline for a bodhisattva? it means living in accord with the wish not to harm anyone, and to do all that one can to be of benefit. that kind of discipline also springs from love. all excellent qualities blossom when a bodhisattva maintains this discipline in thought, word, and deed.

3. patience: love is patient, and the love of a bodhisattva endures all hardships, disappointments, pain, and hurt. patience is the ability to accept adversity and not be discouraged. patience opens our minds to the dharma.

4. enthusiasm: enthusiasm is the joy of doing good deeds. a bodhisattva is deeply engaged in developing the qualities that are essential to the spiritual path -- the wish to be free, loving-kindness, and insight. that process is fueled by great joy.

5. concentration: concentration refers to training the mind through meditation. bodhisattvas have a balanced and composed mind. when the mind is calm and at ease, it also becomes agile and capable of wonderful achievements.

6. insight: insight arises from training in the first five qualities: generosity, discipline, patience, enthusiasm, and concentration. insight is twofold: awareness of things as they appear and awareness of things as they really are. insight dawns when the mind has achieved composure and agility by means of practice."

"all sights are visible emptiness.
all sounds are audible emptiness.
all sensations are blissful emptiness.
all concepts are thought-free wakefulness."

"produce nothing, suppress nothing. just let your mind be, exactly as it is, right now, in this very moment, completely free from hopes or expectations."