Getting to Know You

With palms together,

The world is such an interesting place. Over the last two days two close friends and I rode our Harley’s from Las Cruces to Salado, Texas, a distance of 672 miles.  Throughout the ride we were greeted warmly by interested locals at gas stations and restaurants.  Its always curious to me how that works.  We stop.  People turn their heads at the sounds of the bikes.  They see bikers with “cuts” and, while one might think they’d be intimidated, they often are just as likely, if not more likely, to ask us where we are going and where we are from.  A smile here goes a very long way.  Soon we are in a greart conversation about travel, motorcycles or veteran issues. American can be a great country.  We have great people.  All that seems necessary is a warm smile and willingness to talk and tell stories.

The ride, sometimes on the Interstate, sometimes on the back roads through the Texas hill country, is beautiful.  We see a nation on the move: business, vacation, or just “Sunday” drives, and all the while yielding a willingness to engage and get to know each other.  We stopped at a “parking spece” off I-10.  We were soon joined by a family we had seen together at a gas station a few miles back.  The children were fascinated by locusts that seemed to live there.  We talked about them. How hard is that?

Yet, in the cities, such things are much more private affairs.  Too bad it seems to me, as when we do talk with one another we find common ground and mutual interests.  All it talks is a warm smile and the courage to take the risk of introducing oneself to total strangers.

I look forward to getting back on the road again, but not before getting to know the fine folk in Salado.

May we each enjoy the company of one another!

Be well,

Daiho

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Two Truths

With palms together, 

Buddhism teaches there are two truths: the relative and the absolute. One is particular the other relative. We live in both. 

When aware of the relative, we are each separate beings living on a particular planet in a particular solar system. When aware of the absolute, there is no us, no planet, no solar system: nothing is separate, all is one. Both “inter-are.” 

What does this have to do with anything at all? Everything. Derived from the absolute, our morality guides us. Our oneness teaches us to do no harm. Our relative enables us to live and survive. I am drinking a cup of coffee, and in doing so I am drinking the beans grown in Guatemala or Brazil; I am enabled to do this as a result of the many lives and many hands that brought this coffee into existence and to my table. 

When in the absolute all of this is clear and yet dissolves. When in the relative it is important to honor those hands and lives for they have provided us. 

One might say living in the absolute is living in awakening. One might further say that living in the relative is living in delusion. Both would be true, yet, these distinctions themselves are meaningless. Our teaching is to live without attaching to either, but instead accepting both as the true nature of our reality. 

This is what it means to “float like a duck.” The storm comes and we float. The storm resolves and we float. We know there is no storm and there is no calm. There is just this, what’s in your moment right now. 

So allow the storm, but don’t be guided by it; allow the calm, but don’t be deceived by it. This is the Great Way.

Gassho