Category Archives: amida buddhism

Waking up with Leonard Cohen

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I woke up with Leonard Cohen this morning.

Here’s how.

Early last year, I googled ‘buddhist psychology’ and found the Amida Trust. I started their psychotherapy course last October, and The Buddhist House is feeling more and more like home.

On March’s course block, our tutor Caroline asked for volunteers to run a seminar. I said I’d speak about ‘writing as spiritual practice’. I was crying too hard at the end of our group process to do the talk in the end, but that’s another story… ; )

Whilst preparing and collecting poems about writing, my friend Kaspa mentioned a poem by Snyder.

He found it later and emailed it to me. I liked it so much I posted it here.

I don’t know how, but a blogger called Luke Storms from Toronto found it and re-posted it on his ‘commonplace book’ blog, Crashingly Beautiful, where he collects marvellous things. Here it is (scroll down). I can’t remember how I found it there. I might have been ego-googling (blush).

Wanting to find more marvellous things, I checked out Luke’s main blog – Intense City – and there at the top right was the very Cohen quote I’d stumbled across for the first time a few weeks ago, when I was having a terrible day.

I went to find Luke on Facebook and said ‘hi’. He said ‘hi’ back, and sent me a youtube link to Leonard Cohen singing the song with the quote.

And so I woke up with Leonard Cohen this morning, with a fluffy black cat occassionally getting between me and the screen. There aren’t any finer ways to wake up. Get back under your bed covers right now, turn your laptop up loud, and enjoy.

(Thanks Caroline, Kaspa, Sage (who posted the quote), Luke, Leonard, Fatty, the man who made my laptop, and the multitudes of others who made my morning possible. Who do you have to thank for yours?)

What really matters

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This is the house where I’ve been staying for the past ten days, minus my laptop.

I’ve shared those ten days with four Buddhist cats, 27 fellow psychotherapy students, three faciliators, a resident Buddhist community, and two Lord of the Rings geeks.

I’ve sat in a circle and sobbed. I’ve laughed at Pictionary until my stomach ached. I’ve sang Taize and floated in the bliss of sweet voices coming together. I’ve played Lord of the Rings Trivial Pursuits and been scared by the geekiness of the Lord of the Rings geeks. I’ve chanted Namo Amida Bu and bowed to the golden Buddha. I’ve drunk tea and tea and tea. I’ve sat in a circle and felt soaked in love.

Who am I now? My old life doesn’t quite fit me any more. I’m clearer about some of the things I do (a long story), and I know how I’d like to be different. I’m clearer about some of the stuff I’ve been wasting my time on (the internet, buying stuff, trying too hard at anything), and some of the things I’d like to do more of (creating space for poems to enter, journalling, walking outside and looking at the flowers).

What next?

Nick Drake is playing on my i-pod. I’m going to listen to this song. I’m going to give it my full attention, and I’m going to feel grateful, for Nick Drake, for my i-pod, for my black cat coiled on my white furry cushion, for the sofa I’m sitting on, for the Green and Blacks caramel chocolate on the table. I’m going to love it all. Does anything else matter?

On being foolish and full of human passions (and a moist poem)

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I attend a group regularly – I can’t tell you what kind, because that bit needs to be anonymous. But it is a group of regular people (I’m going all American – ‘regular’!) and we meet to share our experiences and listen to each other and learn and love each other.

When it was my turn to speak, my theme was how truly messed up we all are. There’s a saying – ‘we are all very sick people – it’s just lucky that we’re sick on different days’. It felt somehow glorious that we were all bumbling along, NO idea most of the time what we are doing. There’s a Buddhist term – bombu nature – we are all bombu, we are all foolish beings. We are ordinary and full of passions. Well, I am anyway.

Last night it was a joy to be in the same boat with all the other bombu members of my group. Last night there was so much love in the room that I thought I might go pop.

*

Here’s a very appropriate (and moist) poem. Love you all too, readers – you’re in the boat too.

*

My Love For All Things Warm and Breathing

I have seldom loved more than one thing at a time,
yet this morning I feel myself expanding, each
part of me soft and glandular, and under my skin
is room enough now for the loving of many things,
and all of them at once, these students especially,
not only the girl in the yellow sweater, whose
name, Laura Buxton, is somehow the girl herself,
Laura for the coy green mellowing eyes, Buxton
for all the rest, but also the simple girl in blue
on the back row, her mouth sad beyond all reasonable
inducements, and the boy with the weight problem,
his teeth at work even now on his lower lip, and
the grand profusion of hair and nails and hands and
legs and tongues and thighs and fingertips and
wrists and throats, yes, of throats especially,
throats through which passes the breath that joins
the air that enters through these ancient windows,
that exits, that takes with it my own breath, inside
this room just now my love for all things warm and
breathing, that lifts it high to scatter it fine and
enormous into the trees and the grass, into the heat
beneath the earth beneath the stone, into the
boundless lust of all things bound but gathering.

by William Kloefkorn (from Cottonwood County: Poems by William Kloefkorn and Ted Kooser)
Thanks to The Writer’s Almanac – do support them, they’re fab.