Quotes from Jack Kornfield

Quotes from The Buddha held in A Lamp in the Darkness by Jack Kornfield

·         There is praise and blame, gain and loss, pleasure and pain, fame and disrepute.  Did you think this would not happen to you?

·         Make your mind like the earth which receives all things steadily.

·         Hold yourself as a mother holds her beloved child.

·         Who is your enemy?  Mind is your enemy.

Who is your friend?  Mind is your friend.

·         He beat me, he robbed me, he hurt me.  Abandon these thoughts.  Live in love.

·         Aging, sickness, and death are suffering.  To lose what you love is suffering. 

·         Your days pass like rainbows, like a flash of lightening like a star at dawn.  Your life is short.  How can you quarrel?

·         Care, not carelessness, is the way.

·         Live in joy, even among the troubled.

From Jack Kornfield

It’s not about you.  It’s about us.  Life is difficult for everyone.

The warrior in your heart says stand your ground.  Feel the survival of a thousand years of ancestors in your muscles and your blood.  You have all the support you need in your bones.

Loss and betrayal tear open the heart.  Look through this gate for the wisdom that lies there.

As you become intimate with your suffering your heart grows tender.

Neither avoid nor overreact.  Tend what you are given.  Stay centered in yourself. 

Be the potter of your life.  Center yourself on the wheel.  Find your still point.

Even in the ruins some new life waits to be born.  Fix the mast, or build a new ship.

It doesn’t belong to only you.  It’s the dance of conditions.  You can’t choose the music, but you can choose how you will dance.   

Pests, drought, animals, insects, no gardener gives up.  Water fertilize, plant new seeds.  Whatever you plant and tend with care will bear fruit.

Can you see how much suffering affects those around you?  Can you listen deeply with a caring and honest heart?

Imagine you needed this difficulty to learn a most important lesson.  What truth can it teach you?

Like a sandcastle all is temporary.  Build it, tend it, enjoy it, and when the times comes, let it go.

Don’t add to the problem.  Don’t add fear.  Don’t add confusion.  First take a breath.  Then simply see the situation clearly.

When your thoughts are racing and repetitive, remember no one can harm you as much as your untamed mind.  When you are struggling or in pain remember: no one can help you as much as a quiet, clear, composed mind. 

EINSTEIN: THE NEGRO QUESTION (1946)

by Albert Einstein

I am writing as one who has lived among you in America only a little more than ten years. And I am writing seriously and warningly. Many readers may ask:

"What right has he to speak about things which concern us alone, and which no newcomer should touch?"

I do not think such a standpoint is justified. One who has grown up in an environment takes much for granted. On the other hand, one who has come to this country as a mature person may have a keen eye for everything peculiar and characteristic. I believe he should speak out freely on what he sees and feels, for by so doing he may perhaps prove himself useful.

What soon makes the new arrival devoted to this country is the democratic trait among the people. I am not thinking here so much of the democratic political constitution of this country, however highly it must be praised. I am thinking of the relationship between individual people and of the attitude they maintain toward one another.

In the United States everyone feels assured of his worth as an individual. No one humbles himself before another person or class. Even the great difference in wealth, the superior power of a few, cannot undermine this healthy self-confidence and natural respect for the dignity of one's fellow-man.

There is, however, a somber point in the social outlook of Americans. Their sense of equality and human dignity is mainly limited to men of white skins. Even among these there are prejudices of which I as a Jew am clearly conscious; but they are unimportant in comparison with the attitude of the "Whites" toward their fellow-citizens of darker complexion, particularly toward Negroes. The more I feel an American, the more this situation pains me. I can escape the feeling of complicity in it only by speaking out.

Many a sincere person will answer: "Our attitude towards Negroes is the result of unfavorable experiences which we have had by living side by side with Negroes in this country. They are not our equals in intelligence, sense of responsibility, reliability."

I am firmly convinced that whoever believes this suffers from a fatal misconception. Your ancestors dragged these black people from their homes by force; and in the white man's quest for wealth and an easy life they have been ruthlessly suppressed and exploited, degraded into slavery. The modern prejudice against Negroes is the result of the desire to maintain this unworthy condition.

The ancient Greeks also had slaves. They were not Negroes but white men who had been taken captive in war. There could be no talk of racial differences. And yet Aristotle, one of the great Greek philosophers, declared slaves inferior beings who were justly subdued and deprived of their liberty. It is clear that he was enmeshed in a traditional prejudice from which, despite his extraordinary intellect, he could not free himself.

A large part of our attitude toward things is conditioned by opinions and emotions which we unconsciously absorb as children from our environment. In other words, it is tradition—besides inherited aptitudes and qualities—which makes us what we are. We but rarely reflect how relatively small as compared with the powerful influence of tradition is the influence of our conscious thought upon our conduct and convictions.

It would be foolish to despise tradition. But with our growing self-consciousness and increasing intelligence we must begin to control tradition and assume a critical attitude toward it, if human relations are ever to change for the better. We must try to recognize what in our accepted tradition is damaging to our fate and dignity—and shape our lives accordingly.

I believe that whoever tries to think things through honestly will soon recognize how unworthy and even fatal is the traditional bias against Negroes.

What, however, can the man of good will do to combat this deeply rooted prejudice? He must have the courage to set an example by word and deed, and must watch lest his children become influenced by this racial bias.

I do not believe there is a way in which this deeply entrenched evil can be quickly healed.
But until this goal is reached there is no greater satisfaction for a just and well-meaning person than the knowledge that he has devoted his best energies to the service of the good cause.

Barrel Dog - Thanksgiving 2014

American Thursday

The hotel never closes

The front doors do not have locks

Used chains during Katrina

Housekeeping, maintenance, front desk

Stay in shifts like another twenty-four of the three-sixty-five

Families banking about minimum wage

Brown skin Betty’s and Joaquin’s rolling carts

In the service elevator as I roll out for from behind my desk for paid vacation day

Vegetables tossed in olive oil and rosemary from a garden

Soil easy to grow the privilege of alkaline and sun

Contemplating how my thighs need a tan

Uncle driving to the hunting camp

Pulled over going 75 in a 50

Officer lets him off with a warning

Pulled over again going 50 in a 35

Got a ticket there, pulled his shirt up from his waistband 

Jokes, “One out of two ain’t bad”

Had one of the guns in the passenger seat

Crucifix hanging from the rearview

Dreaming of whitetails

A week ago

Poet friend says, “Yes sir”

After a strap that started, “What are you doing boy?”

Officer wants in, pulls him out

Arms spread, tucks back

Tulane sweatshirt on the passenger seat

Alumni homecoming Yulman stadium

He was architecture; I was business

Ferguson is on fire and the damn country

Is fixed to stampede Wal-Mart for the wrong reasons

Poultry and football, hands in prayer circles

Barrels and beer chasing a limping doe in the woods

Bleeding sending the Carolina Cur in a faceoff

Growling as the doe bolted because the bullet did not drop her

She ran, the man in an orange hat follows the growl of the dog

Pow! the echo waves the silence through the trees

Meat, he has a license all legal to the butcher

On the land his daddy owned, that his daddy owned

In Mississippi acreage in places where they name Wilson Road

After the family that hunts there

Acorn fed, natural, no GMO’s, no CAFO lot

Balance in the images of what one thing is and another is not

Of where land comes from when you find arrow heads in the creek bed

Of what another man’s daddy’s daddy would hear in the sound of a dog

The benefit of a clear shot

The trees not so thick

The meat so close for the taking

The branches fell at just the right angle for the sunlight

The wind in a man’s face

As the doe becomes dinner

An officer tells an architect to be careful boy

A hotel has the cleanest porcelain toilet in New Orleans

I have the privilege of a rocking chair, a sunset
The legs of the table I am blessed to raise my fork from

A full belly and a space to write
Finding thanks, appreciation, responsibility    

The Moving Debate

Maybe I am supposed to go, just not now

In this rush of motivation to flow a mortgage into a mortgage

To on some level prove to her that I am not worthless

I am daring and vibrant like the city I run towards

I am not this plastic blankness of a suburban cliché

Not wanting to be both or me or that or this

I could find rebirth in the smaller confines as if I was closer

Or would make friends with my neighbors in my hermetic routines

I hear the fires of the onions, bell peppers, and celery

Stirring the roux, timing and color to get to that perfect chocolate brown

Unsinged emulsion ready to absorb the flavors of the dish

Basking in the palette of a classical autonomy dancing in New Orleans

I cannot imagine myself living in this two-story forever

Wanting an outlet with hips and a miracle smile

To make me want to talk to a banker and shift residence

Into her, into this, either way with

This is the volley upon the field, grass testing winter’s grip

Seeded in dormancy for a string of breathing midnights

Yoga mats, dodge balls, and poetry reading in the silences

The animal farm and the Chateau D’If channeling protests and prayers

Is this the direction?  Is this the time?

Are these the words?  Who is the woman at the top of the stairs?

The pictures run like a film strip flapping upon my brow

Pictures of what home is reducing in the meditation in the sound

Of last resorts and first responders of hearing the nations gather

In ancestors calling me home

Where I am supposed to be and the timing to confront fear

Of when is enough and where is the bull waiting to gore a body in the street

Eyes blood shot and nervous that a step left will not be retraced

So that standing still is progress

Faith that in this Thanksgiving

The traveling bones will smell home 

Red Modern Panic

The outrage against Christmas in the media

The war assigned to a distancing in demographics

From the exuberant pageantry of commemorating the Claus

And the absence of cunnilingus or penetration

Is about a fear that the sheep outside the manger

Will quit buying things

That whole Magi insertion spun roulette golden bounty

Never letting out for a first mortgage or a college fund

Laid at the infant’s naked toes blown on the donkey ride home

As if His scrotum was world-leveling reciprocation

The red modern-panic is about the stock tickers

The post-Turkey store stampede video-clip news turnstile

Is to make one remember to buy

The herd is forming

Make a list, check it

The variable of co-participants stuffing receipts for you and yours

Must commiserate with them and theirs

The audacious ignominy of saying all I got you was love

I volunteered the other eleven months

Helping families of you do not know

Individuals in paying attention to emotional needs

When the moments flipped in the running waters of my consciousness

I am here, flowing, being like an open womb

Vulnerable and generous

Empathetic and incomplete

Like Christmas without a return policy

Just what I had on this no-nothing day

Willing to be embarrassed that I am apparently empty handed

To stand in this circle hold limbs and connect with you

And that which is greater than me

These newsreel gasps see the revolutionary in such blasphemy

To say not Happy Holidays but Happy Thursday

For the arbitrary rotation of a planet revolving around a gaseous orb

Celebrating the miracle that any of us are here at all

Loving you in this moment without a receipt

A Poem for Michael Brown Jr. - November 24, 2014

There are looks I know I’ll never know

Sentences I get to hear because of skin

Things elders tell me, that is just how it was

As if a change in years masking a sentiment changes the sentiment

It is the fear of men who know the system is built on bones

Bones decayed of flesh, drained of their blood

But centuries soaked you can still feel the color of the sin

That once housed them

Like when we close our eyes, in that darkness

Instead of infinite possibility, no defined lines

The lineage children of those bones know

That when eyes are closed instead of open, it is hopelessness

Hopelessness that there is a difference in what a system sees

When eyes are open that all that history pops

From the instinct of an officer of the law to how quickly

Gun down an unarmed man

It is the flinch-in like magnesium in a match primed to light

That the eyes of a father are closed to no other way to explain to his son

What can I tell you this is just how it is, will be, some iteration of always

When the colonizers took the Cherokee and the Sioux and wiped the slate

Tilled the soil and the definition of dirty hands

Grabbed into Africa for plows, the taint of that imprints behind closed eyes

Of how it was, of why, like shrapnel in a chain of the universe failing empathy

So that a soul of humanity as one whole through God

Keeps repeating the same lesson

That it is the fear in the flinch, of how one is judged in the personal sanctum

Of person, after human, after child being looked at differently with open eyes

Facing the hopelessness of what can be when they close their own

The mirror of one universal shared soul
Bleeding, calling, not to burn a building or shoot flesh

But to shed the preconceptions and regain the infiniteness 
In the darkness behind our lids

To which we were each born and tested in trials to dare see

Tested for a reason bigger than human

Job

I think I was supposed to live a monastic life

But religion tastes like a tar ball

My parents thought I was going to be a Catholic priest

When I was in high school

Because I did not go on many dates

I could count them on my fingers

Maybe two girls in four years

Neither was any kind of relationship

My best friend was gay

Maybe that confused the matter for them

I didn't know, didn't matter

Either way I wrote

I filled notebooks, thought

Contemplated the whys

Still do

My only real relationship has been with the universe

I was married

Involved with another for four years after

But in my guts

It was always the universe

They, me, part of the same whole

Not puppets, but flow

Drawing me to meditate, dwell, see beyond

Low conversations, core, to the essence

Of what we are

The power of broken hearts and

Conversations in heads on pillows prior to slumber

Sexual release endorphins and tingling God

Asking me you have to be alone

To do what you need to do

Wondering how to accept

This is how I have to be

Like a monk, a priest, an imam, a rabbi

Without the storyline in an elaborating pamphlet

Maybe a bar room and urge to ponder

Wanting interconnection with a soul

Knowing all I got is this damn universe like an elephant

Whispering, you’re not done, you’re not done

Go get back to work

Smalltalk does not apply to your accessible assets

It’s forfeit; to go where you need to go

So grab a pen and scribble notes

Take a book for any gathering

Try to make sense of it; that’s your job

Not the one with the paycheck 

Kindness

Such a simple basic concept

Like a reciprocal to insecurity

The more a person feels the need to protect a wound

The less kind

Mathematics of why lovers distancing hearts

Can do what we do

Pulling into self like a superego alcove shielding

The leverage one could provide a cushion

But does not

Here is silence

Here is scorn

Here is a distorted image of the person known

The worst scaffold is truth

The way an ex-lover knows the stitching

The layers of construct that prompt the absence of kindness

The charade of punishing the secret keeper

For the intimacy is a portal like compass coordinates

In which our theater could be unmasked to the audience beyond

So kindness is poisoned into the vilest cruelties

Like a full circle slipping from the first degree to back to the three hundred and fifty-ninth

Distorting the balance in the shortest traversing passage

True healing requires the full circumference to be paced in contemplative iteration

As what was is released and who is becomes recognized

In the spectrum of the mind, body, and spirit

To be of all things quarrel-less in the flash of life breathing universe in kind  

Snuffed Matches

Do not ever want to be treated like that again

Look a man in the eye before flying off, running into the darkness

Reciprocate hope like a lit match, leave it on the sheets

For him to snuff out with tear drops

Blinking heat of fired beats

Poetry and metaphors pouring like a tongued-wall of flame

Posturing ankles gasping words from the tender

Returning to the polite distance of elbows at bus stops

Inking the casual in a smudge as if that was all that ever was

Like a ticket purchased for pocket change wheeling off

Do not ever want to be treated like that again

As if closure were contraband for the security screen to board

Impermissible tote to the confidence to see out from the window

Down to the street glazing over the pedestrians muddling the concrete

Pages written and read and retorted in silence like a spectacle

Crashing wheels of bones clanking tissue red and flung sinew

The cruelty in the power of affection repossessed

As if a body was something now nothing all in the whim of wind

Between hours of seeing future and then nothing parading in surrender

That between here and there the world died

People scoff and laugh and say move on because you have to

Because it is the only sane thing to do,

But the imagination breeds a fork of some dimension of what might have been

Of what one wished the other wished to attempt

And an entire world died,

A man saw happiness like a gust and he licked the air and felt alive

And what more is there to a world than feeling that

The rest is theater and waiting, waiting for that stick of time

To imprint and knock one’s life like the creator’s touch

To have the precipice of love singing in a god damn aria

To try, to just try to participate before the scythe slits the ladder rungs

And that’s it, that is all a man has were these chances

The last of which could be the last, never knowing and so everything falls

The whole damn show like an avalanche of supermarket canned goods

That might have lasted a zombie apocalypse

Or five New Orleans’ hurricane seasons

Who knows, but an entire world died,

To hope like that and see it fall

Without as much as a face to say goodbye to,

Nah never want to be treated like that again