It is as if we are storytellers of where we have been and who we are yet to become. We live an on-going saga as we imprint ourselves on others and all we touch with memories and an eternal presence. We live in a theatre watching the story of our lives with others present as they tell their own stories as well. Thier take on events similar but much different than our own.  

On the theatre’s big screen, we tell of successes and loss, trials, and tribulations, detailing both what we have seen and done as both good and bad reflecting bridges we have crossed both real and imagined. 

Seated in the theatre next to you is your father and mother who have watched and tried to support you over the years. Next, a former teacher who has watched your life with some sense of pride, and disappointment who knows of your untapped abilities, and finally friends you have always known. All watching the story of your life, but seeing an entirely different movie with certain expectations, verses seeing how things turned out. 

We ask ourselves; have we been grounded by gazing into the resonance known as quantum physics, beyond simply cause and effect, as we relearn the benefits of virtue? To look to sacred texts and oral traditions of native Indigenous cultures, of the shaman and storyteller who have kept universal truth alive and passed this divine attribute down to us.  

Looking back, we can say that it was not just family or friends, but teachers who helped to meld or frame who we are to become through the sacredness of our thoughts and actions.

   And as with any movie, have we been concerned with the salability to our audience and who may be watching in history? Are there flashbacks to past events, or can we even fast-forward to anticipated outcomes? Are we in turn watching ourselves as if ninety feet in the air? And most importantly, does the part we are here to play have any real significance in the lives of others? Are we a part of all the characters that ever played with an open-ended finish with words and music saying and saving our immortal soul. 

These are not simply random thoughts, but a collective vision that permeates everything found in nature and the cosmos. Following up from my last entry, we can ask what our task is that helps to unify our purpose with divine order intact.  

Do we have a sense of direction as the vehicle to further our ultimate sense of selfless ego and are we ready for the ride? And more importantly, what have we imparted as teachers along the way and what have we learned as well?

I see many changes occurring now in early March in my garden as Spring approaches. Annuals from last year that will not return, and perennials, some of which will return, and others that won‘t.  

Nature is always in the process of change, both reconstructing and deconstructing at the same time, which reminds us of both impermanence and resiliency. 

In the past before retiring in my professional life I was a city planner focusing on neighborhood revitalization and master plans, and later teaching English in China, I always tried to focus on teaching what people could do for themselves that would sustain both minds and communities. Tearing down impediments to our understanding of sustainability, and how we are sustained as individuals and collectively. 

I often think about the bodhisattva vow and Maitreya Buddha [the future incarnation of the Buddha on Earth]. Maitreya Buddha can be seen as the ground of our reconstruction, and represents a just society at the individual, communal, institutional, and global level.

What we are to base our own decisions on? Except to vibrations employing the four qualities of a just society embodied as lovingkindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity.  

We should remember that every human personality has shortcomings. If we are engaged in observing the imperfections of others, we deprive ourselves of the opportunities of learning from them. I find meditating on this principle helps to see them in a different light and asking what theatre we are in, and what movies we are watching. That we all have a spark of goodness, of what is called Buddhahood, or bodhicitta. That when we concentrate on the faults of others, we deprive ourselves of the light emitting from them.     

And by equanimity, I do not mean accepting anything. For myself, equanimity means divine order and profound stability. Equanimity comes from an open heart, open mind, and a clear direction of energy toward enhancing the direct trajectory of history from which we came and to which we will return.