Title: Of the Heart

Gender: Male

Age: 50

Sun Sign: Pisces

Chinese Sign: Earth Boar

Location: Nashville, Tennessee

I am a practicing Buddhist, a psychologist, and a part-time writer and poet.  I love reading sacred poetry.  Currently I am writing(prose) on the intersection between eastern spirituality and western psychology, drawing heavily on the great poets.  My spiritual journey over the years has been about cultivating greater awareness and what wisdom I can.  In recent years, I have become increasingly aware of how important love and the heart are to our world.  Love has become a larger and larger part of my path. 

Hobbies include hiking and being in nature.  I just love the woods.  I also enjoy music, and particularly like going to see live music.  Fun with friends is great. 

Politically, I am very liberal (although, as a nondualist, I know it's not that simple).  Our great country has lost its way since the election of 2000, and it is imperative that we help it get back on track as soon as possible.  Political activism is important now. 

Rather than write a lengthy piece about myself, I am going to quote a few sentiments I love from poets and other writers:

Oh come my friends, be not afraid
We are so lightly here
It is in love that we are made
In love we disappear

     From Boogie Street    
     Leonard Cohen


And so long as you haven't experienced
This: to die and so to grow,
You are only a troubled guest
On this dark earth.

      From The Holy Longing
     Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


This clumsy living that moves lumbering
as if in ropes throught what is not done
reminds us of the awkward way the swan walks.

And to die, which is a letting go
of the ground we stand on and cling to every day,
is like the swan when he nervously lets himself down

into the water, which receives him gaily
and which flows joyfully under
and after him, wave after wave,
while the swan, unmoving and marvelously calm,
is pleased to be carried, each minute more fully grown,
more like a king, composed, further and further on. 

     The Swan
     Rainer Maria Rilke
     Translated by Robert Bly


To study the Buddha's way is to study the self, to study the self is to forget the self.  To forget the self is to be awakened by ten thousand things.  

     Zen Master Dogen


When you feel sorrow, it might be taken as a request to sit down, right where you are on the brown Afghan carpet, and feel more of your own life.  Or maybe you are happy, there on the brown Afghan carpet; it doesn't matter.  Suddenly you hear, really hear, the Canada geese crying overhead.  If you don't ask your sorrow to leave, or try to make happiness stay, either might be something merely present, like the snow on Tortoise Mountain.  Then, both happiness and sorrow can be interesting and even, paradoxically, satisfying.  Sorrow might be a sort of reverse Pandora's box from which, when you open it, happiness flies out.  

     From Bring Me the Rhinoceros and Other Zen Koans
     John Tarrant


Whoever can't see the whole in every part plays at blind
                  man's buff;
A wise man tastes the entire Tigris in every sip.  

     Ghalib


This moment that love comes to rest in me,
many beings in one being.  
In one wheat grain a thousand sheaf stacks.
Inside the needle's eye a turning night of stars.  

     Rumi

     
I love meeting kindred spirits. 

Member Since: Monday, July 03 2006

Last Visit: 12 days ago.

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