Inspiration

I'm home! 10 days out of my own bed, without my cats and loving partner. 10 days with new and old friends, teaching, learning, and spreading out my experiences in New Mexico, deepening them. Lots and lots of writing and photos to be posted soon, especially the photos.

What a place that New Mexico is. I saw more inspiration than ever before, and felt the desperation of the place more keenly. Just a touch, a taste, of what the reality of living there must be like. Like so many tourist places, life is extremely gorgeous and intensely tough.

On this intensive, I began to daily read and consider passages from The Way of the Bodhisattva, from Pema Chodron's No Time to Lose. Here's the part I got today, coming home:

1.6
Thus behold the utter frailty of goodness!
Except for perfect bodhichitta,
There is nothing able to withstand
The great and overwhelming strength of evil.

On the road, I feel the tenousness of life more and more - of myself, of my understandings, and of others' experience. Impermanence. This passage was a perfect one for just beginning to process this trip and all it inspired in me. If you take away the "western" connotations of good/evil and see "evil" as "our neuroticisms and mindless suffering," then this quote really rings true for what I saw in myself, in the other participants, and in day-to-day folk this time around.

More soon, I promise. Off to begin all weekly classes again.