There are no requirements to meet or hurdles that need to be overcome before we can choose to interject compassion into the immediate moment.  I'll be taking a break for the end of year and I hope you are all able to enjoy some time off.  There may be an intermittent podcast, or a livestream from the studio but otherwise I'm going to be dug in and writing.  Cheers, all.

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I  finished reading Red Comet: The short life and blazing art of Sylvia Plath , a recent biography written by Heather Clark.  Reading Plath's poetry  is like being alive:  strange, beautiful, elegant, upsetting.  Tragic. Ecstatic.   

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A leap of faith? Or should it be a leap from faith?  What about a leap from Realisation?  A leap into what?  Towards what?  Is it a leap, or are we pushed?

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The Bodhicitta vow is the aspiration to bring compassion and empathy in all action of body, speech and mind.  I like the 'planetary gravity' metaphor.  Some anomaly in the gravitational continuum causes the accretion of atomic material leading eventually to suns and planets.  When we sit on a cushion and consider the Bodhicita vow, it is like a gentle indentation in  space-time which over the course of lifetimes causes the accretion of compassion and empathy.  

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We are surrounded by noise, just about all of which we filter out either mechanically or mentally.  But when I  made note of unexpected and beautiful noises that arose throughout a day, in short order I started to have a sonic journal of surprising delicacy and emotion.  Just using the recorder directly on my phone to capture anything that struck me as beautiful or unusual.  Then I mixed it together for a short ( 1 minute) piece....but maybe over the weekend I'll get in the studio and work more with these sounds ( or others).

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Picking back up on my opera ("Love,Love,Bing,Bing"  an opera about the Soviet Space Dog program).  Focusing for now on the text and trying to figure out some more details about the characters, specifically the character of The Program Director.  There's a history of bizarre occult influences on early Russian rocket science, and I'm digging up articles on Konstantin Tsiolkovskii -  self-taught, possibly Theosophist, certainly eccentric and now recognized as the 'grandfather of Russian space travel'.  

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It's time for my meditation practice to shift gears.  The last several months have been a focus on a certain set of prayers and chants...I'm feeling like a shift to more open-ended insight practice.  It occurred to me that my entire practicing life, I've started a meditation session with a timer set to some pre-defined amount.  Could be 2 minutes (short, good meditation is excellent);  20 minutes ( a nice strong stable practice) or 40 minutes ( probably the longest I've ever sat in a single sitting).  But what if I turned off the timer and set a stopwatch instead?    As part of the observation, observe only when my session ends....not whether it's lasted a set duration?  It's such a simple and obvious question that I'm eager to see where it leads. 

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How much did Sisyphus know about the nature of his punishment?  Did he know that the rock was fated to roll back down?  Or did he think he had a shot each time, but was just really bad at pushing rocks up a hill?  Was he Happy?

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