Musing over the Rainbow

As the loyal companion of two rescued springer spaniels (see The Rescue of Dallas and Austin), I joined the English Springer Spaniel Lovers Facebook group.

Springers are 99% heart.  Dallas is about as smart as a bag of hammers, but I've never known a dog with more heart.

As you might expect, members of the group tend to post from the heart too. Most of the stories are heartwarming accounts of devotion and loyalty and just plain cuteness.

But as you might also expect, there are heartbreaking stories of the brown and white faithful companions arriving at the end of their all too short lives. This, I learned, is called going to the Rainbow Bridge.

Lately, several Pride parades got me thinking about the rainbow symbol.

The oldest is probably as the symbol of hope for the future.

Noah said it was God's way of saying that He was done with His ethnic cleansing rampage.

Personally, I wouldn't take much comfort in that, coming from a being who had just massacred 99.99% of the women and men on earth and their children. Not to mention what must be the worst example of collateral damage ever - especially coming from an omniscient omnipotent being - killing all but two members of every innocent animal species on the planet.

Oops - ranting. Perhaps another time...

The rainbow symbol that gives me the most hope is as the celebration of diversity.

You know how some people just can't seem to tell you about someone else without being compelled to also mention the person's race, religion, sexual orientation and body morphology?  I remember getting particularly fed up with racial stereotyping one day and saying, "Won't it be nice when all the races have completely interbred and we all look the same?"

After a little reflection, however, I realized that what would be much nicer will be to live in a world where our hearts have opened and prejudice no longer abides, where, with innocent, affectionate curiosity, we can approach strangers and ask them about their racial origins and no offence will be intended and none will be taken.

Here's Eva Cassidy. Sadly, cancer took her to the Rainbow Bridge early, but the songs she left behind have gladdened many hearts.



Photo credit: Captain76 by CreativeCommons.

With Bliss-Bestowing Hands Searching for the Ox

The Ten Ox-Herding Pictures are traditionally considered to represent stages along the path of awakening. The first picture is of a beginner; in the last picture, the beginner has become a master. For present purposes, I'm skipping the steps in between.

The beginner appears to be intent on seeking. The master seems to have found, mastered, and transcended whatever he was looking for, and now, for lack of better words, is blessing everything he encounters.

The boy in the tenth picture looks remarkably like the beginner in the first - perhaps a hint that beginning never ends, or in T.S. Eliot's words, the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

In Original Dwelling Place, Robert Aitken Roshi wrote:

I spend time with inquirers disabusing them about absolutes. When someone who has read a little in Zen Buddhism asks me if I am enlightened, I respond without hesitation that I most certainly am not. When someone asks me how many koans I have passed, I respond that I am still working on my very first koan and that I haven’t passed it yet. This is not false modesty but is true to the very bottom. There is enlightenment beyond enlightenment, passing beyond passing. Each milestone on the path may seem a be-all and end-all experience. Everything falls away. The everyday self disappears. Yet the path continues to open out.

Experience is the moment; the path is endless practice.

The tenth ox-herding picture brings to mind words from another tradition:

… I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. To the thirsty I will give water without cost from the spring of the water of life. (Revelation 21:6)

The point I seem to be trying to make is that it’s never too early to spread kindness. No need to ‘attain’ something first. Just do it. The marketplace awaits your bliss-bestowing hands.

Oh and the flip side of that is, do we really believe there is something to attain? Or, perish the thought, that we have attained it?

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Lately I've been discovering the music of Libera.

I am the day, soon to be born

I am the light before the morning

I am the night that will be dawn

I am the end and the beginning

I am the Alpha and Omega

The night and day, the first and last

Look! A Mayfly!

Look! A mayfly!

Tears began, but then my heart

Sang a little song

The mayfly is a member of the Ephemeroptera, from the Greek meaning 'lasting only a day'. After a year as a nymph, it crawls out of the water, moults, spreads its wings, takes to the sky, finds a mate, lays its eggs, and dies, all in a day.

A cascade of emotions took me by surprise.

Melancholy and a sense of futility surfaced first. Compared to the rest of its life, the tiny creature's last day is like a flash of lightning. So much heroic activity in such a short time, and for what? So that more mayflies can grub around in a stream for a year to spend a frantic day in the sun, provided they don't get eaten by the fish or the birds first? Perhaps even so that people can contemplate them, get all teary-eyed and write poetry that other people who may not have seen a mayfly can read and get all teary-eyed too.

Melancholy becomes wonder. The critter's last day really isn't so much frantic as it is perfect. After a slow climb out of the water, it waits in the sun until it's ready to moult. It climbs out of its old skin and waits again until its wings dry in shape. Then at just the right time with just the right effort, flapping them, the former bottom dweller does the unimaginable. (I don't imagine that mayflies imagine, but who knows what goes on in their little heads.) Its flight is an invitation to jump for joy.

Then the adult stuff - courtship, wild mayfly sex, laying eggs. Since baby nymphs don't need looking after, the parents do the right thing and give themselves completely for the benefit of all beings in the vicinity that could use some nourishment.

I recognize I'm projecting here, or maybe squinting at my reflection. The sadness, wonder and joy I feel contemplating that brief life, are the sadness, wonder and joy of my life.

And the cascading emotions aren't quite over.

I feel an uneasy chill that I really don't want to deal with, knowing exactly what it is. The mayfly's life is brief, but not a moment is wasted. My life is not so brief, and about those wasted moments, let's just say I seem to be studiously ignoring what Zen Master Daito Kokushi said in 1337:

Time flies like an arrow, so do not waste energy on trivial matters.

Be attentive. Be attentive!

Guilty as charged.

So many lessons packed into a tiny mayfly.

So many lessons in everything, if we just pay attention.

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Here is one of my favourite pieces of music that breaks my heart – the theme from Schindler’s List, composed by John Williams and played by Itzhak Perlman. Although the movie is about the Holocaust, the music makes me think of the suffering of the animals for whom the Holocaust has never ended.

Mayfly photo credit: Richard Bartz via Wikimedia Commons.

Music Hath Charms

Some things are just a big mystery to me. Music is one of them. How vibrations in the air that move your eardrum can completely change your mood boggles my mind.

Here are a few YouTube clips that made an impression on me. Some are a bit lengthy, but you can get the gist of them in the first minute.

The first clip makes me think of the cybersangha practising together all around the world.



The second clip is a graphical representation of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. It's hard to imagine that one person is playing all those notes. Apparently both hands and both feet are required.



If you're feeling a bit down, a little bluegrass might raise your mood a notch - especially Earl Scruggs and friends playing Foggy Mountain Breakdown.



If that music didn't make you smile, perhaps this might... OK maybe the image helps too...




The last clip is Suo Gan, a Welsh lullaby that was made popular by the movie Empire of the Sun. I don't know if music can make you feel compassion, but this one must come close.



On that 'note', warm wishes for a harmonious New Year!