Can you see it too?

Did you know that frogs help to curb the population of mosquitoes?

My daughter and I love frogs, so when I heard about a two-week summer camp that focuses on frogs I signed her up for it. The kids go on field trips, do crafts and learn about frogs.

  I was disappointed to see that they keep frogs in bowls. My daughter talked to the teacher about setting them free and she was told that those frogs belong to them. Then I explained to my daughter that those frogs do not belong to human beings; they belong to nature.

 We don’t need to be smart to understand that those frogs are suffering.  
  Is this the way they teach about compassion to kids?

 Are they imparting the message that their suffering is okay as long as we ignore it?
 Being more powerful than the frogs does not mean that it is acceptable to imprison them.

 I promised my daughter that I will write a letter to her teacher.

 Later that day we came across this lovely picture book at the local library: Growing Frogs by Vivian French; it was illustrated by Alison Bartlett.

 On the first page we read the following words:

 Frogs are in danger. Please help!

Rules for frog-lovers:

Don’t take frog spawn from a pond in the wild

You should only take frog spawn from a man-made pond and only take a little.

Always take your frogs back to the pond they came from.

 We live in a neighborhood of educated people. Yet they seem to ignore that the chemicals they use to kill weeds are harming frogs. How about teaching kids about compassion by respecting nature?

 Ignorance has its own consequences. Human beings are also part of nature and, whether we acknowledge it or not, pesticides end up in the water we drink.

Living in a tree

The title of this post is not about a metaphor. It refers to "Luna and Me",  the true story of a woman called Julia Butterfly Hill who saved the life of a one thousand -year -old Redwood tree by living in it for two years.
 Julia volunteered to sit in Luna for 3-4 weeks in December 1997 with the support of her ground team, but she ended up staying for two years. During this time she endured personal fears, intimidation from loggers, fierce storms, frostbite and many more challenges.



 

Julia became a powerful voice for sustainable forestry and the integrity of the planet.

 The illustrations of this book are delightful and as inspiring as the story itself.
 This book was printed on paper from responsible, FSC-certified sources.
 Jenny Sue Kostecki-Shaw is the author and illustrator of "Luna and Me" and this is what she said about the story:
 "This is a story of strength, endurance, teamwork, commitment and love. Luna still stands today as a beacon of hope for the ancient forests."

 I find these trees intriguing. They date back to the time of dinosaurs and are the largest living organisms on earth.
 Their roots hug the roots of other Redwood trees to stand strong.


Here's an interesting video...

 You can learn more about these forests by visiting sanctuaryforest.org.

Brave New World

 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley is a satire about a society in which people are labeled and classified into groups or castes. They are conditioned to behave a certain way since they are born. Anybody who dares to think original thoughts or to crave solitude is considered dangerous and weird. These people are treated like misfits and are deported to a distant island.

  In Brave New World everybody is supposed to be happy, but this happiness is not true happiness. It is loveless and synthetic. It is based on the consumption of goods. Human beings are deprived of love and compassion, and those who dare to do something differently are treated with contempt and sent away.

  People are  encouraged to consume a drug called “Soma” to feel good and “happy” all the time.  In this male dominated society sexual promiscuity is the norm. Yet the sexual act is meaningless.
   Aldous Huxley’s Brave New Word is the description of a conformist society in which art and science are considered threats to their stability and their so-called “freedom”. They have to be muzzled to satisfy the interests of the status quo. Literature, for example, is of no interest to people because they fear that it will make them feel sad, so they shy away from it just as they reject anything that is thought-provoking. Literature carries the risk of awakening the possibility of dealing with original thoughts.

 Even though the individuals in Brave New World believe they are free they are all expected to behave in predictable ways.  Anything that is considered unconventional or that strays from standard patterns of behavior is treated with distrust, and so the root of the irony is that this world is neither brave nor new.

 Interestingly, George Orwell expressed his concerns about banned books in his popular novel 1984.  Aldous Huxley, on the other hand, portrayed a society in which there was no need to censor books anymore because people did not care about literature altogether: since a very early age they were conditioned to believe that literature  was boring, depressing or a threat to their stability.

 Soon after the publication of 1984, Huxley wrote a letter to George Orwell. I will share a fragment of this letter:

“My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and those ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World.

“The lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude or by flogging and kicking them into obedience. In other words, I feel that the nightmare of “Nineteen Eighty-Four” is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World.  The change will be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased efficiency.”

Grazia Deledda

"The world is suddenly fuller, the reader's own capacity for astonishment miraculously replenished. A writer of the emotional power of Grazia Deledda is overdue for literary resurrection. It is hard not to feel, when reading her, that... her readers are getting close to some pure ore of human emotion."~ Todd Gitlin, Chicago Tribune

 Even though Grazia Deledda won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1926, the critics underestimated her works and labeled her as a “provincial housewife”.

   She published her first short story  when she was fifteen years old. Her brother advised her to quit writing because he feared that it would  tarnish her reputation. Her mother  was embarrassed.

   Later in life Grazia Deledda’s stories dealt with themes that people believed a woman should not write about. For this reason, they doubted her morality. Grazia Deledda took criticism in stride; the social discouragement did not quench her impassioned creative spirit. She continued writing seven days a week for one or two hours throughout her life. She was also a sedulous reader and protected her reading and writing routine with determination.

    Grazia Deledda was born and raised in Sardinia. Her native language was Sardinian, but she wrote in Italian. I recently read two of her books: “Reeds in the Wind” and “Cosima”. 

 I believe a good fiction writer understands the human soul deeply. Grazia Deledda had the power to do this well. In “Reeds in the Wind” she explored inner struggles and emotional journeys while narrating an engaging story. Her main characters either succumbed to a temptation or they were forced to transgress due to circumstances that were out of their control.  Grazia Deledda’s compassion for them shines through her insights and through the ways she dives into their intimate thoughts and emotions. She places her characters in grueling moral snares and enables them to find resilience.

 Grazia Deledda reveals that those who are judged the most have the most sensitive souls. She wrote about love, jealousy, forgiveness, hope, social ostracism, social conventions, prejudices and human resilience.  
 She also showed how prejudices and superstitions shaped people’s views and beliefs. We learn about the religious festivals held in mountain encampments and the lore of "the dark beings who populate the Sardinian night, the fairies who live in rocks and caves and the sprites with seven red caps who bother sleep."

 Her descriptions of Sardinia are vivid. Reading her two books was like taking a trip to this idyllic island.
   

   Cosima is an autobiography and was published posthumously. It was interesting to perceive that the themes of Cosima and “Reeds in the Wind” are related. I hope that more of her works will be translated into the English Language.

 I will share some extracts from Cosima:

“Her notebooks attracted her more than toys, and the classroom blackboard with those white marks made by the teacher had for her the charm of a window open onto the dark blue of a starry night.”

“Life follows its inexorable course like a river: there are calm times and turbid times, and there is no protection from it. In vain one tries to dam it, even to lay oneself across the current to keep others from being swept away by it. Mysterious, fateful forces propel one toward good and evil; nature itself, which seems perfect, is controlled by the violence of inevitable fate.”

 “And it came to her for no other reason than that she saw the evening star shine above the mountains no less and no more marvelous than the ladybug and the wild grasses that perfumed her walk. She decided to expect nothing that might come from outside herself, from the world agitated by men—but to expect everything from herself, from the mystery of her inner life.”

“Since she had begun writing poems and short stories everyone began to look at her with a certain suspicious amazement, if not to openly make fun of her and predict a dire future for her.”

Anything but Superior Medicine

 My short story "Anything but Superior Medicine" has been published in the Spring 2015 edition of  the Medical Literary Messenger. You can read it here.
  The Medical Literary Messenger aims to promote humanism and the healing arts through prose, poetry and photography. This journal is associated with Virginia Commonwealth University.
   

"Health is based on happiness from hugging and clowning around to finding joy in family and friends, satisfaction in work and ecstasy in nature and the arts."~ Patch Adams

Home

 "A modern astronomical view says that everything in the universe is moving uniformly away from everything else in all directions into space, so there is no center point in the cosmos at all. We live with no fixed reference point. From one perspective, this understanding produces the desolate feeling that there is no home. But from another perspective, this realization shows us directly that every point is home. We are free; we do not need to fix on a single center for refuge, for safety. This is love, this is happiness, where our refuge is unbounded, and we are always at home."
 Sharon Salzberg (From her book "Loving-kindness")

Loving-kindness

“Even as a mother protects with her life

Her child, her only child,

So with a boundless heart

Should one cherish all living beings”

The Buddha’s words on loving-kindness

I love this quote by Buddha and I want to add that both a mother and a father love their child, and their love can be projected on to all living beings.

My hubby has cultivated a special interest in meditation and mindfulness. Six weeks ago he encouraged me to join a meditation retreat. I’m glad I followed his advice. Since I attended this retreat I’ve been practicing meditation every day.

I’m not going to discuss the benefits of meditation on this post. There is research on the psychological and medical effects of meditation, but I will focus on another dimension that is often overlooked. Yet it has the potential to permeate all aspects of our lives.

  After I expressed my interest in loving-kindness meditation, the kind lady who led the retreat gave me this book by Sharon Salzberg entitled “Loving-kindness”.

 You don’t need to practice meditation or to be a Buddhist to appreciate the power of this book.  It inspires you to build a fortress of loving-kindness, regardless of what you encounter.

 The wisdom on these pages is a harbor of peace, a beacon of hope.
 How do we find peace amid the chaos of the world?

 It is through metta that we take the power of love beyond the sphere of our thoughts.

 Metta is the sense of loving-kindness that is not bound to desire, that does not have to pretend that things are other than they way they are. It overcomes the illusion of separateness, of not being part of a whole.

 Metta is the ability to embrace all parts of ourselves as well as all parts of the world. We can open to everything with the healing force of loving-kindness. When we feel love, our mind is expansive and open enough to include the entirety of life in full awareness, both its pleasures and its pains.

  

 The other root meaning for metta is “friend”. A good friend is someone who is constant in our times of happiness and also in our times of adversity or unhappiness. A friend will not forsake us when we are in trouble nor rejoice in our misfortune. The Buddha described a true friend as being a helper, someone who will protect us when we are unable to take care of ourselves, who will be refuge to us when we are afraid.

 The practice of metta is also about befriending ourselves and uncovering the force of love that is stronger than fear, anger and guilt.  It has nothing to do with sentimentality and desire.

 Desire says, “I will love you, I will take care of you, I will offer you this or that as long as you meet my expectations and satisfy my needs.” This kind of “love” is a bargain based on attachment and desire.

 "True happiness cannot be found in something or some person, because as everything changes, that level of happiness is bound to be temporary."
                  Sharon Salzberg

  

 Many human beings tend to live under the delusion of separation, and yet we are all interconnected. Those who cause suffering do so out of ignorance. Those who slander, gossip, kill, hate, rape, torture, do so without knowing that they are hurting themselves. But hate only perpetuates hate.

 Consider anger, for example. We don't have to deny it. Anger is something we have to acknowledge and accept. The energy of it can be turned into wisdom. It can encourage us to do something to change or improve a certain situation. 
 We have to remember, however, that anger is like the clouds over a mountain. It is temporary. The mountain symbolizes the strength of love: it is the solid foundation that does not disappear, even when the clouds are dense and seem to conceal the mountain.
  All dark emotions can be overpowered by love. 

 I picked the image of an ocean at the beginning of this post to symbolize our inner worlds. Our inner world is boundless. By meditating we tap into it and meet that spaciousness. The vastness of our interior worlds is a part of the outer world as a whole. We are all connected to a boundless universe. 
 When we sit to meditate we do so without expectations. We are not attached to the outcome of the practice.
 "Loving-kindness" tells us life anecdotes and delves into many subjects: kindness,  compassion, morality, suffering, judgments, envy, jealousy, forgiveness and many others.
  Sharon Salzberg explains the concept of mudita.  I sense that many people I've encountered have trouble understanding the concept of mudita. Interestingly,  I can't find a word in English for mudita. Mudita is the joy and happiness that we feel at other people's happiness. It is the pleasure that comes from delighting in other people's well-being. When I was writing this post I reflected on the concept of mudita. 
  Why do people find it so difficult to believe in mudita? Why do they treat it with distrust? Are their minds clouded by competition and judgments?

I will share some quotes from this book:

“We can give in so many ways. We give materially, in terms of goods and money. We give time, service, caring. Even to allow someone to be just the way they are is a kind of giving. We have endless opportunities every day to give.”

“As mudita grows, we see that the happiness of others is our happiness; sympathetic joy allows us to open further and further with loving-kindness, so more and more we really do want other people to be happy.”

"Contemplating the goodness within ourselves is a classical meditation, done to bring light, joy and rapture to the mind. In contemporary times this practice might be considered rather embarrassing, because so often the emphasis is on all the unfortunate things we have done, all the disturbing mistakes we have made. Yet this commitment fills us with joy and love, and a great deal of self-respect."

“There is always blame in this world. If you say too much, some people will blame you. If you say a little bit, some people will blame you. If you say nothing at all, some people will blame you. This is the very nature of life. No one in this world experiences only pleasure and no pain, and no one experiences only gain and no loss. When we open to this truth, we discover that there is no need to hold on or push away.”

“Despite the hatred and monstrous egoism evident in some human actions, remembering the fortitude, courage and love people are capable of can awaken our appreciation. When we feel happy for others we feel happy and connected ourselves.”

"I have met beggars on the streets of India whose spirits were enormous. I have seen a beggar in Calcutta, with no arms or legs because of leprosy, crawling along the streets with a bucket in her mouth into which people dropped money. Despite her suffering, she wanted to live. "
"Love exists in itself, not relying on owning or being owned. Love is not a matter of currency or exchange. Everyone has enough to cultivate it. Metta reunites us with what it means to be alive and unbound."