To shine like the stars

Have you ever waited ten hours in an airport for your next flight? It is more than the third part of a day. Having arrived there from Atlanta, I was in Salt Lake City airport, waiting for my flight to Southern Oregon. Those ten hours were good for a rest, and to write some travel notes. Also, an opportunity for contemplation and reflection. Airports are very interesting, because so many different people from all around the world are there.

After lunch, I decided to contemplate people. Backpackers backpacking. One carrying just a messenger bag. A man with a nice shirt and fine red-brown shiny shoes, with almost no luggage. Young girls all by themselves, maybe only for a while. Nice faces, bored faces, cool people, weird people. Young, old, babies, infants and children. Thousands of stories, some of them intermingling with one another. I wished I could to hear those stories. There’s so much to learn from everyone.

All that people reminded me of a Zen story in ancient China. The emperor was on a terrace with a Zen master, watching the Yang Tze river. Hundreds of boats were sailing to and from different parts of China. The emperor was elated at the sight. He asked the master, “how many boats you think are there, sailing our country?” The master replied, “I see only two. One is called fame, the other is called profit. That is what most of that people are living for.” I wondered how many of the people I saw in the airport were after that too.

We spend so much of our given time looking for the pot at the end of the rainbow. It’s here today, and gone tomorrow. There are the stars in the night sky. They serve us to find our way when sailing the oceans. Some of those stars were extinguished several thousands of years ago. But their light still travels throughout the universe, and guide our way. There were men of old who have left traces for us. Art, literature, philosophy, buildings… they left us an example, and a guide for our life. They shine in the sky of our lives, like the light of the stars. Can we say they are dead?

We can give our time to the quest for the pot at the end of the rainbow. We can also find a balanced way, and give some time to leave something behind us. Something that cannot be destroyed by fire or water. That is not lost if the stock market falls down. Something that will take us to shine like the stars, forever and ever.

Good Old Times

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
T. S. Elliot

Albert Einstein once said, “put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT’S relativity.” I like it. It’s a humorous way of putting what Buddha Shakyamuni said about happiness. He said that “happiness does not comes from what it happens, it comes from what we think.” But we usually just think without being aware of what we think. We pass by places seeing, but not being aware of what we see. The same way, things-events happen around us, without our being quite conscious of them. We’re more concerned with what we want to happen, and if it does happen or not. This way, we don’t really realize what’s going on. Regardless of us, these things-events are stored in some box in our memory, and left there until something triggers them out. We then realize and appreciate them from a different point of view. And then we remember them as the good old times. The interesting thing of the good old times is that, in those days we now remember, we didn’t notice them as being so good. Jack Kerouak realized this when he said that the best thing of traveling is when you remember it. While traveling you don’t enjoy it so much. As it happens to most people who once in a while thinks, these issues came to my mind more than once.

Now, I’m among those who, when winter approaches, start caring more for food, and like to have a lot at home. Here, in the Pacific North West, winter is really winter. Sometimes you feel like going out during a snowstorm, but some other times you just feel it like enjoying it at home. You like the warmth of the house, and look at the storm through a window, letting the falling snowflakes give you the rhythm for the watching. That’s why I like to have a food storage in winter, you may spend several days without leaving the house if you wish so. Some people suffer winter depression, probably because they never heard about enjoying winter seclusion.

After two years away, I returned to Oregon right at the end of autumn and the beginning of winter, and although I came to a new town, I was more than happy to be back. Meeting my daughter and her fiancée in Eugene after more than two years away, completely compensated the non-nearness of the mountains and countryside of Ashland. Once I accommodated and made myself avail of a few things needed, I started appreciating the new place. They showed me around some, they being new kids in the block too, some I discovered in my own explorations. We went to places together, we shopped together, and, part of the shopping was, of course, food. Food. An old Chinese Zen master once said, “there is nothing like wearing clothes and eating food. Apart from that there are neither Buddhas nor Patriarchs”. I don’t know if the Buddhas and Patriarchs agree. I don’t even know if I do. But food with winter are one of the greatest inventions of nature, provided that you have a warm cozy home with no leaking roofs, and a window with a nice view.

I had discovered a small natural food market that my daughter and husband to be didn’t know. The place is not only beautiful to the eyes. It has great organic, natural food, good prices, and cool people. Besides that it’s only five or six blocks from home, what else can you ask for? The couple wanted to see the place. We went together and bought a few things we needed, vegetarian pepperoni included. We were in the row to pay, and there was a sticker display beside the counters. I took a look at them. There were some about war and peace, some about oil, but I saw one with just six words that turned a bright light deep my heart-mind. The sticker said “These are the Good Old Times.” I picked up one and said “hey Tad, look at this.” Tad turned around to see and smiled knowingly. I put the sticker back in place and kept the phrase in my heart-mind.

These are the good old times. It is one of the greatest secrets in life. We have a tendency to take life too seriously, and so, cannot appreciate it’s subtleties. But if we stop for a fraction of a second and look at it from that stop, we have, in some way, taken a step aside from time and space, as if we were looking from the future, and seeing everything fresh for the first time. In that very moment I saw the whole scene as if from the future. Our being buying winter food at the old barn building, all our shared moments and those of introspection, our going places… all appeared in my mind as if remembering it in some years’ time. Not that everything that happens is necessarily “good.” In fact, the last two years of my life have been more than hard in many regards. But some way or another, I still had the strength to overcome, and keep on healing wounds. And the healing of wounds also make the good old times. It is like the feeling of happiness you have once you are cured from a hard cold, or having a late lunch when you are real hungry. As the Sung dynasty genius put it, “eating late is as good as eating meat.”

The difference between these being the good old times or not, depends, in great part, of our inner awareness. If we are in touch with our innate inner awareness, which is the very essence of our heart-mind, we can live the present moment in such a way that it is the good old times. It will always be remembered so. In the words of Buddha Shakyamuni, “happiness does not comes from what it happens, it comes from what we think”. If you prefer to put it in a more humorous way, then remember Einstein, “if you sit one minute on a stove it feels like an hour, and if you sit one hour beside a pretty girl it seems like a minute”.

You can find more of my articles and photographs in my website: http://www.robertocurto.com.ar