KM Huber's Blog

A Little Night-Morning Musing on Magic

Posted on June 8, 2014June 8, 2014 by KM Huber in Consciousness, Inspiration, Spirituality

Magic has properties, rules that govern it, but with magic, just when we believe what we are seeing, something else is revealed. It is as if the more aware we are, the more the magic reveals.

That seems a bit murky yet that is precisely as it should be. Magic is elusive, restless even, for it is and it is not. What is tangible in magic regardless of ritual, symbol, or illusion is technique.

Technique is the mechanism of the magician, the means to an end, for there is always an end. The grand illusion that is life is a mixture of individual experience and human nature, the unknown shrouded in the mist of the known.

The realm of magic is murky by design so that it is able to remain on the cusp of believable.

Often, I visit magic in the hours when a day ends and begins. These hours when night and morning are dark seem suited to illusion.

This time of in-between, as night becomes morning, are restless hours for one is not yet another. I, too, am murky in my mind, dull with the day that has ended, not yet open to the day that has begun.

By the light of my laptop screen, I sometimes surf the Internet, not for substance for I do not wish to engage but rather, I am content to float in and out of websites. On some nights, I visit an online solitaire game that offers magic.

At first glance, it is traditional solitaire: seven piles of cards, some face up and some not, red on black, black on red, and four aces at the top. Then, the illusion begins. Magic is given freely and at regular intervals; neither purchase nor friend invitations are required.

Win or lose, you may play forever. Winning means advancing and receiving more magic; losing means just playing another game. There is an intricate scoring mechanism that makes the play of every card worthy of consideration.

How and where a card is played determines the number of points. Not all plays are equal—some may be undone—using magic produces a card to keep the game going but more magic may be required to win.

Ultimately, the player decides whether a game is worth continuing, whether winning is worth using magic. Life seems much the same in that regard, whether to be or to seek what may be.

Ah, once again I am far afield in my musing. Restless magic is fitting for those dark hours of night-morning yet in the light of day, it is less so.

(In a comment on a long ago post, “Do You Believe In Magic,” J.B. Whitmore offered the idea of the word magic as restless. Thank you for that. )

Graduating is a Lifelong Practice

Posted on June 1, 2014May 31, 2014 by KM Huber in Beyond Time, Consciousness, Inspiration, Spirituality

We graduate from one moment to the next. Every breath we take has a beginning and an end, and what occurs between that beginning and end is a lesson in living.

From the intake of the breath and all that it holds–the experience of it–to the release of the breath as the moment unfolds is an exercise we practice all the days of our lives.

Graduation is neither success nor failure but a series of milestones, markers of where we were, indicators that we have gone on to what comes next. Sometimes, that is only the next breath. Other times, graduation is a moment of accomplishment, of adding another tool to the toolbox that we carry through life.

Life is its own school, with assignments unique to each one of us. Always, there are questions; always, there are options.

I get up every morning determined to both change the world

and have one hell of a good time.

Sometimes, this makes planning my day difficult.

E.B. White

Graduation does not guarantee changing the world or having a hell of a good time but it does get us from one point in life to the next. It is a reminder that breathing is always an option. For the rest, we have our ever-expanding toolbox.

Throughout our lives we make choices. It is indeed a milestone when we are thoughtful in our word, taking nothing and no one for granted, doing our best not to take things personally. This moment of graduation is available in every moment we live. Its lifelong tool is awareness.

Awareness helps us sort our options wisely, carefully, especially when our choice is one difficult path or another. Awareness reveals the hollowness in magical thinking for no decision made with heart ever rings hollow.

Many times, we approach crossroads that seem so familiar that we are sure we have been in this same spot before yet life does not afford us that luxury, not quite. We are not the same as we were, and neither are our options. Each moment in life is as unique as each breath. We graduate from one decision to the next.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

(“The Road Not Taken,” Robert Frost)

Graduation requires we immerse ourselves into life with our head below our heart so that we do not leave the difficult choices to someone else while we wither in weakness. Rather, we lead with our heart as we stand, perhaps alone, for what we know is right.

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.

Martin Luther King

Our graduation from the womb to the outside world is the first of many, the beginning of miles of stone markers of the path traveled, the one that made all the difference.

Befriending Demons Begins with Naming

Posted on May 25, 2014May 24, 2014 by KM Huber in Inspiration, Spirituality

Stay watchful of gluttony and desire, and the demons of irritation and fear as well.

The noonday demon of laziness and sleep will come after lunch each day, and the demon of pride will sneak up only when you have vanquished the other demons.

(Evagerius as quoted in A Path With Heart by Jack Kornfield)

I have avoided putting a name to my “demons,” those every day “physical energies, emotions, and thought patterns [that I meet] within my relatively ordinary state of consciousness.” (Kornfield). My resistance was that I confused naming or recognizing these demons with attaching to them.

Mine is not to disassociate but to experience, or in the wise words of Rosanne Rosannadanna, “It’s always something.” I might as well name my emotions so I can recognize them immediately.

This recognition both “honors and nurtures” the demons as I look beneath these emotional states for the pure energy that is at their core (Kornfield). In that energy is the experience they offer me. The emotional states are familiar but every occurrence is a new experience of them.

The naming of the familiar whether it is mental anguish or bodily pain opens us to the experience without attaching to the drama of it. Rather, we recognize the feeling and face the sensation as it occurs.

We might say to ourselves, “I know that feeling,” and we do. If we recognize that naming the feeling is the first step in freeing ourselves from its drama, we are more apt to open ourselves to the experience at hand. We face the familiar with a fresh being.

All of the spiritual traditions have a practice for facing the demons in our lives. For the Sufis they are the Nafs; some 2000 years ago, there were the Christian Desert Fathers, of which Evagerius was one; Buddhism knows these difficult forces as either Mara (God of Darkness) or the Hindrances to Clarity.

Naming our demons allows us to explore our body’s reaction to our emotions. Recognizing a familiar emotion without its drama allows our body a fresh and new experience of the familiar without the baggage.

As long as you have all sorts of ideas about yourself,
you know yourself through the mist of these ideas. To know yourself as you are, give up all ideas.
You cannot imagine the taste of pure water,
you can only discover it by abandoning all flavourings.

~ Nisargadatta Maharaj ~

Pure emotion is pure energy. Naming it gives us the green light for a familiar yet fresh experience. Our emotions are our greatest allies, if we recognize them as a yet another way to experience any moment.

We feel our emotions with all of our being, in every cell of our body. When we are mindful of these sensations, and as Pema Chodron says, “make friends with them,” we come to recognize that mindfulness opens us to options.

Blind determination walls in what we want and walls out what we fear. It digs a ready rut. In mindfulness, we name the feeling so that we may experience it anew. We do not experience the same scenario or emotional state twice, similar maybe but not exactly.

Whether we open to life as it is or whether we try to confine life to our way is the measure of our peace of mind. In every grain of sand there is yet another view.

The Conquering of Self: All in a Day’s Outing

Posted on May 18, 2014May 17, 2014 by KM Huber in Florida, Inspiration, Spirituality

It is a spring day of which poets write and painters paint but my mind is all a jumble as thoughts tumble, each more urgent than the last. My body has joined the revolt, sending one pain message after another. This mind-body battle means it is a perfect day to take myself off to Waverly.

It is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles.
~ Buddha ~

No matter how many times I visit Waverly, it whispers to me, sometimes to remind and other times to reveal. Regardless, a breath here is less ragged with frustration. The mind-body battle is still present but now resides at the edge of my awareness as if the stillness of Waverly is all-pervasive.

Waverly offers something for each of my senses. With the focus of a juggler tossing each ball high enough so that the others remain in the air, I take in one view completely before leaving it for another. In a moment’s stance, the mind-body is absorbed otherwise.

Standing at the edge of the circle of live oaks whose branches intertwine into a year-round canopy of shade, Waverly as park and pond is mine to survey. I will not walk the park and pond today but I decide to try to make my way to the bench on the bridge that crosses the pond.

My steps are deliberate, almost mindful, as my right knee wobbles. My focus shifts to the pain in my shin and then to my calf and back up my thigh into my hip. I take in what I have come to know as a “pain breath,” which gives me a way to communicate with it.

Sometimes, the pain will release but this is not one of those times. Again, I assume the juggler’s focus, tossing the pain as high and as far away as I can, knowing it will come round again but I have made it to the bridge.

Waverly has never seemed so vibrant. I have lost count of the times that thought has come to me as Waverly’s purity of color and panorama of life stun. This is a world not shy about life.

There is tightness in my lower back but this time it releases simultaneously with my noticing parent geese and their two, yellow-brown goslings in full down just at the edge of the other side of the bridge.

I will not disturb you is the only thought of which I am aware as I quietly open my camera. The sun is behind me so all I can do is aim and hope that the goose family is somewhere in one of the shots but regardless, my mind’s eye has this one.

In my three years of visiting Waverly, these are the first goslings I have seen. My entire mind-body watches with a focus that had seemed impossible moments earlier. This has been a spring of uncertainty.

The red-shouldered hawk also decides to watch from atop the light post, perhaps to watch for a failure in focus, perhaps not. The parent geese are ever alert while the goslings are otherwise engaged yet in this moment, the world is theirs. They do not dawdle in their gusto of being alive.

As a human, I am easily snagged by the “what if” of drama but in the natural world, life is lived as it comes. Each moment is so precious, so all-consuming that it cannot possibly be anything but enough.

I rub my right leg in gratitude for each sensation it sends, as my mind opens to being rather than to battle. Such is possible with each breath, this being in life as it is. How it dazzles.

Life as a Juggler

Posted on May 11, 2014May 10, 2014 by KM Huber in Inspiration, Oneness, Spirituality

The act of living, breath by breath, is our practice, unique to each one of us and universal to all. Our practice is what we do with the life we have. In some form or another, this idea has always framed the way I live.

There were the decades that I brandished about the label of 19^th century romantic, comfortable in believing that life is in the striving and the arriving is secondary. It was my variation of Emerson’s “life is a journey not a destination.”

For me, however, arriving was important. It meant goal accomplished, an item checked off my list. Age has shown me that the value of a list is in its items. If the items reflect our practice, every day is a fresh read of our life list.

These days, my list is limited to four: compassion, loving-kindness, joy, and equanimity for all in all things. This universal list is inherent in every major spiritual tradition, eastern or western. They are not items to check off but to practice in every experience I have.

What we give to the world is our daily practice; it reveals how we are doing. At the age of 90, cellist Pablo Casals said he continued to practice, “’because I think I am making progress.’” Practice is personal first and public second.

To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.
Corita Kent

I came late to practice and its heart, discipline, but I arrived. My daily practice of meditation and yoga bring me to my list of compassion, joy, love, and gratitude every morning. Some days, I can see progress but there are many days of practice for its discipline.

Discipline helps me as a writer and as a chronically ill person, as my life not only constantly changes but expands in ways I never imagined. Yet, the list that guides my life stays the same. No longer interested in striving or arriving, I perceive my life through perspectives new and bold. My discipline is not manipulating my state of being but being in my life as it unfolds.

My life and my list differ from yours yet it is the practice of our lives that connects us. Together, we are coloring existence for every other form of life.

In my life practice, meditation is more than a matter of sitting in stillness. It really is a matter of “changing postures,” as Ajahn Chah called it, bringing stillness into the chaos of every day as life unfolds, moment by moment, nanosecond by nanosecond.

I am learning to juggle rather than to struggle, no matter how many balls are in the air. I need only watch one at a time to keep all the rest in the air, allowing attention to each in its turn. It is my practice of the list that is my life.

On Either Side of the Windowpane

Posted on May 4, 2014May 3, 2014 by KM Huber in Cooper and EmmaRose, Florida, Inspiration, Oneness, Spirituality

We are always in relationship–some small, others grand–ours is to co-exist. Life is what we have in common. It is sharing space with one another, including the insect in the room.

In the subtropical climate in which I live, co-existence with insects and bugs is possible year around. There are seasonal changes, sometimes marked by a winter’s bloom and other times, yet another change in foliage color.

Through it all, insects and bugs make their way on either side of window panes. The world of bugs and insects is fragile in its beauty and terrifyingly transient. There, living life to its fullest, even for a nanosecond, is never questioned, and death is just as imminent. The more I watch this world, the larger my own life becomes.

Insect and bug death is more common outside my windowpane than on the inside. Feline EmmaRose and I are content to observe all the life around us, although there are times I escort bugs and insects to the world on the other side of the pane. Relationship requires decisions.

Our windows look onto a carpet of grass that slopes to live oaks, pines and vines of woodland too thick for human occupation. Gray squirrels flick their feather-plumed tails, scurrying in and out of the woods in constant search of nuts not yet sprouted. Rarely, do they look to insects and bugs as food but they are never off the menu. This spring, EmmaRose and I have watched a pair of cardinals pecking seeds at woods’ edge as well as enjoying bug protein. The silken-red male most often appears in mornings, taking breakfast from what seems to be a favorite series of spots.

It is early evening when we see an earthen-brown female with a tufted, red crest and subtle red highlights. She stays closer to the woods, most often preferring low branches to the ground.

The brown thrasher is quite common of late. It seems a good year for insects and bug protein. To me, the reddish-brown streaks of the thrasher splashed through its mostly white chest seem velvet in texture. Thrashers, cardinals, and squirrels can be territorial but EmmaRose and I have yet to see a squabble.

The world outside the windowpane seems orchestrated and random. I wonder at all that I never see. I like that there is yet another world beyond mine.

This week, there is a new crop of clover, always a favorite for the eastern cottontail rabbits that enjoy the cover of the woodlands as well as the grassy area borders. We watch kits and adults alike.

EmmaRose seems most attuned to rabbit watching. Often, she puts her paw on my arm and meows; it is my cue to look to the world outside the windowpane. More often than not, a rabbit munches the green slope at the edge of the woods.

Relationships are a collage of images collected over a lifetime, snapshots of the world on either side of the windowpane.

A Way I No Longer Am

Posted on April 27, 2014April 26, 2014 by KM Huber in Consciousness, Inspiration, Spirituality

Let me begin with a question: what of the moment when the cocoon is no more? All is new, unknown for this form of life. It is a moment of dramatic tension as well as one of wonder. Life is crisp, clear, completely in focus; there is just so much of it to explore.

One life has ended and another begins.

I had never considered the falling away of the cocoon. In not doing so, I missed the ending of one way of life and thus, the beginning of the next. Life cycles and while a cocoon is only a stage, each stage must have its moment—from beginning to end–so that the next may emerge. No matter how many times the cycle repeats each stage is unique.

It is not easy to let go of a way of life, especially the nurturing stage of a cocoon. Yet, in order to experience life through another perspective, the cocoon must fall away for the new form to live.

Five years ago I retired, believing I would regain my health by modifying my life. From a Buddhist perspective, I stayed stuck in samsara (the cycle of suffering), trying to live a way I no longer am.

I did not know then what I know now. The cocoon has fallen away, and the way of life that is emerging is familiar but its form is unique. It is one of less movement and more being.

In Buddhism, one develops the practice of loving-kindness and compassion as well as joy and equanimity for all in all things. I like to think of these “four sublime states” developing in stages as my practice of them grows. Some days, there is no growth but always, there is practice.

In these last two months, my practice has undergone such a dramatic change that my life feels new. I am curious and excited about this new form of being and what I will discover.

No longer trying to live a way I no longer am, I open to life turning on a dime. In a moment, it will turn again. Never has impermanence seemed so full of possibility. Once again, chronic illness opens me to another perspective, another way to be. I am not lupus or any of the labels that I have accumulated over the decades for as the Buddha taught, there is “no fixed or unchanged self.”

However, there is a body and a mind that cycle through my lifetime. For over half of that life, my mind and body experience has included autoimmune disease. Now, in this new stage of life, my mind and body are adjusting to the consequences of living with decades of disease. There is a wearing away of the old as the new comes into being.

In order to discover all this new stage offers, I must be more mindful than I have ever been. That much is clear. More rest for the body, more tolerance for the thought chatter.

I am neither my body nor my mind but I am experiencing a lifetime through them. For me, the challenge is and has been to be. Perhaps it is for most, as change excludes no one and no thing.

Stage after stage, the cocoon falls away.

No Separation of Space and Time Here

Posted on April 20, 2014 by KM Huber in Beyond Time, Inspiration, Oneness

I do not remember ever distinguishing the dimensions of space—length, depth, width, breadth, height—from time. Edgar Allan Poe, H.G. Wells, and even Marcel Proust wrote of space and time as one. I came late to the word space-time (or spacetime) but not to the concept, not really.

For me, space-time has always been more about mindfulness, paying attention to the details of life as they unfold. The space of a moment is a combination of any three of the spatial dimensions–width, depth, breadth, length, or height. Its time is its unfolding as a scene in life. It is as if each moment has four dimensions, a trio of space in time, 3+1.

Space-time gives me a better sense of the present as a bridge between the past and the future. The present provides open-ended access to both yet serves as a reminder that the only time we actually live is now.

Having access to the past and to the future is not the same as being in either for we are always only in the present. Yet, it is in paying attention to the details of our lives as they unfold that provides the access to both the past and to the future.

If being completely immersed in the moment reminds us of a similar scenario, that past moment might flash through the mind. It usually does for me. In that flash of familiarity, I have accessed the immutable past but the present scene is of its own unfolding. The scenes are similar but not the same.

Awareness also seems to color the future. Sometimes, I wonder whether or not awareness is the source of infinite possibilities. When we are truly present maybe we are stockpiling for our future; perhaps by minding the details of the present, we provide options for the future.

It is tempting to try to re-create the past as well as frame the future, as if either were possible. Neither is. I know. I have tried. The present is all there ever is and to ignore it is like separating space from time, something I cannot do.

After all, everywhere I go, there I am. I might as well be who I am in the moment that I am.

Perhaps a Glimpse of Buddha Nature

Posted on April 13, 2014April 12, 2014 by KM Huber in Beyond Time, Inspiration, Spirituality

Every once in a while I think I catch a glimpse of Buddha nature. Actually, it is more of a feeling than an actual sighting. In other words, any “aha-moment” vanishes the moment the recognition is mine. I suspect that is how it always is with Buddha nature.

Even the term, Buddha nature, is known by many other names. For me, it is the eternal aspect of existence–energy vibrating in infinite dimensions and form as matter and anti-matter—creating a background of immutable harmony so that we are able to live our lives with choice.

The reason everything looks beautiful is because it is out of balance, but its background is always in perfect harmony.

This is how everything exists in the realm of Buddha nature, losing its balance against a background of perfect balance.

~Shunryu Suzuki~

Suzuki’s description is a familiar one on this blog, as I have cited it many times. For me, it is the essence of the feeling I get whenever I sense Buddha nature. No matter the definition or description, the idea of a balanced background against the days of our lives means we always have options.

For me, Buddha nature is what I am and have been from my inception, the blank canvas that was me at birth. If I look closely at this painting that is my life, its background is in perfect balance, allowing me to lose and regain myself moment after moment.

Dates and years frame the triptych of my past, present, and future. I am the artist’s brush, swirling with the color of every choice, stroke after stroke on the canvas that is my moment in Buddha nature. Its balanced background—the context of my life—absorbs the outcome of each moment that is my life.

Buddha nature does not allow me to slide through my life unaware or it does. The choice is mine. In any given moment it is up to me how aware I am of my own brush stroke. In mindful moments is when I glimpse Buddha nature.

The moment is hazy at first, floating in and out like any other, yet its rhythm is different, like an undercurrent that absorbs rather than pulls. Maybe this is what synchronicity is; regardless, I am immersed in it. In such a moment, the ending is as uncertain as is the beginning but I am bothered by neither.

Rather, it is like a story that begins with “once upon a time” and ends with ever after and forever. I am confident there is a bridge between the beginning and the end and indifferent to the outcome. Buddha nature has the essence of a rainbow, a bridge to and from and back again.

Only life is in flux, neither ending nor beginning but always being, not a snapping of photographs or a study in stillness but a series of scene changes as the stroke of the artist aligns with change against the constancy of Buddha nature. The painting that is my life is only one scene in the tapestry of existence yet mine mirrors all others in that it is lived.

As I say, every once in a while I think I get a glimpse.

When Spring Occurs Inside and Out

Posted on April 6, 2014April 5, 2014 by KM Huber in Florida, Inspiration, Spirituality

Every moment is the best time to begin. Beginnings are never out of season no matter what the weather is in your heart or outside your door. Every once in a while, spring is the season inside and out.

No matter the season, we welcome its beginning for in opening ourselves to any season, we stand at its threshold new, and the possibilities are infinite.

Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn, a cool breeze in

summer, snow in winter. If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things,

this is the best season of your life.

Wu-men (as quoted on Zen Flash)

In each moment of every season, we thrill to the unfolding of what we do not yet know. All together, these are the years of our lives, each with its own spring, summer, fall, and winter.

Sometimes the spring of a year, both within and without, is sporadic in its blossoming but nonetheless, in spring all comes alive again, anticipating the produce of summer, the harvest of fall, and the sleep of winter.

Of course, each season has its days of clouds but on the clear days of spring, eternity seems within our reach for the bursting forth of life is the promise of forever.

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature

is constituted to be that profound secret

and mystery to every other.

Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities)

In any beginning of any season is the promise of life’s renewal for every sentient being. There is birdsong, the greening of grass blades; there is the flight of the insect, dazzled in its moment of life.

It is in a moment’s beginning that all seasons start. Beginnings are for poets and painters capturing forever a moment in a blossom’s life, the uncovering of what was once winter stilled. A season begins the life cycle.

In the moment that is spring the world awakens because we, too, awaken, stretching for the infinite possibilities inherent in every beginning. There is spring in such a moment, and we wrap our arms around life.

All winter long, underground roots have embraced one another in frost or warmth, sharing nutrients through the stillness in anticipation of the moment of movement that is a thaw or a breaking of the surface. Life begins again, unpredictable but renewed.

Where I live, it is the season of beginning all around me as well as inside me. I am reminded that I am in constant relationship with life no matter where I am, inside or out. It is the season of my life, rich in bursting forth, magnificent in blossom, resplendent in fall foliage, and sated in winter.

In every beginning of every moment I stretch my arms to the sky in appreciation that I see the sky, whether or not there is weather in it. I am in a moment’s beginning and all that it may be.

It may be the moment that I look into the face of an iris and discover a shade of purple not ever known to me for the light in this moment is new, unlike it has ever been. Together, the iris and I, wild in our ways and settled in others, share in the sentience of being.

Always, we are in relationship with life whether it is an insect, a blade of grass, or a plant in a pot on a bedroom windowsill. We engage constantly in the cycle that is life and from time to time, we burst forth as an iris bloom or as a human, both grateful for another spring inside and out.

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: