Serve Spontaneously!

my dear politicians, politicos, campaigners, party members, workers, would be public reps & (voters), fellow drukpas:

what separates us little compared to what unites us

we share a little yet vastly blessed kingdom in the sacred Himalayas

we come from villages

all of us love chillies

dried beef jerkys

the more than occasional wine

archery

bantering jokes

and if prodded we be related!

then we share the same Monarchs of the Dragon Kingdom

and indeed grew up receiving their profound words of wisdom and pragmatism

guided as such and privileged to be the recipients of their peerless service

kindness

care

concern

compassion

and so much more

as the winds of change storm

as the tides of torrential falls drum and thud the ground beneath yer feet

perhaps it's apt that these are the periods where we are most vulnerable

yet opportunities arise

in such disguises

perhaps these are testing times

but what's a life if not the eventual wait for death?

when little things gets immersive

the bigger view is dimmed

this is when we should be most alert

alive

aware

for if ya actually keep the faith

give it back tenfold or more

whether ye be elected or rejected

remember to serve is to receive

and most people serve on a daily basis

some sweep the streets

others fill in the potholes

many keep yer toilet tanks & sceptics awashed and safe

then there are the majority-

they farm

walk

toil

often making no more than the next meal

or no meals at all

or schools for their kids

hospitals for their health

then we have public servants

they make do with routine-work

doing their bit

day by day

as accountants

drivers

peons

et al

we have the biz-folks too

they keep the rest employed

try to revv up the economy

the engine that's necessary to keep pace

if not lag behind

often at losses

now when ya understand these even emotionally

if not by intellect

you'd know that to serve is the noblest of callings

to serve as an elected rep of yer own constituency

that much more of a privilege

to serve yer country

such an honor!

and to serve right and humbly

to keep yer ground sound

yer speech right

yer actions well-motivated

yer concerns genuine

this if ya remember and seek fervently-

you're already accepted

remembered

not just publicly

but within yerself

as yerself

since we're a dharma kingdom blessed with living siddhas that ya all know so well

remember the dharma

it will guide yer karma

accept yer karma

it will strengthen yer dharma

and in the end-

you will know more than i the profound words of Nagarjuna:

"all the happiness there is in the world comes from wishing happiness for others; all the misery there is in the world comes from wishing happiness for the self"-

for we are all serving one way or another

if that be the case

why not serve in that ancient and noblest of traditions as our seers and predecessors have done?

as our kings continue to demonstrate without fail

without bail

no other anchor but the brave sail
in purity

striving at nothing but the walk on the Noble Path paved by the Shakyamuni Buddha

who toiled in a manner similar
who wanted to serve but did not know how
hence sought the scriptures
the yogas
fasts
renunciation
self-emaciation
till he found his calling
realized his failings
came to his buddhahood
and served and taught;
lived and served...

and my dear fellow Drukpas of The Glorious Dragon Lineage-

perhaps its apt that yer reps represent you in all fairness-

if they're what they are its a reflection upon thee

if the reflections good credit too goes to thee

but when it turns sour do not be so dour

for two slapping hands make a sound

or a folded lotus

or a jacking hammer

to just blame is lame

to just cuss and curse is a shame

we're all mirrors really

reflecting each others good, bad and ugly deeds

and such-

should vote minus the rotting rote

take no nonsensical note

then placing such morals for yerselves and yer reps to come

thumb in the ink naked and bold

this is us

cast the ballot with no hold

always remembering the frailty of human nature

communities

societies

countries

and the need for temperance

tolerance

patience

compassion

thus remembering the bigger picture always

in light of the daily details

keep abiding in the temporal triple gems

and the profound triple jewels!

Ps: YourLustForLifeStartsRightNow!

Monthly May Bees

Sarfrida by Sara Johnson

i like my ego

it keeps me from bloatin & floatin away;

just as i like my pride

reminds me to avoid exaggerated rides;

i like death

reminds me to live alive

just as i like impermanence

tells me to let go

i also dig attachments;

shows me the freedom of detachment

and the wisdom of ignorance;

telling me i know nothing

forgetting the buddha

the sangha

and the dharma

fashioning reminders of my blunders

and when hallucinations take over with delusions

there's a monkey prancing around-

Talisskeleton by Sara Johnson

gauging my reaction

making sure i don't remember-

the four-noble truths-

and the eightfold path;

you see

every single manifestation that meets the eye,

sounds the ear

speeches the tongue

actions the body

fills the mind-

are essentially telling you what you are

and what you are not!

never quite know where you goin till you go

stay gone to see you still gotta go farther

even when you're not gone

sitting on yer ass

breathing itineraries

in and out

out and in

finding nothing in between

but gaps of gasps

expanding awareness

now go with the flow

for the flow goes with or without yer board

here and now

there and everywhere

where cities become villages

a skyscraper a hut

a hut a mat

a mat a spot

a spot an ass

an ass no more

now gone are the grosses

the crasses

the masses

along with butts & if's

the five Ws

the singular H

and every issueless issue

like dissolving tissue

this is what sitting on yer bottom does to yer top

yer topless head

dramatized heart

mind full of motions

until there are nothing but shadowy visitors

who come & go

take a peek

try a knock

snatch a glimpse

and just as shadows of the deep

disappear back to evaporations

letting you be

just the way you are-

perfect!

 

i abhor violence

when thoroughly necessary

i engage

wholeheartedly

ready for consequences

emptying all excuses

respect yer dharma kings & queens

but question the public wanna be reps-

its what's expected

& thoroughly logical

skinned earth

with a massage

some call it gardening

others find it enlightening

the weeds spoke

why always us?

we be plants as well

no different from flowers such as roses

or lilies of the valley

right i said

we are tweelings

my kinf looks at nature

as if it exists outside of the self-

never knowing in their screams of conservation

that we're nature as well

that skins & skims other naturals

this eco thing

this organic stuff

that biological bull

these environmental preachings!

the weed wept

then smiled a little

and blurted in extreme generosity:

"you like grass?"

it was my turn to grin stupid ;D

 

our calendar together is short

the goodbyes will hurt

i ignore time

live dime by dime

tho' its magical

all phenomena is temporal

right now it rains rainbows

laughter & songs

discoverying exchanges

changing like seasons do

all i can and will do

is be here

live & be alive

if forms of fortitude come out of nothingness

one's gotta be grateful for everythingness

and laughing at tragedy

grinning at comedy

one smiles on

beyond samsara & nirvana

and every realm in the way

yonder & beyond

beyond bondage & adage

saying 'i do'

or 'adieu

brilliant moon

rains comforting beams

santiago shephards

alchemy returns

beauty falls in graces

making beautiful losers

a catcher in the rye

i'll try

junkys done

tho' i'll burrough some!

if words fail to describe yer feelings use signage-

lot of noises will do too-

clicks are tolerated ;D

if nothing works, try everything

failing which

retire

resign

have a notorious cup of coffee!

it was never the journey ;D

nor destinations-

it was always about the driver!

Face Phases, Brace Paces in Doses- unTie Knotty Laces & Ageing Graces my Bristleless Toothbrushes... along with Tintless Stained Sunglasses

god isn't in heaven

sipping nectar

watching benignly yer daily rote

now god isn't in hell either

or in examples of parables

stories

miracles

magic

god's in hell

if there's an actual hellhole

rescuing spirits gone astray

or something to that likeness

as metaphors

similes

catalysts

literals

if that's yer thing

and god's in heaven

spacious

relaxed

chilled

bowling

pooling

carrom-boarding

telling us:

do not be fixated on me-

my heaven

my hell

or my paradise

focus on yer godliness

and enjoy the ride

ye fools!

 

concrete blocks

a fragile flower wills, cracks & blooms through!

beyond petals

& flowers powers!

tis ok

after ya pop it

kick the bucket

sling a noose

die a death

everyone hate u gonna like u

even strangers u never knew

matter of fact-

u r well liked once yer gone!

if yer love's made by shrinkage

leakage

breakage

sniff & snuff

hide & seek

see & saw

drill & draw

allthebest!

awakenings

dissolutions

dull envelopes

nightly hallucinations

morning after disorientations

a lul

toilettic refuge

refusals

leakages

renunciations

no abhorations

arisings arrive

form shines

day happens

cyclist cycles circular collaborations

paints yin

draws yang

canvases sky

earth

from edges

to centers

of weird theater

absurd plays

rationale dyes

logical reincarnations

unfathomable bull

measurable horns

scientific pig

spiritual chicken

nice cow

good goat

sheepish hellos &-

fvcking french loafs!

zoos & goldfish

we see 'em & go "po animals!"

somewhere there's gigantic beings decoratin' their rooms with the earth-

with us in it-

"cute lil fvckers!" they be sayin!

as ya grow older yer none but yer apa,

yer ama teaches ya by simply being yer mother;

just as yer achos watching yer back- literally & otherwisely-

and asheys & nomeths just make yer world that much more brighter-

which reminds me i gotta be bloody good son and a bro and obviously- an apa

and yet all of these are seeds one must nurture into a rooted plant that ain't cut- rather bearing fruits & giving shade as they all done for ya & that ye must do for those ye have given life; asking not how much can ye give but how do i give...

this is the alley-gully of the well-intentioned-dharmabum.

cheers & adios ;D

This Way of Life (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Ps: YourLustForLifeStartsRightNow!

Afghan Girl: A Life Revealed

A Life Revealed

Her eyes have captivated the world since she appeared on our cover in 1985. Now we can tell her story.

By Cathy Newman Photograph* by Steve McCurry

She remembers the moment. The photographer took her picture. She remembers her anger. The man was a stranger. She had never been photographed before. Until they met again 17 years later, she had not been photographed since.

The photographer remembers the moment too. The light was soft. The refugee camp in Pakistan was a sea of tents. Inside the school tent he noticed her first. Sensing her shyness, he approached her last. She told him he could take her picture. “I didn't think the photograph of the girl would be different from anything else I shot that day,” he recalls of that morning in 1984 spent documenting the ordeal of Afghanistan’s refugees.

The portrait by Steve McCurry turned out to be one of those images that sears the heart, and in June 1985 it ran on the cover of this magazine. Her eyes are sea green. They are haunted and haunting, and in them you can read the tragedy of a land drained by war. She became known around National Geographic as the “Afghan girl,” and for 17 years no one knew her name. 

In January a team from National Geographic Television & Film’s EXPLORER brought McCurry to Pakistan to search for the girl with green eyes. They showed her picture around Nasir Bagh, the still standing refugee camp near Peshawar where the photograph had been made. A teacher from the school claimed to know her name. A young woman named Alam Bibi was located in a village nearby, but McCurry decided it wasn’t her.

No, said a man who got wind of the search. He knew the girl in the picture. They had lived at the camp together as children. She had returned to Afghanistan years ago, he said, and now lived in the mountains near Tora Bora. He would go get her.

It took three days for her to arrive. Her village is a six-hour drive and three-hour hike across a border that swallows lives. When McCurry saw her walk into the room, he thought to himself: This is her.

Names have power, so let us speak of hers. Her name is Sharbat Gula, and she is Pashtun, that most warlike of Afghan tribes. It is said of the Pashtun that they are only at peace when they are at war, and her eyes—then and now—burn with ferocity. She is 28, perhaps 29, or even 30. No one, not even she, knows for sure. Stories shift like sand in a place where no records exist.

Time and hardship have erased her youth. Her skin looks like leather. The geometry of her jaw has softened. The eyes still glare; that has not softened. “She’s had a hard life,” said McCurry. “So many here share her story.” Consider the numbers. Twenty-three years of war, 1.5 million killed, 3.5 million refugees: This is the story of Afghanistan in the past quarter century.

Now, consider this photograph of a young girl with sea green eyes. Her eyes challenge ours. Most of all, they disturb. We cannot turn away.

“There is not one family that has not eaten the bitterness of war,” a young Afghan merchant said in the 1985 National Geographic story that appeared with Sharbat’s photograph on the cover. She was a child when her country was caught in the jaws of the Soviet invasion. A carpet of destruction smothered countless villages like hers. She was perhaps six when Soviet bombing killed her parents. By day the sky bled terror. At night the dead were buried. And always, the sound of planes, stabbing her with dread.

“We left Afghanistan because of the fighting,” said her brother, Kashar Khan, filling in the narrative of her life. He is a straight line of a man with a raptor face and piercing eyes. “The Russians were everywhere. They were killing people. We had no choice.”

Shepherded by their grandmother, he and his four sisters walked to Pakistan. For a week they moved through mountains covered in snow, begging for blankets to keep warm.

“You never knew when the planes would come,” he recalled. “We hid in caves.”

Soviet troops (in right row) withdrawing from Afghanistan in 1988. Afghan government BTR on the left. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The journey that began with the loss of their parents and a trek across mountains by foot ended in a refugee camp tent living with strangers.

“Rural people like Sharbat find it difficult to live in the cramped surroundings of a refugee camp,” explained Rahimullah Yusufzai, a respected Pakistani journalist who acted as interpreter for McCurry and the television crew. “There is no privacy. You live at the mercy of other people.” More than that, you live at the mercy of the politics of other countries. “The Russian invasion destroyed our lives,” her brother said.

It is the ongoing tragedy of Afghanistan. Invasion. Resistance. Invasion. Will it ever end? “Each change of government brings hope,” said Yusufzai. “Each time, the Afghan people have found themselves betrayed by their leaders and by outsiders professing to be their friends and saviors.”

In the mid-1990s, during a lull in the fighting, Sharbat Gula went home to her village in the foothills of mountains veiled by snow. To live in this earthen-colored village at the end of a thread of path means to scratch out an existence, nothing more. There are terraces planted with corn, wheat, and rice, some walnut trees, a stream that spills down the mountain (except in times of drought), but no school, clinic, roads, or running water.

Here is the bare outline of her day. She rises before sunrise and prays. She fetches water from the stream. She cooks, cleans, does laundry. She cares for her children; they are the center of her life. Robina is 13. Zahida is three. Alia, the baby, is one. A fourth daughter died in infancy. Sharbat has never known a happy day, her brother says, except perhaps the day of her marriage.

English: US airstrike during the battle of Tora Bora. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Her husband, Rahmat Gul, is slight in build, with a smile like the gleam of a lantern at dusk. She remembers being married at 13. No, he says, she was 16. The match was arranged.

He lives in Peshawar (there are few 

Tora Bora Mountains in Afghanistan (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

jobs in Afghanistan) and works in a bakery. He bears the burden of medical bills; the dollar a day he earns vanishes like smoke. Her asthma, which cannot tolerate the heat and pollution of Peshawar in summer, limits her time in the city and with her husband to the winter. The rest of the year she lives in the mountains.

At the age of 13, Yusufzai, the journalist, explained, she would have gone into purdah, the secluded existence followed by many Islamic women once they reach puberty.

“Women vanish from the public eye,” he said. In the street she wears a plum-colored burka, which walls her off from the world and from the eyes of any man other than her husband. “It is a beautiful thing to wear, not a curse,” she says.

Faced by questions, she retreats into the black shawl wrapped around her face, as if by doing so she might will herself to evaporate. The eyes flash anger. It is not her custom to subject herself to the questions of strangers.

Had she ever felt safe?

”No. But life under the Taliban was better. At least there was peace and order.”

Had she ever seen the photograph of herself as a girl?

Front cover of the June 1985 issue of National Geographic Magazine (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“No.”

She can write her name, but cannot read. She harbors the hope of education for her children. “I want my daughters to have skills,” she said. “I wanted to finish school but could not. I was sorry when I had to leave.”

Education, it is said, is the light in the eye. There is no such light for her. It is possibly too late for her 13-year-old daughter as well, Sharbat Gula said. The two younger daughters still have a chance.

The reunion between the woman with green eyes and the photographer was quiet. On the subject of married women, cultural tradition is strict. She must not look—and certainly must not smile—at a man who is not her husband. She did not smile at McCurry. Her expression, he said, was flat. She cannot understand how her picture has touched so many. She does not know the power of those eyes.

Such knife-thin odds. That she would be alive. That she could be found. That she could endure such loss. Surely, in the face of such bitterness the spirit could atrophy. How, she was asked, had she survived?

The answer came wrapped in unshakable certitude.

“It was,” said Sharbat Gula, “the will of God.”

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2002/04/afghan-girl/index-text

Ps: YourLustForLifeStartsRightNow!