spirituality

early morning readings

May I find the Courage to withstand the crumbling of my
delusions so that the light of right understanding guides me on a life path absent of greed, anger, and ignorance.

Nikon D750 f/4.5 1/250s 85mm

” ‘To find a pathway absent of greed, anger, and ignorance’ messages hope that there is indeed a way of life that leads out of this petrified forest in which there looms gigantic trees twisted and bent by an ego intent on creating a self- referenced world. Each tree has been tagged with a label that takes possession of it through the identification of “my memory”, “my feelings”, “my ideas”, or “my dreams”. Circling the trees are multiple pathways carved out by the anger of unmet desires and covered over by entangled vines driven by a need to satiate an unquenchable thirst. For years I have wandered in the shadows of this forest unable to see that it is of my own creation.

I come to a place where I envision myself eagerly before bookshelves, my eyes lightly and briefly touching upon one book’s title and then another, feeling their words tickle my thoughts until I surrender to their unspoken promises. Once engaged by the promising nature of a title, it is hope that opens a book jacket and begins another journey through pages. With the turning of each page, desire seeks the experience of validation within the configuration of a writer’s text. All of this, I believe, is driven by memory traces of how the words of unknown authors enfolded my emotional self as they alleviated the subsequent emotional chaos that followed the death of my father when I was three years old.

Later, literature provided me with alternate threads by which to darn a harmonious, yet delusional, understanding of death, of fatherless children, of a family.”

~B C Koeford (A Meditative Journey with Saldage)

dogwood photography’s photo challenge: story telling – your culture

Week 28 Story Telling: Your Culture (Photographers participating in the challenge come from nearly every country and culture. Tell us the story of your culture.)

Nikon D750 f/7.1 1/60s 85mm ISO 100

Image submitted in response to Dogwood Photography’s annual 52-week photography challenge.

tell me, sir, where’s the distinction?

The river and its waves are one surf: 

where is the difference between the river and its waves?

When the wave rises, it is the water; 

Nikon D750 f/22 .02s 125mm 100 ISO

and when it falls, it is the same water again.

Tell me, Sir, where is the distinction?

Because it has been named as wave, 

shall it no longer be considered as water?

~Kabir Das (One Hundred Poems by Kabir, Trans: Rabindranath Tagore)

in remembrance

Death of a loved one disturbs the relationships that sustain a person’s sense of ‘identity’ and the high level of binding and cathexis concentrated on the person who is lost is suddenly disrupted . . . there is a close link between the doctrines of egolessness and suffering.

De Silva, Padmasiri. An Introduction to Buddhist Psychology. Landam, MD, 2000.
Poudre Canyon… f/7.1 1/200s 28mm 4500 ISO

Through this lens of Buddhist thought, I begin to feel a crumbling of a child’s self with an understanding of how my father’s absolute and final absence from our lives disrupted the multiple relationships between my father, mother, sister, and me.  Besides the sudden severing of the identity I was forming via my father, the connecting emotional threads between those of us that were left, although still intact, were unknowingly stretched and pulled by our own individual fears of egolessness.

My father’s death left my mother, a young woman deaf from infancy, with two daughters and pregnant with her first son.  I do not recall whose idea it was to wander outside the house early that morning as my mother slept.  I can, however, imagine my young self following my older sister as if an invisible thread that tied us together tugged me along as she, with her five-year-old world view, undertook an emotional duty to find our father.  Did we believe we could find him fly fishing in the creek that ran alongside the house? Or was there something about the water that enticed us into abandoning our search?  I can recall to this day the cessation of anxiety and arising rapture that coincided with my surrender to the inevitable. Two young men, I am told, rescued us both from this search for our father.

Koeford, BC. A Meditative Journey with Saldage Homesickness for a place, a time, a person that cannot be