earthquake | dhamma footsteps

POSTCARD #127: Delhi: Jiab sent a photo from Madurai in South India, people go to work, life goes on. Meanwhile I’m hanging out my laundry on the roof terrace here in Delhi in an immense dryness of heat, knowing I’ll have to take them in an about one hour because if not they will become crisps, weather conditions being as they are and also the leaves of the bouganvillia plants and palms all around are soaking up the moisture in the air. I water the plants too of course but every day they’re dry in the morning. Somehow, everything survives.

It’s an ordinary day. And I was starting to write about that… then there was the small earthquake in Delhi, buildings shook for a few moments, nothing compared with the 2nd quake 7.4 Richter scale in Nepal. In fact I was there in Kathmandhu in the earthquake in the early 90s The thing I rememember about it was I was in a hotel on the 4th floor and suddenly the sky was full of birds, pigeons dashing around, hovering in the air… then the building started to move. The birds felt it first.

This is when blogging becomes a kind of mind-bogglingness. The aloneness of the solitary blogger in some time-zone in the world – an aloneness, maybe that’s what motivates this reaching out. ‘The internet is an extended sense organ’, bloggers in the world scattered around the planet, but really all contained in conscious awareness – we couldn’t be connected in any other way! I can’t see you, or hear you. I can’t touch you and will never ‘meet’ you in the normal sense of the word, I just know you’re there, or here inside me, or where we all are… curious how it’s the awareness of the connection that activates it.

‘There’s no other time than now, so how could we be elsewhere? We’ve always been “here and now” ―there’s nowhere else! Whether we think we are living in the past or in the future, we’ve always been squarely in the present moment. When we “stroll down memory lane” or “boldly go where no one has gone before”, we’re still exactly wherever we are, in the same time and place. Our memories of the past and plans for the future are nothing but present mental fabrications. Wherever we are, that is “here”. Wherever we were before, that was “here” then. Wherever we go later, that will also be “here” then. We can never return to yesterday, nor can we advance to tomorrow. Yesterday was now, only then. Tomorrow will be now, only then. It’s always now.There are no geographical or temporal alternatives. It’s HOW we live “here and now” that matters: avoiding harm, doing good, purifying the mind.’ [Nying Je Ling – Jonang Buddhism]

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