Andrew Furst's Blog, page 113

I Need Your Help – Help Me Choose The Right Video

I Need Your Help

I need your help deciding which video to use for my upcoming Indiegogo fundraising campaign.  I’m looking to publish my second book.  It is a collection of poetry titled “And We Still Answer”. It explores the  intersection of nature and our humanity.

Please watch both videos and let me know which one you prefer in the poll below.

Option 1

Option 2

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

The post I Need Your Help – Help Me Choose The Right Video appeared on Andrew Furst.

Quote – Shinran on Mind and the Primal Vow

Shinran on Mind

 

Mind

 

The post Quote – Shinran on Mind and the Primal Vow appeared on Andrew Furst.

One Minute Meditation – Lazy Day Fire

 One  Minute Meditations is an ongoing series of short videos, poems, and commentary intended as a meditation.  Offered as an opportunity to step back from your cyber routine and settle into a more natural rhythm, if only for a minute.

Lazy Day Fire

The dog and I kicking back, burning brush on a early autumn day.  Breathing in the fresh air, listening to the birds chatter, and entranced by the cracking flames. Ah, a lazy day fire.

Get Each Week's One Minute Meditation in your email box

First Name:

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In addition to a monthly email you can also subscribe to the following weekly series:


One Minute Meditations



Tiny Drops (Photography series)



Compass Songs (My Favorite Poems)



Dialectic Two-Step



Modern Koans (interesting questions)



Sunday Morning Coming Down (Music Videos)



Relics (Timeless Republished Articles)



Say What?



Quotes



Verse Us (Poems I Write)

If You Watched The One Minute Meditation, How Do You Feel? Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll. 

The post One Minute Meditation – Lazy Day Fire appeared on Andrew Furst.

Eleven AM Meeting – Verse Us

Verse Us - Poems I write: haiku, senryu, mesostics, free verse, random word constructions, I might even use rhyme or meter once and a while.

Eleven AM Meeting

This is something to hold on to;

your heart.

There is not another.

You seem like you might look at me,

rushing it.

Here I am, I didn’t get no sleep last night.

100 girls like to do the white too much.

Can you just chew them up?

But there was a conversation,

passing through what we had talked about;

I needed to be separate

and the answer was no.

And that so it’s like we get there,

they said it was fine.

But

this

is looking for you.

It’s just like he doesn’t have affection.

He’s admitted to stuff like that.

So he was down here for a month and a half

to be there every day.

But it’s one of those things that’s too much

that.

But I can’t be bothered.

 

This poem was constructed by using a voice recognition application to record my Thursday eleven AM meeting.  From the jumble, I pulled out phrases that mostly worked out as understandable. I then removed specific meeting content, leaving the phrases to be ordered into this poem.

The post Eleven AM Meeting – Verse Us appeared on Andrew Furst.

Aligned – Tiny Drops (Photography)

Tiny Drops is an ongoing iPhoneographic series. The images represent moments of noticing on my part.  For you, they are an offer to pause, observe, and take that noticing into your life.  All photos are mine unless noted otherwise.

These works by Andrew Furst are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Aligned
chair seatchair slatsslats

Aligned

Get Each Week's Tiny Drops in your email box

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In addition to a monthly email you can also subscribe to the following weekly series:


One Minute Meditations



Tiny Drops (Photography series)



Compass Songs (My Favorite Poems)



Dialectic Two-Step



Modern Koans (interesting questions)



Sunday Morning Coming Down (Music Videos)



Relics (Timeless Republished Articles)



Say What?



Quotes



Verse Us (Poems I Write)

 
FIVE LIMITLESS THOUGHTS

May all living beings have happiness and its causes

May all be free from unhappiness and its causes

May all dwell in equanimity, free of attraction and aversion

May all quickly find the great happiness that lies beyond all misery

May all enjoy inner and outer peace now and forever

NAMO AMITOFO

The post Aligned – Tiny Drops (Photography) appeared on Andrew Furst.

Where Can I Find Inner Peace? – Say What?

Say What?  is an ongoing series of laconic exchanges on Buddhism in the format of a comic strip.

This shirt is dry clean only. Which means... it's dirty. - Mitch Hedberg 

Where Can I Find Inner Peace?

A Few Words On Inner Peace

Get Each Week's Say What? in your email box

First Name:

Last Name:

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In addition to a monthly email you can also subscribe to the following weekly series:


One Minute Meditations



Tiny Drops (Photography series)



Compass Songs (My Favorite Poems)



Dialectic Two-Step



Modern Koans (interesting questions)



Sunday Morning Coming Down (Music Videos)



Relics (Timeless Republished Articles)



Say What?



Quotes



Verse Us (Poems I Write)

The post Where Can I Find Inner Peace? – Say What? appeared on Andrew Furst.

Compass Songs – Sally’s Hair

 Compass Songs is an ongoing series of works by poets that I enjoy. Poetry, as the Zen Masters have said, is like a finger pointing to the moon. It speaks the unspeakable.

Sally’s Hair

by John Koethe

It’s like living in a light bulb, with the leaves

Like filaments and the sky a shell of thin, transparent glass

Enclosing the late heaven of a summer day, a canopy

Of incandescent blue above the dappled sunlight golden on the grass.

I took the train back from Poughkeepsie to New York

And in the Port Authority, there at the Suburban Transit window,

She asked, “Is this the bus to Princeton?”—which it was.

“Do you know Geoffrey Love?” I said I did. She had the blondest hair,

Which fell across her shoulders, and a dress of almost phosphorescent blue.

She liked Ayn Rand. We went down to the Village for a drink,

Where I contrived to miss the last bus to New Jersey, and at 3 a.m. we

Walked around and found a cheap hotel I hadn’t enough money for

And fooled around on its dilapidated couch. An early morning bus

(She’d come to see her brother), dinner plans and missed connections

And a message on his door about the Jersey shore. Next day

A summer dormitory room, my roommates gone: “Are you,” she asked,

“A hedonist?” I guessed so. Then she had to catch her plane.

Sally—Sally Roche. She called that night from Florida,

And then I never heard from her again. I wonder where she is now,

Who she is now. That was thirty-seven years ago.

And I’m too old to be surprised again. The days are open,

Life conceals no depths, no mysteries, the sky is everywhere,

The leaves are all ablaze with light, the blond light

Of a summer afternoon that made me think again of Sally’s hair.

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First Name:

Last Name:

Email address:

In addition to a monthly email you can also subscribe to the following weekly series:


One Minute Meditations



Tiny Drops (Photography series)



Compass Songs (My Favorite Poems)



Dialectic Two-Step



Modern Koans (interesting questions)



Sunday Morning Coming Down (Music Videos)



Relics (Timeless Republished Articles)



Say What?



Quotes



Verse Us (Poems I Write)

 

The post Compass Songs – Sally’s Hair appeared on Andrew Furst.

What Does Buddhism Say About Harmony? – Dialectic Two-Step

Dialectic Two-Step  is an ongoing series of my thoughts on questions that come my way.

Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two. - Octavio

What Does Buddhism Say About Harmony?

Response:  In the Mahayana tradition, harmony shows up in the Bodhisattva ideal. A Bodhisattva has two virtues – wisdom and compassion. One virtue often follows in the footsteps of the other. Compassion can instill wisdom and vice versa. They are the natural consequence of harmony with nature.

Each of us is acutely aware of the difficulties of daily life. We make mistakes. We come into conflict with others. We find ourselves immersed in uncertainty and fear. Even the most successful of us are plagued with doubts. This insecurity can bring out some pretty ugly behavior.

We can be petty and selfish. We get cynical and paranoid. Our hearts harden to the plight of others. We build a wall of protection that shields us from the world. We develop an us versus them attitude. The Buddha described this as the source of suffering.

But what if we recognize that the seed of our discontent is something shared by all of us? What if we consider what we see as deplorable in others as being rooted in the same fears and insecurities that we have? Compassion can arise. When we see that others suffer like us, cracks start to form in the walls. This is compassion. From this arises the desire to end suffering for others. This is personified in the impossible ideal of the Bodhisattva; save everyone.

This is a noble but daunting sentiment. On the face of it, it’s crazy. How can we help everyone? How can we help even one person, when we can’t even get our own house in order?

I like to view my suffering as the consequence of the fact that I can’t seem to get out of my own way. I bring it on myself by wishing things were different than they are. Viewed from another angle, it’s the delusion that my preferences should somehow dictate my experience. It’s a disconnect between my head and reality.

When you look at it that way, the answer seems obvious. If I could reconnect with reality, then I could reduce my suffering. How is that done? By letting the world in. Or put another way, by establishing harmony between me and reality.

A Bodhisattva’s wisdom comes from harmony. They effortlessly act by being in the world, free from biases. In doing so, they liberate themselves from suffering and act as a beacon to others seeking the same.

Get Each Week's Dialectic Two Step in your email box

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In addition to a monthly email you can also subscribe to the following weekly series:


One Minute Meditations



Tiny Drops (Photography series)



Compass Songs (My Favorite Poems)



Dialectic Two-Step



Modern Koans (interesting questions)



Sunday Morning Coming Down (Music Videos)



Relics (Timeless Republished Articles)



Say What?



Quotes



Verse Us (Poems I Write)

The post What Does Buddhism Say About Harmony? – Dialectic Two-Step appeared on Andrew Furst.

One Minute Meditation – Spring Trickles Out

 One  Minute Meditations is an ongoing series of short videos, poems, and commentary intended as a meditation.  Offered as an opportunity to step back from your cyber routine and settle into a more natural rhythm, if only for a minute.

Spring Trickles Out

Here in August, so far from the depths of the winter, I felt like looking back at the earliest signs of spring.  Here in a foot of snow in Royalston, Massachusetts,  the melting began.  Uncovering the green moss even in the face of a few lingering flurries.

Gurgling Life

How many new springs

are as welcomed as this one

the chlorophyll stirs

These videos are produced for those of us who spend an inordinately large amount of time in the cyber-world.  They are not a substitute for unplugging from your devices and taking a stroll near trees, water, or a patch of unkempt grass.  Getting out into the world - touching, smelling, hearing, and seeing nature is the best way to reconnect with our prime purpose.  

What is our prime purpose? We are feeling and sensing machines.  We are the universe looking back on itself. We are witness to the wonders and dangers of living in this corner of the cosmos.  We are the seekers looking for connection a little further beyond yesterday's borders and boundaries.

But sitting and staring at the screen robs us of the sustenance that we rely upon for wonder and sanity.  These videos are an opportunity to bring the sensations of nature to you, while you're in the cyber-world. Its an opportunity to relax your gaze, resettle your posture,  and regain some depth in your breath.  Listen and watch the video and allow your self to open up and recharge.

Most of these are best viewed in full screen

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First Name:

Last Name:

Email address:

In addition to a monthly email you can also subscribe to the following weekly series:


One Minute Meditations



Tiny Drops (Photography series)



Compass Songs (My Favorite Poems)



Dialectic Two-Step



Modern Koans (interesting questions)



Sunday Morning Coming Down (Music Videos)



Relics (Timeless Republished Articles)



Say What?



Quotes



Verse Us (Poems I Write)

The post One Minute Meditation – Spring Trickles Out appeared on Andrew Furst.

Sunday Morning Coming Down – Half Acre

Sunday Morning Coming Down is an ongoing music  video series.  The songs fit my definition of music for a lazy couch bound Sunday morning.

Half Acre – Hem

Hem was one of those quiet folk bands that I listened to back when I was a database developer and worked in a cave with headphones.  Those were great days, when the internet opened up the music world for people like me who couldn’t abide with what Billboard Magazine said was good music. Halfacre and Sailor were favorites.

 Get Each Week's Sunday Morning Coming Down in your email box

First Name:

Last Name:

Email address:

In addition to a monthly email you can also subscribe to the following weekly series:


One Minute Meditations



Tiny Drops (Photography series)



Compass Songs (My Favorite Poems)



Dialectic Two-Step



Modern Koans (interesting questions)



Sunday Morning Coming Down (Music Videos)



Relics (Timeless Republished Articles)



Say What?



Quotes



Verse Us (Poems I Write)

 
Half Acre – Hem

by Daniel R. Messe

I am holding half an acre

Torn from the map of Michigan

And folded in this scrap of paper

Is a land I grew in

Think of every town you’ve lived in

Every room, you lay your head

And what is it that you remember?

Do you carry every sadness with you

Every hour your heart was broken

Every night the fear and darkness

Lay down with you

A man is walking on the highway

A woman stares out at the sea

And light is only now just breaking

So we carry every sadness with us

Every hour our heart were broken

Every night the fear and darkness

Lay down with us

But I am holding half an acre

Torn from the map of Michigan

I am carrying this scrap of paper

That can crack the darkest sky wide open

Every burden taken from me

Every night my heart unfolding

My home

The post Sunday Morning Coming Down – Half Acre appeared on Andrew Furst.