Lately: Milkweed, Kabir, and “Meditation Is Decadent and Wasteful”
The time of year when milkweed can’t contain itself any longer and decides it needs to fly. May all beings be free!
Songs of Kabir translated by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
Reading Kabir reminds why I’ll never be able to only take refuge in Buddhist sangha and Buddhist teachers. What a missed opportunity!
When Kabir passed away, it’s said that his Hindu followers and his Muslim followers argued about whether to cremate or bury him.
When they went to his body and took off his burial shroud, they found a pile flowers instead of a corpse. The Hindus cremated half the flowers, the Muslims buried the other half.
What a waste of time it is to be sectarian and dogmatic when the ineffable desires us to behold it.
I place Kabir on the crown on my head today—the seat of the teacher.
“Listen carefully,
Neither the Vedas
Nor the Qur’an
Will teach you this:
Put the bit its mouth,
The saddle on its back,
Your foot in the stirrup,
And ride your wild runaway mind
All the way to heaven.”
— Kabir, translated by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
Image detail of Samantabhadra Buddha, Tibet. Date and artist unknown. Rubin Museum of Art.
Sorry you guys, but I went to a 12-day meditation retreat and it didn’t help me solve the polycrisis, or even help me start a new novel manuscript 😱 I wrote about the expectations of my inner purist-leftist-scold and my inner obsessive-artist, and how they’re actually right: like art, meditation is decadent and wasteful. It’s is why they both feel so essential—they take me to the root of being alive, which has no value other than itself.
A view from the Yangti Yoga Retreat Center, where I gloriously wasted my life away for a nice long stretch in September.