Dr. Randy Pausch, a 35 year old professor from Carnegie Mellon University, gave his last lecture to his students on September 18, 2007. He had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and after all the treatments, his doctors told him he had only a few months to live. In this lecture, he stated that he could not control the cards he was dealt but could control the way he played them. He chose to live with curiosity and joy and managed to live all of his childhood dreams. You could be, he said, either a Tigger or an Eeyore, and he had decided to be a Tigger, alight with fire and enthusiasm, and to spend the rest of his days building memories for his three children.
Dr. Barbara Dalberg
There was a spiritual teacher in the 70’s that I felt had some wisdom. I went to hear him speak, and afterward he allowed people to ask questions. A guy down front stood and, at length, talked about the fact that an opportunity had come into his life, but he was having trouble “getting it together” to do something about it. Finally, he said that he had decided it didn’t matter. If he blew the opportunity, the universe would find a way to give him another one because that’s how the universe worked. The teacher looked at him silently, lengthily, then said, “No, man. It doesn’t work that way. If you blow this opportunity, this gift, then it’s blown. Forever.”
Donna Piper Leichtling
Krishna would counsel, “Regard alike pleasure and pain, gain and loss, success and defeat—prepare yourself for battle.” Our joy is not in results. Our validation is not in evaluations. Our call is to fulfill our dharma and prepare ourselves for battle. This is our joy—if wonder is the seedbed and dharma the root, joy is the fruit.
Benjamin Martin
The I Ching reveals that great ideas are not merely bright lightbulbs that go off in our heads occasionally, providing us with new efficiencies, streamlined methods, and quality assurances. Rather, created under yang, the eternal masculine principle, great ideas are regenerative; they shock us out of puny thinking and feeling, they point to the greatness around us in nature and the universe, as well as the potential greatness slumbering within each. Great ideas under yang confront us with our own profound ignorance and egoism and reveal that we are here to create new beauty, new life. These visions under yang are not the same as sweet dreams; they are wrought with danger, for as the Taoists tell us—heaven creates its ideas under the dragons, the unremitting energy, the seasons of sword and arrow, the fires of yang. Yet, without the baptism of fire, great ideas are like dry winds and consume with no boon. The I Ching says: “The secret of tao in this world of the mutable—the realm of yang—is to keep the changes in motion in such a manner that an unbroken coherence is maintained. He who succeeds in endowing his work with this regenerative power creates something organic, and the thing so created is enduring.”
Teri Martin
On This Day…
Independence Day for the United States
St. Elizabeth of Portugal: born in 1271 in Spain, became queen of Portugal and, when widowed, a Franciscan tertiary who cared for the poor and was official negotiator to prevent war between Castile and Portugal
O Holy Spirit,
From who we are at the root
to what we do at the heart,
generate in us what is generative
and all shall be well,
and all shall be well,
and all manner of things shall be well.
In Your Image. Amen.
Benjamin H Martin
