DISAPPOINTMENT

2 Tough and Crazy people get together and consider life. They contemplate Holidays which go wrong and the streets of Byron Bay. They consider the rain which don’t stop and the cabins in Byron Bay Tourist Village. Some days are groin kicks and the rose lassi spills on your shirt. The Bangalow Hotel is booked out and the FUN tourist park is encaged with large metal spikes. Some days the pool and tennis court at home are better than the ones you’re paying big money for. Sometimes you miss every meeting you want to get to and things seem to SUCK. The tough and crazy people put a lot of thought into that. How do you make sense of some things ?

Aim Low, Reach Your Goals, Avoid Disappointment.

The gardener who imagines that his work can be reduced to a set of rules and formulae, followed
and applied according to special days marked on the calendar, is but preparing himself for a double
disappointment. Few things are so certain to be uncertain as the seasons and the weather; and these,
rather than a set of dates, even for a single locality, form the signs which the real gardener follows.
That is the great trouble with much book and magazine gardening.

- Frederick Frye Rockwell, Around the Year in the Garden, 1917

We must all suffer one of two things: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret or disappointment. Jim Rohn

Never doubt in the dark what you have learnt in the light.

The price of excellence is discipline. The cost of mediocrity is disappointment. – William W. Ward

    Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr

 If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.

DREAMING IN FEBRUARY

2 Tough and Crazy people get together and consider life. They contemplate DREAMS they have in February. Of Patrick McNally and of Canada. Of Kalang and Armidale. Of Bilambil and Blues. They dream of EARTHSHIPS and walls lined with books and ladders on wheels. They dream of children and grandchildren, of vegie gardens and Melinda. Dreaming is a fine thing. They dream of coloured cloth and of Hannah who was sentenced to death for stealing a roll of cloth. Up yours – says her grandaughter. I shall wear all the cloth I wish. Bright coloured cloth wrapped round me like wedding gowns. They dream of Johannah and Julia, of Judith and Emily. They drean of music and words.

THEY DREAM in a room with no curtains and the moon full shining above valley mists.

If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.

Marcel Proust

I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man. ~Chuang Tzu

All conditioned creeds
are like dreams, illusions, bubbles, shadows,
like dew drops and a lightning flash:
contemplate them thus.”

Diamond Sutra
A paraphrase and modification by Mike Garofalo

In green old gardens, hidden away
From sight of revel and sound of strife,
Here I have leisure to breathe and move,
And to do my work in a nobler way;
To sing my songs, and to say my say;
To Dream my dreams, and to love my love;
To hold my faith, and to live my life.
Making the most of its shadowy day.
- Violet Fane, 1843 – 1905, In Green Old Gardens

 

 

The young May moon is beaming, love.
The glow-worm’s lamp is gleaming, love.
How sweet to rove,
Through Morna’s grove,
When the drowsy world is dreaming, love!
Then awake! — the heavens look bright, my dear,
‘Tis never too late for delight, my dear,
And the best of all ways

To lengthen our days
Is to steal a few hours from the night, my dear!
- Thomas Moore, The Young May Moon

 

 

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
– Mark Twain

The greatest achievement was at first and for a time a dream. The oak sleeps in the acorn, the bird waits in the egg, and in the highest vision of the soul a waking angel stirs. Dreams are the seedlings of realities.
– James Allen

SILENCE

2 Tough and Crazy people get together and consider life. They contemplate SILENCE and SOLITUDE. Whether it be in the lush garden of a sub tropical city or on the Hill in a white cottage. Alone or deeply private within the coupling. It is the season of the perfect white fleshed peach and the deep plum. Silently. Macadamia nuts lie early on the ground and mangoes are behind glass in chutney. When the key is turned in the StarWagon – there is not one sound.

“Nothing resembles the language of God so much as does silence.”

Meister Eckhard wrote those words. What do they mean? Among other things, they speak of a deep mystery.

It is better wither to be silent, or to say things of more value than silence. Sooner throw a pearl at hazard than an idle or useless word; and do not say a little in many words, but a great deal in a few.
Pythagoras

When we have the courage to speak out – to break our silence – we inspire the rest of the “moderates” in our communities to speak up and voice their views.
Sharon Schuster

I saw old autumn in the misty morn
Stand shadowless like silence, listening
To silence.
- Thomas Hood

We all sat in silence. This guy walks onto the stage and up to the microphone.
He adjusts his glasses. This is him, D. T. Suzuki, we’ve seen pictures of him before,
but he looks smaller. He reaches out and taps the mike. A hollow ping sounds
though the hall. He says: “Zen Buddhism, Very hard to understand. Thank you.”
Then he walked off the stage.
- A story told by Jonathan Greenlee about a a visit by D. T. Suzuki to UCLA.

In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood.

“If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.” –John Cage.

 

FROM ZEN FROG

How long had Ryoanji been there? You must have asked –
but there is no remembrance, just the rocks
and the gravel and the wall
and the very great silence,
the rootedness of deep meditation,
the weight of the rocks and the trees of this earth,
as if their roots grew right down through your heart…

- Ryoanji Zen Garden. By Jan Haag.

 

http://www.ronrolheiser.com/columnarchive/archive_display.php?rec_id=70

 

 

KOOKABURRAS

2 Tough and Crazy people get together and consider life. They contemplate THE GOOBURAS in the front nut tree and down near The Dell in Bilambil. They wait for the laughing.

That is the saving grace of humor, if you fail no one is laughing at you.
A. Whitney Brown

General Description:

The kookaburra is a large, Australian species of kingfisher. It is a carnivorous bird and has developed some fame as being a snake and lizard killer. Kookaburras are famous for their cackling call which sounds unmistakably like raucous laughter. Kookaburras are intelligent and quite social, and can become quite tame at picnic spots, accepting handouts from people. Kookaburras mate for life, and both care for the young. Offspring are known to remain and help care for new families. A kookaburra’s beak can reach 10cm in length. They are predated upon by foxes, cats and raptors.

RAINING STILL

2 Tough and Crazy people get together and consider life. They contemplate the ongoing Summer Rain in Brisbane and the Star Wagon which can only start with a hammer and stick like the old days of cranking the engine up. Lizzy will be taking buses along Coronation Drive to kick the engine over when Izzy hits it with the hammer with the orange handle. That means the red umbrella and the almost certainty of getting wet as the rain just continues to DRIZZLE. Don’t matter . Its SUMMER RAIN.

_____________

Mountain fruit drop in the rain
and grass insects sing under my oil lamp.
White hair, after all, can never change
as yellow gold cannot be created.
If you want to know how to get rid
of age, its sickness, study nonbeing.

– Wang Wei, 699-761
Laughing Lost in the Mountains: Poems of Wang We

 

 

I think of the garden after the rain;
And hope to my heart comes singing,
At morn the cherry-blooms will be white,
And the Easter bells be ringing! ~Edna Dean Proctor, “Easter Bells”

 

Like a welcome summer rain, humor may suddenly cleanse and cool the earth, the air and you.

 

 

I rebuke the wind and revile the rain,
I do not know the Buddhas and patriarchs;
My single activity turns in the twinkling of an eye,
Swifter even than a lightning flash.

- Nampo, 1306
Zen Buddhism: A History, Japan, Heinrich Dumoulin, p. 40

No more prizes for predicting rain. Prizes only for building arks.
Anonymous

You have to have lots of rain before you can have your rainbow!

The itsy bitsy spider (or The eensy weensy spider)
climbed up the water spout.
Down came the rain
and washed the spider out.
Out came the sun
and dried up all the rain.
And the itsy bitsy spider (or eensy weensy spider)
climbed up the spout again.

TREES – THE SHELTER OF THE INTERTWINED

Break open a cherry tree and there are no flowers, but the spring breeze brings forth myriad blossoms. ~Ikkyu Sojun

Beneath these fruit-tree boughs that shed
Their snow-white blossoms on my head,

With brightest sunshine round me spread

Of spring’s unclouded weather,
In this sequestered nook how sweet
To sit upon my orchard-seat!
And birds and flowers once more to greet,
My last year’s friends together.

- William Wordsworth

SACRED TREES

In the early historical period, however, there is considerable evidence that trees held a special significance in the cultures of the ancient world. In Ancient Egypt, several types of trees appear in Egyptian mythology and art, although the hieroglyph written to signify tree appears to represent the sycamore (nehet) in particular. The sycamore carried special mythical significance. According to the Book of Dead, twin sycamores stood at the eastern gate of heaven from which the sun god Re emerged each morning. The sycamore was also regarded as a manifestation of the goddesses Nut, Isis, and especially of Hathor, who was given the epithet Lady of the Sycamore. Sycamores were often planted near tombs, and burial in coffins made of sycamore wood returned the dead person to the womb of the mother tree goddess.

"The night is darkening round me,
The wild winds coldly blow;
But a tyrant spell has bound me
And I cannot, cannot go.

The giant trees are bending
Their bare boughs weighed with snow.
And the storm is fast descending,
And yet I cannot go.

Clouds beyond clouds above me,
Wastes beyond wastes below;
But nothing dear can move me;
I will not, cannot go."
-   Emily Bronte, Spellbound      

Climbing a propped-up ladder, I’m daunted
by the tree’s springing and spreading. Its top-
most, tapering poles are bare; but the sap
still flows along its horizontal limbs
to feed the scale-like leaves, some red, some green.
- Geoffrey Haresnape, Mulberry in Autumn

 

 

The trees that are slow to grow bear the best fruit.
Moliere

Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.
Faith Baldwin

TROPICAL GARDENS

LIZZY IS IN BRISBANE THIS WEEK IN BERYL MORTIMERS LUSH GARDEN. GOOBURRAS IN THE TREES AND PARROTS . VINES TWISTING ROUND THE RAILS OF THE STEPS AND A METAL GARDEN SETTING UNDER THE NUT TREE. WEEKEND SHE WAS DOWN IN BILAMBIL WITH THE GRASS NEAR AS HIGH AS HER MIDDLE AND TREES REACHING ACROSS THE BACKROADS TO TOUCH OVER TELEPHONE WIRES. ASHA HAS HAD ANOTHER SNAKE IN HER GARDEN TODAY. THATS 2 IN 2 DAYS THE TROPICS ARE ON US AND THEY ARE LUSH !

______________________________________________________

In the garden the door is always open into the “holy” – growth, birth, death.
Every flower holds the whole mystery in its short cycle, and in the garden
we are never far away from death, the fertilizing, good, creative death.
- May Sarton

Should I pluck it,
My hands
Would defile the flower;
I offer it, as it stands,
To the Buddhas of the Three Worlds.
- Empress Komyo, Japan

 

 

An ant guarding a mango

Used for a boy who is careful not to let other boys near his girlfriend

4000 BCE

“As in the case of the cereals, the legumes are amongst the oldest crops cultivated by the human race. Between the cereals and legumes there is a parallel domestication: wheat, barley, pea, lentil, broad bean, and chick pea in West Asia and Europe; maize and common bean in Central America; ground nut in South America; pearl millet, sorghum, cowpea, and bambara groundnut in Africa; rice and soya bean in China.” – – The New Oxford Book of Food Plants, xviii, 1997, by J. G . Vaughan and C. A. Geissler.

 

The Peace of the Mango Tree

My love you, my grandchildren. Come over and sit by the mango tree. I have a question I want to ask it.

“O beautiful mango tree who gives us such refreshing shade, do you have peace? If you do, could you teach us how to have peace? You seem so cool and tranquil. What makes you this way? Can you tell us?”

Children, come closer and listen carefully to the mango tree’s answer.

“I am a member of the tree family, and you are human beings. I do not know if you can understand our peace. Even though God has given you judgment, subtle wisdom, analytic wisdom, and divine luminous wisdom, you also have qualities that cause you to take our fruits, cut us down, and destroy us.

“If you want to attain peace, do not cut down a tree, whether it is useful to you or not. And don’t cut down a man, whether he does good deeds or bad. If, because of your pride or selfishness, you think about taking revenge or deceiving and ruining another person, or of making another man suffer in any way, that will destroy your peace. It is your own state of mind that will destroy your peace. But if you can avoid bad thoughts, then you can be happy and peaceful. This is my advice to you.

Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees,
then names the streets after them.
- Bill Vaughan

Hui Tzu said to Chuang Tzu: “I have a big stinktree in my garden. The trunk is so bent and knotty that nobody can get a good straight plank out of it. The branches are so crooked you can’t cut them up in any way that makes sense. There it stands beside the road and no carpenter will even look at it. Such is your teaching, Chuang – big and useless.”
Chuang Tzu replied: “Have you ever watched the wildcat crouching, watching its prey? This way it leaps, and that way,
high and low, and at last – it lands in the trap. Have you ever seen the yak? It is great as a thundercloud, standing in his might.
Big? Sure. But, he can’t catch mice! So for your big tree. No use? Then plant it in the wasteland – in emptiness. Walk idly around it and rest under it’s shadow. No axe or saw prepares its end. No one will ever cut it down. Useless? You should worry!.
- Chuang Tzu, The Useless Tree, circa 200 B.C..

 

 

 

 

 

 

SUMMER RAIN

Been raining all summer. Now Lizzy is back in Brisbane and its raining still.Kind of not even rain. Its just 100% humidity and the water is dropping . Dripping.

Costa Rica

“Imagine studying in a tropical rain forest, at a beach in an absolute reserve, and in a cloud forest! The learning curve was tremendous, and so much was accomplished in 4 weeks. The educational opportunities were excellent and challenging! Faculty were extremely knowledgeable in a wide range of disciplines.” – Costa Rica Ecology Program – Maymester (San Luis de Monteverde, Costa Rica)

Quotes About HAARP

“Hurricanes and tropical storms have ravaged the Caribbean. Central Asia and the Middle East are afflicted by drought. West Africa is facing the biggest swarm of locusts in more than a decade. Four destructive hurricanes and a tropical rain storm Alex, Ivan, Frances, Charley and Jeanne have occurred in a sequence, within a short period of time. Unprecedented in hurricane history in the Caribbean, the island of Grenada was completely devastated: 37 people died and roughly two-thirds of the island’s 100,000 inhabitants have been left homeless; in Haiti, more than two thousand people have died and tens of thousands are homeless. The Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Cuba, the Bahamas and Florida have also been devastated. In the US, the damage in several Southern states including Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and the Carolinas is the highest in US history.”

- The Ultimate Weapon of Mass Destruction: Owning the Weather for Military Use

I think fish is nice, but then I think that rain is wet, so who am I to judge?

Douglas Adams

Tears fall in my
heart like the rain
on the town.”

Paul Verlaine

I am sure it is a great mistake always to know enough to go in when it rains. One may keep snug and dry by such knowledge, but one misses a world of loveliness. ~Adeline Knapp

Everywhere water is a thing of beauty gleaming in the dewdrop,
singing in the summer rain.
- John Ballantine Gough

Tears of joy are like the summer rain drops pierced by sunbeams.

–Hosea Ballou

 

DAUGHTERS

LIZZY FOREAL ON BLOGNOW

My Daughter

My wonderful daughter, delight of my heart,
I hope that you know you’re both lovely and smart.
I cherish you dearly for the person you are,
You have passion and caring that will carry you far.

Wherever you go you’ll be watched by my love,
And we’ll always be close like a hand in a glove.
May the years treat you kindly, may laughter hold sway,
And I’m here for you always if your blue skies turn gray.

By Karl Fuchs

This to me was the most powerful part of the khutbah. Using examples from the Prophet’s life, the Shaikh related that by according undue power to the perceptions of people, we are distancing ourselves from the power we accord to God. Does it matter what others will say about how one’s daughter dresses? Isn’t it more important that God sees how we treat that daughter – with the tender and obvious love the Prophet (peace be upon him) showed his daughters instead of the violence of a twisted sense of honor? This was the focus of his khutbah.

Suddenly, through birthing a daughter, a woman finds herself face to face not only with an infant, a little girl, a woman-to-be, but also with her own unresolved conflicts from the past and her hopes and dreams for the future…. As though experiencing an earthquake, mothers of daughters may find their lives shifted, their deep feelings unearthed, the balance struck in all relationships once again off kilter. ~Elizabeth Debold and Idelisse Malave

“A son is a son till he takes him a wife, a daughter is a daughter all of her life.” ~Irish Saying

Certain is it that there is no kind of affection so purely angelic as of a father to a daughter. In love to our wives there is desire; to our sons, ambition; but to our daughters there is something which there are no words to express.”

Joseph Addison

Daughters can sometimes be too serious,
teach them to laugh and not take life too seriously.”
Catherine Pulsifer

A daughter is a mother’s gender partner, her closest ally in the family confederacy, an extension of her self.
And mothers are their daughters’ role model, their biological and emotional road map, the arbiter of all their relationships.”
Victoria Secunda

LIZZY FOREAL COMES TO WORDPRESS

IN a natural nervousness about BlogNow especially with the addition of ads and being one of one or two online users at a time Lizzy is trying wordpress for a time. Depends a little on the ease of inserting the animated gifs but here we go anyways.