Is the Grass Greener on the Other Side?

     “ ‘Someday,’ she said, sighing, poised with a cup of tea in one hand and cigarette in the other, parakeet fluttering in the air behind her head, ‘I may move somewhere far away from here.’ But something in her face in that sallow light made me think that it was almost certain she wouldn’t.”
       Michael Paterniti “The Telling Room. A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World’s Greatest Piece of Cheese.” The Dial Press, NY, 2013

     My daughter-in-law recounted a Tibetan teaching about having a wise relationship with moments of what we perceive as happiness. Consider a precious dove landing, briefly, on your open hand. And the moment when the dove starts flying away ... truly loving it, letting it go - complete freedom ...

     Preciousness & brevity; 
     Vitality & openness; 
     Freedom & spacious generous openness of the heart-mind.

     The periphery appears to remain disturbed. Keep returning to the center, which appears to remain still, silent, open, undisturbed, at peace. Yet life is residing in both at once - in the totality. As they say in Tai Chi, we join heaven and earth.

     Parts are relatively easy to "get", 
     the totality more challenging, 
     and yet ...
 

Citadel Hill, Halifax, NS

What is Time? Place?

     "In the morning I walked down the Boulevard to the Rue Soufflot for coffee and brioche. It was a fine morning. The horse-chesnut trees in the Luxembourg gardens were in bloom. There was the pleasant early-morning feeling of a hot day. I read the papers with the coffee and then smoked a cigarette."

     It's miraculously disorienting to peer through Hemingway's mind's eye, far removed in time & place, via our son's book, stamped on the inside first page with: "Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia Beach Whitman Foundation, Kilometer Zero Paris."

     
 

Hemingway at the Henry House, Halifax