Cafe Musings 301

Its been a few months since the time I willingly gave into silence. Silence of words and silence of mind. A peaceful sensation that breeds thoughts. Thoughts that are simple and beautiful. Beautiful because they are my own and simple because they are without pretentions and without any need to impress.

My Buddhist friend (The Thinker) must have liked the ice-tea at my favorite noisy little cafe because when I met him again after all these months and asked him to join me for a cup of tea he promptly suggested the same cafe.

So here we are, he with his ice-tea and I, stirring my my coffee and searching in my mind for something smart to say, to start off our reunion with that 'A-ah' sentence.

He just saw right through it and with a smile he said;

"simplify"

"what??!!"

"be simple, if its not simple its probably not very good"

I just couldn't help laughing. He had got me again. But try as I might I just couldn't think of something simple to say. So I just stared at my coffee and admired the way it looked.

One of the nice things about keeping things simple is that everything flows so naturally. Once I had given up looking for that 'A-ah' thing to say, words and thoughts just kept coming up and before anyone knew it we were back to talking, just talking. Nothing in particular. I, sipping my coffee, and he letting his ice-tea go flat.

He spoke of a Lama he had spent his last winter with. He said lamas like to live on their own because its easy to be simple when you are on your own. He said this lama had a very unique way to attain spirituality. His measure of spirituality was a clear conscience and for him spirituality manifested in being able to sleep peacefully night after night knowing that there was nothing he did during that day that if done in some other way would have made things better than they already are. For him the pursuit of spirituality lay in being able to extend the scope of his involvement in ever increasing circles around him.

First he limited himself to making his own life better. Then he included his immediate surroundings, his room, his immediate community. Then the circle kept growing wider and wider. Every night he asked himself the same question, "Can I do something that would make things better?" The night he answered this question in the negative, that next morning he would push his circle a bit wider to include more things. When I mean things I just don't mean people, I mean everything. The animals, the trees, the stones, the water, the air, everything. He said that's why he wrote prayers on flags and let them flutter in the wind. That way the wind would carry the prayers away and the prayers would swirl around touching things and making them better. Things that were too far away for his hands to touch but things that were nonetheless on his mind, on his conscience and that deep down something told him that he had to help in making them better.