What's Inside Your Wonderful House?
Plus people getting busy living
“The birth of a human is the birth of their sorrow.
The longer one lives, the more stupid one becomes,
because their anxiety to avoid unavoidable death
becomes more and more acute.
What bitterness that a person would live for what is always out of reach!
A person’s thirst for survival in the future makes them
incapable of living in the present.”—Chuang Tzu, 4th century Chinese philospher
One day Dudjom Rinpoche, a Tibetan Buddhist meditation master, was driving through the French countryside with his wife, admiring its beauty. They followed the winding roads, passed through villages, and eventually came upon a cemetery. Its stones and buildings were freshly painted and decorated with colorful flowers.
“Rinpoche, look how everything in the West is so neat and clean,” his wife observed. “Even the places where they keep corpses are spotless. In the East not even the houses that people live in are anything like as clean as this!"
"Ah, yes," Rinpoche replied. "That's true—this is such a civilized country. They have such marvelous houses for dead corpses.”
He paused for a moment.
“But haven't you noticed?” he continued.
“They have such wonderful houses for the living corpses too."
Adapted from The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche
In what ways are you lifelessly running on autopilot right now?
How are your anxieties about the future keeping you from living here and now?
What external things are keeping you from connecting to the source within?
“I guess it comes down to a simple choice, really.
Get busy living or get busy dying.”
―Ellis “Red” Redding, The Shawshank Redemption
Some folks gettin’ busy living:
How a small group of nuns in rural Kansas vex big companies with their investment activism
Nestled amid rolling farmland, the Benedictine sisters of Mount St. Scholastica have taken on the likes of Google, Target and Citigroup — calling on major companies to do everything from AI oversight to measuring pesticides to respecting the rights of Indigenous people.
Armed With Saran Wrap, She Sinks in the Muck to Save the Planet
A dogged paleoecologist named Dorothy Peteet is digging through the salt marshes of New York in the hope of preserving the city’s best natural defense against climate change.
‘Magic in Her Hands.’ The Woman Bringing India’s Forests Back to Life (a non-NYT option)
Tulsi Gowind Gowda has spent most of her more than 80 years planting and nurturing trees in southern India. “I like them more than anything else in my life,” she said.
Check out my new book The Way Home:
“Katt invites us on a journey through personal pain to the suffering of the entire human family. Through his compelling, poignant and humorous storytelling we are invited again and again to surrender our own resistance to reaching the end of our ropes and to being surprised by grace.”
―Killian Noe, founding director of Recovery Café
