Two curiously similar books were recommended by readers of THE SEED CATALOG, good friends Penny Rosel & Chrystalle DeLuca. Excerpts from each follow with my enthusiastic suggestion that both are well worth acquiring!

--Bill Joyner

START WHERE YOU ARE by Pema Chodron

I HAD AN INTERVIEW with someone who said she couldn't meditate; it was impossible because she had real-life problems. In the meditation we're doing, we're trying to bring home the very supportive message that real-life problems are the material for waking up, not the reason to stop trying. This is news you can use. Today's slogan is "Whatever you meet unexpectedly, join with meditation."

This is a very interesting suggestion. These slogans are pointing out that we can awaken bodhichitta through everything, that nothing is an interruption. This slogan points out how interruptions themselves awaken us, how interruptions themselves - surprises, unexpected events, bolts out of the blue - can awaken us to the experience of both absolute and relative bodhichitta, to the open, spacious quality of our minds and the warmth of our hearts. This is the slogan about surprises as gifts. These surprises can be pleasant or unpleasant; the main point is that they can stop our minds. You're walking along and a snowball hits you on the side of the head. It stops your mind. The slogan "Rest in the nature of alaya, the essences" goes along with this. Usually it is considered a slogan for when you're sitting on the cushion meditating, you can then rest your mind in its natural, unbiased state. But the truths is that when the rug is pulled out the same thing happens; without any effort on our part, our mind finds itself resting in the nature of alaya.

STAYING PUT by Scott R. Sanders

The Taoist book of wisdom, the Secret of the Golden Flower, speaks about a condition of utter clarity and selflessness as "living midnight". I don't know a word of the original Chinese, and I might well misread the translation, but I am haunted by this phrase. Living midnight: to face oblivion, to drown in the annihilating water, to dwell without fear or fret at the still center. Hardest of all is to live through midnight, to accept the knowledge of one's own private extinction and still return to daylight charged with passion and purpose. Earth is sexy, just as sex is earthy. Each of us is a landscape of plains and peaks, valleys and thickets. I speak in metaphors. As through a garbled phone line, but what I mean is plain and simple: body and land are one flesh. They are made of the same stuff. Their beauty is one beauty, their wounds the same wounds. They call to us in the same perennial voice, crying, come see, come touch, come listen and smell, and O come taste. We explore them alike, honor or abuse them alike. The health or sickness of one is inseparable from that of the other. There is no division between where we live and what we are.

BEACON PRESS, BOSTON