Quick note to announce that Visudha de los Santos can now be reached at dancingvisudha@yahoo.com. (Her comcast account is no longer in service.)
And, while I'm here, a brief tale. A friend found a fragile creature of the air grounded and lifeless in a rest area on the road home from Breitenbush. She gave it to me for safekeeping. Here's what I wrote upon getting home last week ... a sweet satori that somehow has meaning to me:
"Your dragonfly flew home with me intact. I put him/her on my desk next to the yellow smiley faced rubber ball that sits happy in an indigo-blue candleholder ... there beside the river-washed stone inscribed with the reminder "everything is a mirror" & the various rocks I've gathered on beaches near and far & a small, framed picture of my beloved cloud cat Chloe, RIP, a pure being of light.
Now perhaps it had something to do with the change of climate here by the ocean ... but this morning i discovered that dear dragonfly had lost his/her head. Literally. It lay there in front of the winged torso, a concave shell, sad and hollow and empty of whatever it is that dragonflies think on their short, sweet path to whatever come next.
And here lies the lesson I will carry forward on my own path. To lose one's head is to begin listening with the ears of the heart ... to fly free here and now without the heavy anchor of patterned wounds, tricks of memory, the shoulds/coulds/maybes."
Recommended reading for rhythmatists: Douglas Harding's On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious (Penguin Arkana, 1961)
