One of my favourite personages in Buddhist practice is Kuan Yin.  I love the idea of a drop of nectar that has the power to take away profound suffering.

Your pity is a shield from lightening,
Your compassion forms a wondrous cloud
Which, raining down the Dharma-nectar,
Extinguishes the flames of woe.

Lotus Sutra, translated by John Blofeld in Bodhisattva of Compassion: The mystical tradition of Kuan Yin

Some of you reading the post, “something about a goose” have been incredibly sweet in offering sips of nectar on the blog and back channel.  I’m so touched by your advice and sharing of your own process with anger and hurt.  What always impresses me is the way in which we find each other and touch this common humanity.  The first step with anger is to feel the underlying pain, the hurt, sadness, loss, and even death – be it of persons, objects or concepts.  And then the healing begins with the recognition that nothing is truly lost and, even if something disappears, relinquishes its current form, its true essence is never gone.

Martin Palmer and Jay Ramsay (with Man-Ho Kwok) wrote a fascinating book: Kuan Yin: Myths and prophecies of the Chinese Goddess of Compassion.  I read it a long time ago, so long that I’d forgotten they included a section on The 100 Quatrains of Kuan Yin.  Like the I Ching, the verses are used to guide us through whatever “flames of woe” we may be experiencing.  Quatrain 83 reminds me that there are things visible and things invisible in every moment.  More than that, the growth of light is inexorable.  We have to do nothing more than simply sit – and wait.

You can’t see the moon in its early new days
But isn’t it radiant, gold and round nevertheless?
Wait until mid-month for the Lighting of the Night –
And then its brightness fills the whole circle of the sky.

Taoism’s Wu Wei and I Ching’s Double Mountain point to the same truth.  There is deep and quiet power in stillness.  And, in the dissolution of the constructed self, the loss of ground is not the same as the loss of groundedness.

Thank you for your compassion and your faith in my capacity to restore myself to well-being.