[Encouraging us in making it a habit of reaching out and helping others in less fortunate circumstances than ourselves. This is really what matters. When we die, how many of these seeds of arising kindness in the mind, (antidote to our self-grasping (source of suffering), we plant as we go, that bring forth both this our current, and future good conditions for the mind. All phenomena outer and inner are experienced by the mind].
❤️
(🌾 A Dharma poem)
In a world where the dawn wore a veil of grey,
Walked the Burdened Ones, bent in the usual way.
Their backs were arched by invisible weight—
Desires and fears they mistook for fate.
They carried satchels of must be more,
Of I am lacking, I must restore.
Each craving a tether, each story a chain,
Each grasping thought a seed of pain.
They trudged through life with a beast’s dull tread,
Believing the voice in the back of their head
That whispered, “Protect what you think you are—
Your self is fragile, your peace is far.”
But high on a ridge where the sky grew wide,
A wanderer watched with a quiet stride.
His eyes held the stillness of unmoving flame,
And he called to the Burdened Ones each by name.
“Come rest,” he said, “and unbind your load.
You walk in circles on a straight, open road.
Your burdens are shadows you’ve mistaken for stone—
They vanish the moment they’re truly known.”
He lifted a weight marked Fear of loss,
And it blew away like a leaf across
A field where the wind had nothing to hold—
A truth too simple, too rarely told.
He held up another carved Need to be right,
And it dissolved in the warmth of the mountain light.
The Burdened Ones gasped as their packs grew thin—
A spaciousness rising from deep within.
“But how,” they asked, “did we come to believe
That these passing clouds were ours to grieve?”
The wanderer smiled with a tender grace,
“Relative truth is the dream you chase.
Ultimate truth is the sky behind—
Open, selfless, luminous mind.”
“Two truths,” he said, “are the loom of your days:
One weaves illusion, one burns it away.
One shows the world as a tangle of threads,
One shows the vastness where all of it spreads.”
The Burdened Ones stood with a trembling breath,
Feeling the life that had slept beneath death.
Their steps grew lighter, their hearts grew clear—
Not free from the world, but free within fear.
They walked back down to the valley floor
With eyes that saw both less and more:
Less of the self they had clung to tight,
More of the world in its shimmering light.
And slowly the valley began to change—
Not through decree or a grand exchange,
But through kindness offered without demand,
Through seeing each other as sky, not sand.
A new earth rose where the old one stood,
Not perfect, but rooted in basic good.
A place where compassion arose not a rule,
But the natural warmth of a mind in heart school.
And though burdens returned, as burdens will,
They met them with spaciousness, soft and still.
For they knew at last what the wanderer meant:
That awakening isn’t an accident—
It’s remembering the truth that was always there:
The beast was a dream, the burden (cleared) space-air.