Lawrence in the News!

I recently visited the boarding school for bad kids. I had a sore throat at the time, and one of the boys, a rather clever one who likes speaking with me like an adult, asked “Is something wrong? You are not your usual self. You are not being usual-David.”
"Yes, actually.” I replied. “I have a sore throat.”
“You might want to fix that.” He responded with a smile.

It was an interesting conversation, and as he walked away I had to ask myself, like the characters in I Heart Huckabees, “How am I not myself?”

Sometimes I like to go out on my porch, fourth floor balcony, great view, and look though my prayer flags, look though my prayers, into the sky behind them. I will look into the Dragon's tail to see the distant mountains disappearing beneath a layer of cloud. I will look through the mantras woven into the colored fabric to the infinite sea of soft stillness that is the sky, and ill see clearly the black crows flying through me. The wind picks up.

I take some pictures, and come back inside to listen to music and type letters into my own prayer flag-life waving and playing and saying to the wind “May peace be in you” in so many words.

At elementary school this week the principal gave a teaching at the morning assembly. She said, “It is so wonderful that we all have our own opinions and it is important to express them. But it is also very important to listen to other people’s opinions with all your mind and heart.”

I was stunned at the beauty of that simple teaching. Listening (and being a space for people to work out their ideas within) is also being a viewer for dancers, being a critic for painters, a fan for musicians, or a dancer for drummers. There are many important forms of listening. And isn’t it interesting that we, as aspects of the universe, talk and listen? We talk to ourselves, and listen to ourselves; the universe talks to itself, and listens to itself, and we grow together, forever united, forever apart, in a dance of emptiness and form, forever and ever, I hope and pray, amen.

The same principal gave me a large stalk of ginger flowers that smell like 100 lilies to take home after school. “They will help your cold!” Have you ever seen ginger flowers? Beautiful. Very sweet smell.

Deep down I’m a farmer, a gardener. But I live in the city and don't have a plot of land to use at the moment. So I’ve been planting and harvesting in a few mind-fields that live around my home. These fields are very healthy, fresh, and rich with nutrients; their soil is ancient and fruitful. I plant my friendship into them and they all respond with much fruit, giving me back their kindness and care, or insight into why they don’t. I am rich with fruit and experiential knowledge from all the mind-fields around me, and so I plant in the often, and spend many hours lying on their colored surfaces. Every one of them is a different color, texture, and shape, but they all equally glow in the setting sunlight. In the moonlight, all the fields are the same colors—shades of silver blue-gray, and they all dissolves into black during the darkest hours of the night. At night, all the fields become one color. Then the sun comes up, Light returns, life returns, and with it, infinity, actually shimmering as diversity changing so fast across the fields, and humming like the dragonflies, the buzz of the present moment, the quantum dance of creation occurring right now as the textures of this very instant. It shimmers when you look at it long enough, or with a big enough microscope, or with a wide enough lens to see the entire Milky Way shimmering across the infinity fields of dark blue voidness that is Space. Space, Clear Abyss Emptiness. Remember, that Space, surrounding the Milky Way, is here on this planet too. It’s in between you and the computer. And it can also be perceived as the stillness beneath all thoughts within you.