Living skillfully with our cows

From our dharma council yesterday on the skillful ways to live with our cows:

Living skillfully on the Eight-fold Path requires a clarity of vision of our current state. Seeing reality. 


It also means seeing the many cows we collect. This comes from the story of a farmer who lost his cows and anxiously asked the Buddha and his monks if they had seen his cows. They hadn't and the Buddha said to his monks, "Aren't you glad you don't have cows?" But cows are not something we cannot have. Even the wish to not have cows is a cow.

In our practice, can we see the cows for what they really are? Can we care for them skillfully or let them go when they wander off? Can we tell the difference between the ones that nourish us and the ones that are toxic?

Even if we left home and became wandering monastics, we would drag along a herd of cows behind us. Practice is not in wishing them gone but in knowing how to manage the herd so we don't get stampeded!

Here's a lovely poem by Wendell Berry on cows and how to deal with them.

From The Sabbath Poems

1979: I

I go among trees and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet
Around me like circles on water.
My tasks lie in their places
Where I left them, asleep like cattle.

Then what is afraid of me comes
And lives a while in my sight.
What it fears in me leaves me,
And the fear of me leaves it.
It sings, and I hear its song.

Then what I am afraid of comes.
I live for a while in its sight.
What I fear in it leaves it,
And the fear of it leaves me.
It sings, and I hear its song.

After days of labor,
Mute in my consternations,
I hear my song at last,
And I sing it. As we sing,
the day turns, the trees move.