Like A Train

Along with 8,298 other people (and still counting) I get Trungpa Rinpoche quotes from the Dharma Ocean mailing list. Usually, I read them and save them. Sometimes, I print one out and give it to a friend. Today, I want to share this one with all of you:

When you are trying to help someone, you have to have humor, self-existing humor, and you have to hold the moth in your hand, but not let it go into the flame. That's what helping others means. Ladies and gentlemen, we have so much responsibility. A long time ago, people helped one another in this way. Now people just talk, talk talk. They read books, they listen to music, but they never actually help anyone. They never use their bare hands to save a person from going crazy. We have that responsibility. Somebody has to do it. It turns out to be us. We've got to do it, and we can do it with a smile, not with a long face.

Oh, that hit like a train. The years rolled away, and I was standing on the tracks, and he was standing there beside me, saying something a whole lot like what he said above, and probably that is what he was always saying.

Some others, who never knew him -- who know only the pictures, or the books, or the wild stories, and know nothing of his great and gentle, endless and nurturing ocean of loving kindness -- might say that this is not necessarily an "easy" way to live. 

But, it is a good way to live, and who cares about easy?

Oh, Rinpoche... you used your bare hands to keep people from going crazy, and you did it with a smile -- the flame from the candle that is never extinguished, dancing in your eyes.