https://simplymindful.com.au/
Much of the reason I am doing the Mindfulness course is my reading of Annie Dillard.
An essay of hers that I really like is Living like Weasels. It is on line in an English course somewhere, but I posted it (without comment) at: http://members.tip.net.au/~
I will leave you with a few quotes as well as the links. Don't go too far into it. It was simply useful to me. (I have had the experience of eyes locked with skinks as well as with magpies)
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The bits I like are especially:
I have been thinking about weasels because I saw one last week. I startled a weasel who startled me, and we exchanged a long glance. ...The weasel was stunned into stillness as he was emerging from beneath an enormous shaggy wild-rose bush four feet away. I was stunned into stillness, twisted backward on the tree trunk. Our eyes locked, and someone threw away the key.Our look was as if two lovers, or deadly enemies, met unexpectedly on an overgrown path when each had been thinking of something else: a clearing blow to the gut. It was also a bright blow to the brain, or a sudden beating of brains, with all the charge and intimate grate of rubbed balloons. It emptied our lungs. It felled the forest, moved the fields, and drained the pond; the world dismantled and tumbled into that black hole of eyes. If you and I looked at each other that way, our skulls would split and drop to our shoulders. But we don't. We keep our skulls. ...I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.We could, you know. We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience — even silence — by choice. The thing to do is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting. A weasel doesn't "attack" anything; a weasel lives as he is meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity.I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. then even death, where you're going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.
In looking around the web for comments I saw: http://ewp.cas.nyu.edu/
a very stern criticism of Dillard. (I don't think they get it). Perhaps this too is a criticism of mindfulness or meditation in general. But isn't clearing the mind a task that is done in order to then engage the world?
The writer, Emil Stern, is bouncing off Elie Wiesel, rather than Dillard's Weasel I think. Cleverly comparing the two but maybe missing the point. (interesting that I also have a page of ideas from Weisel!)
Living Like Wiesel EMIL STERN
History, despite its wrenching pain, Cannot be unlived, but if faced With courage need not be lived again. —Maya Angelou
Annie Dillard’s blithe and lively little essay, “Living Like Weasels,” is at heart actually quite corrosive—insidious, in fact, in its undermining of the need for a sense of history and human empathy, both of which are rooted in the intellect she finds so deplorable. Dillard chooses not to face history at all, let alone with courage: “
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