Notes from the morning after the rover landed on Mars

When the love in my cat's mind feels even more mind-blowing than a NASA rocket

Humans have just sent a rocket 126 million miles to Mars. 

And I have to say I laughed when I saw it’s first tweet upon landing. And I appreciated the way it snapped my mind out into a much bigger place, the vast space of things.

But the thing that truly impressed me this morning, as I sat in a wooden house in the forest and beside the winding streams of this jewel of a planet, is the way that this elderly cat, who has seizures and advanced kidney disease and lungs that don’t work very well anymore, nonetheless dutifully wakes us up every morning.

With nothing but an incredible sense of timing and kindness in her heart, she runs back and forth over our pillows at 5am and then sits on my bedside table, sending purrs into my ears — to make sure we get up on time. She comes and sits with me as I drink my morning tea, and we sit and put our heads close together and I help clean her fur. And the love that is the texture of her mind is as vast and full of potential as any human mind.

It fills the house.

It curls around corners.

And within that love is the most amazing, potent power for peace — sitting like an exquisite reservoir just below the surface, just waiting for us to discover and harness it. If only we weren’t always so endlessly distracted by the objects outside of ourselves.

​And I reflect on the teaching that the nature of every living being’s mind is Buddha nature or Buddha seed, meaning it is pure limitless potential. As formless and therefore as vast as reality itself. If only we could crack open that potential and release its power, travel the 126 million miles inside our own hearts to the very core of reality. And find the same limitless peace and freedom that a man sitting under a tree in India found 2500 years ago.