Know that you don't know

Sustaining the truth is like tending your own garden.

To use refrigerator food, or restaurant food all the time might be reliable, like the Bible, or Sanskrit. We all need that kind of nurturing, but in reality, we each have our own interpretation and experience of life, that like the food that comes from our own garden, originates with our self.

We savor food from our own garden much more than food that comes from the grocery store, and we tenderly preserve it for harsh winters or lean times ahead.

Food that was planted in soil tilled by our own hands with compost that results from the natural consequences of our daily living, rather than the distant lives of others in remote ages and places.

Flavor and appreciation that comes with the satisfaction of having tended, weeded and watered the emerging plant and watching it grow.

The ripening of our fruit for harvest too, has an appreciation we can't always share with others. Knowledge peculiar to ourselves that can only be appreciated by others in a more general way.

From a  Dharma Talk by Tim Burkett

The Grace of a Good Woman

After gathering raspberries for breakfast, I returned....to find they had all been eaten by my son.

I said to my wife:
"Darling, our son has eaten all the berries!"

She replied:
"Ah, but how good they tasted!"

From a  Dharma Talk by Tim Burkett

Karma

Karma encompasses everything that has ever happened: Past and present.

We live in a giant echo chamber, and whatever starts with us must end with us.

We cannot ignore the observations of others, or observations of our ancestors, as we are perceived to be them.

~IMID

Compensation

Thus is the universe alive. All things are moral. That soul within us a sentiment, outside of us is law. It is in the world, but the world was made by it. It is eternal but it enacts itself in time and space. Justice is not postponed. A perfect equity adjusts its balance in all parts of life. Every secret is told, every crime is punished, every virtue rewarded, every wrong redressed, in silence and certainty. What we call retribution is the universal necessity by which the whole appears wherever a part appears. If you see smoke, there must be fire. If you see a hand or limb, you know that the trunk to which it belongs is there behind.

~exerpt from  Compensation by Ralph Waldo Emerson