Renowned cartoonist and creator of MUTTS comic strip Patrick McDonnell and spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle joined creative forces to bring us one of the most unique mindfulness books for children (and adults) titled Guardians of Being: Spiritual Teachings from Our Dogs and Cats.

“I was compelled to pick up The Power of Now when it first came out in 1999,” says Patrick McDonnell in an interview. “It just knocked me out and I was taken by its directness, its simplicity, and its deep truth.” What eventually inspired him to create the book was Eckhart’s photo with his dog Maya. McDonnell adds, “My wife and I went through all of his CDs, audiotapes, DVDs, and books and started compiling quotes that talked about nature. I put a few of them together with some of my cartoons.”

All of McDonnell’s comic strips have illustrations with text that is deceptively simple but deep. “I compare them to Haikus or poetry,” notes McDonnell, and this quality shines the most when his illustrations are coupled with Eckhart Tolle’s unforgettable quotes that remind us to stay present and appreciate small things in life. Take a look for yourself:

Compliment Guardians of Being with author Roxane Marie Galliez and illustrator Seng Soun Ratanavanh’s illustrated ode to attention as an essence of meditation.

Humor, wit, and sheer elegance are the most distinguishing features of Billy Collins’ poetry. As America’s two-term Poet Laureate and a wordsmith of immense talent and unique voice, he introduced countless people to the art of verse through his books and numerous teaching workshops.

Every poem that comes under his pen shows us that good poetry doesn’t have to be difficult or obscure — a rule evident in his deeply empathetic “Dharma” included in the collection Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems. Read here by Billy Collins himself and masterfully animated by Sophia Li, this uncommonly soulful meditation celebrates our four-legged companions and their intrinsic ability to give meaning to our lives. Please enjoy.

DHARMA
by Billy Collins

The way the dog trots out the front door
every morning
without a hat or an umbrella,
without any money
or the keys to her doghouse
never fails to fill the saucer of my heart
with milky admiration.

Who provides a finer example
of a life without encumbrance —
Thoreau in his curtainless hut
with a single plate, a single spoon?
Gandhi with his staff and his holy diapers?

Off she goes into the material world
with nothing but her brown coat
and her modest blue collar,
following only her wet nose,
the twin portals of her steady breathing,
followed only by the plume of her tail.

If only she did not shove the cat aside
every morning
and eat all his food
what a model of self-containment she would be,
what a paragon of earthly detachment.
If only she were not so eager
for a rub behind the ears,
so acrobatic in her welcomes,
if only I were not her god.

While Sailing Alone Around the Room and contemplating “Dharma,” don’t forget to revisit the growing collection of deeply stirring poetry readings that include Billy Collins’ “The Lanyard,” Emily Dickinson’s “I Dwell in Possibility,” Pablo Neruda’s “I Like for You to Be Still,” Gregory Orr’s “This is What Was Bequeathed Us,” and Wallace Stevens’ “The Snow Man.”

In a recent episode of On Being — a podcast I enjoy and highly recommend — climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe told a story that may resonate with many of us who feel helpless in the face of the environmental crisis facing our shared home, “I was talking with a pastor [in Texas] just recently, and he asked me very genuinely, ‘How do I talk to people about climate change when the only solutions we are told is to stop eating meat, stop driving trucks, stop traveling, stop having children, basically, stop all these things that we often see as defining of who we are?'”

Indeed, it’s one thing being concerned about climate change but quite another to take action. For to take action requires us to change what we cherish most — who we are and what it is that we truly value in our life. This is what writer, poet, and farmer Wendell Berry explored in his beautiful paean to nature and all creation, and this is what deep ecologist and rainforest activist John Seed explores in a book of meditations and rituals titled Thinking Like a Mountain: Towards a Council of All Beings.

In the article “Beyond Anthropocentrism,” John Seed starts by warning us of what he calls “human chauvinism,” an idea that humans are the crown of creation, the source of all value, and the measure of all things. Deeply seated in our culture and our consciousness, this idea is at the heart of unavoidable disaster that threatens our global planetary ecosystem. Only when we question such egoic maxims the real change is possible. John Seed writes:

When humans investigate and see through their layers of anthropocentric self-cherishing, a most profound change in consciousness begins to take place. Alienation subsides. The human is no longer an outsider, apart. Your humanness is then recognized as being merely the most recent stage of your existence, and as you stop identifying exclusively with this chapter, you start to get in touch with yourself as mammal, as vertebrate, as a species only recently emerged from the rainforest. As the fog of amnesia disperses, there is a transformation in your relationship to other species, and in your commitment to them.

Drawing inspiration from North American forester-ecologist Aldo Leopold and his essay “Thinking Like a Mountain,” an organic part of A Sand County Almanac, John Seed admonishes us against trying to understand this transformation intellectually — for intellect is only one entry point, the easiest one — but to go deeper, to the very core of being. John Seed writes:

What a relief then! The thousands of years of imagined separation are over and we begin to recall our true nature. That is, the change is a spiritual one, thinking like a mountain, sometimes referred to as “deep ecology.” … As your memory improves, as the implications of evolution and ecology are internalized and replace the outmoded anthropocentric structures in your mind, there is an identification with all life. Then follows the realization that the distinction “life” and “lifeless” is a human construct. Every atom in this body existed before organic life emerged 4000 million years ago. Remember our childhood as minerals, as lava, as rocks? Rocks contain the potentiality to weave themselves into such stuff as this. We are the rocks dancing. Why do we look down on them with such a condescending air? It is they that are the immortal part of us.

Complement Thinking Like a Mountain with wise elder Wendell Berry on how to make the world a better place for ourselves and our posterity, Richard Louv on the spiritual necessity of nature for the young, Deborah Underwood and Cindy Derby’s watercolor meditation on our inseparable link to nature, and then revisit transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau on why he went to live in the woods.

Human civilization is an elaborate, symbolic defense mechanism against the knowledge of our own mortality Ernest Becker argued in his Pulitzer-winning book. But unlike our denial of death, our consciousness of death is a powerful life-affirming force that can help us change the way we live — and die — argues Yoel Hoffmann in his captivating volume Japanese Death Poems: Written by Zen Monks and Haiku Poets on the Verge of Death. Please savor this selection of exquisite short poetry composed by Zen monks moments before they passed away.

At a young age of thirty one, Zen monk Bassui Tokusho heard the running of water in a brook and was enlightened. Being a recluse, he spent most of his days in a hut in the mountains, and whenever visitors came to hear his teaching, he would flee. But despite his love of solitude, Bassui was known as a monk who didn’t turn away from simple people and taught them Zen in a way they could understand. When the time came for him to pass away, he turned to the gathered crowd, uttered the death poem below, and died.

BASSUI TOKUSHO 抜隊得勝
Died 1387 at the age of sixty-one

Look straight ahead.
What’s there?
If you see it as it is
You will never err.

Sensing that his final hour was near, Zen monk Kozan Ikkyo called his pupils to gather around him. What followed were his instructions to bury him without any ceremony and without any services in his memory. On the morning of his death he wrote the poem below, laid down his brush, and passed away.

KOZAN IKKYO 固山ー鞏
Died 1360 at the age of seventy-seven

Empty-handed I entered the world
Barefoot I leave it.
My coming, my going —
Two simple happenings
That got entangled.

Feeling the inevitable, Zen monk Goku Kyonen gathered his disciples, tapped the floor with his stick one time, and said the death poem below. Once finished he tapped the floor with his stick one more time and shouted, “See! See!” Then, sitting upright, he died.

GOKU KYONEN 悟空敬念
Died 1272 at the age of fifty-six

The truth embodied in the Buddhas
Of the future, present, past;
The teaching we received from the
Fathers of our faith
Can all be found at the tip of my stick.

Japanese Death Poems is a kind of read that stays with us for life — and death. Complement with spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle on endless cycles of renewal and our biggest misunderstanding about life and death and then, for a different kind of contemplation, revisit symbolist painter Gustav Klimt’s masterpiece on what scares us the most.