22 Friday Jan 2021
day by day
drags on by
frozen in place
by violent tides
an unstable tower
of promises
skin color
disease
and hope
to heal
or die
but not suffer
after all
the poison is gone
people need love
the rest is loose
and transient
we end up
together
10 Sunday Jan 2021
Like a lot of people, I have been looking at a lot of heartbreaking videos. I just don’t understand that much hate. I really don’t.
I can understand a verbal explanation of it, sure. But I can’t wrap my heart around what it takes to twist your soul into so many knots that the only explanations you will accept anymore are based on the idea that everything around you is really a deception. A place where secret societies pull all the strings, and where everyone wants to make everything about you and your life irrelevant. A place where the hope you have is that if we can somehow just eliminate all of the physical differences we find objectionable in people, then we can some sort of Super Utopian Alpha society.
But that kind of hate doesn’t just go away once it gets what it wants. Things would just end up playing out like all of the nasty parts of American history, but in reverse and way worse. Once they got rid of the first (and darkest) layer of people, you know they would suddenly discover some other social group to degrade. Bullies just look for new victims. And then who knows… But, left-handed people may want to quietly remain on notice.
Personally, I could not, and do not want to live in a world like that. And like a lot of people, there doesn’t feel like much we can do right now. We voted already. And we can’t fight this with violence. That’s exactly what they want. But there is one thing we can do. And they’ll never see it coming.
The next time we see someone that you really don’t like right now, say something nice to them. Something that reminds them know that we are all still neighbors. Do it for no other reason than that it is in forgiving that we are forgiven.
07 Thursday Jan 2021
Posted in Buddhism, Change, Death, Ego, Emotional Intelligence, Environment, Fear, First Amendment, Human, Indivisible, Meditation, Middle Way, Open mind, Patriotism, Politics, Revolution, Terrorism, Trump-Hole
One of the exercises that I found particularly helpful when discussing the concept of ’emptiness’ in Buddhism, was trying to figure out at what point a car is a car.
For example: We have a car in front of us…
If I remove the engine, and the leave the rest of the body, frame, etc., is that still a car?
What if I then take off all of the doors, is it still a car now?
Or how about if I took out all the wiring and stuff, is that still a car then?
You can see how the exercise goes. At some point the realization began to set in that all things are all composite. We ourselves, are not singular. And we really are not separate from other beings. We are all made of of countless other components, and those things themselves are made up of even smaller elements. You can follow this logic as far down as you like, ultimately splashing around in the quantum foam like are in a 50’s surf movie.
But what if applied this logic to other things? Like what happened yesterday at the capital.
At what point does a protest become a riot?
At what point does riot become sedition?
At what point does a sedition become an insurrection?
At what point does insurrection become civil war?
What I have discovered is that rarely are there clear lines showing separation in nature. We tend only to be able to identify things after a new form has become apparent to us. In Buddhism, I have found this very humbling. When it comes to public safety, things get very messy and dangerous very quickly.
05 Tuesday Jan 2021
Posted in Conspiracies, Death, Dingleberries, Ego, Grief, Healthcare, Human, Mental Health, Revolution, Sameness, Terrorism
the others don’t count
Death likes to play with its food
low and slow for fun
19 Thursday Nov 2020
The molecule that makes people camp out for days just to get a new iPhone a few weeks before their neighbor, is the very same one that drives people to rapidly refuse to wear a mask the more we ask them to. We need to de-escalate the stigma of it somehow.
The ego is the non-Newtonian fluid of our spirit. The more we force this issues, the harder they’re going to push back on it. More PSAs, less confrontations folks.
11 Wednesday Nov 2020
Posted in Brain Droppings, Depression, Ego, Emotional Intelligence, Growth, Human, Meditation, Middle Way, Open mind, Recovery, Sameness
It’s not so much that I’m naturally a negative person. It’s just that I am starting to figure out that if you avoid seeing the positive stuff in life, then you’re only left with negative things to look at. And, yes there is a difference. Ask anyone with self-esteem issues, it builds upon itself like compounding interest.
19 Sunday Jul 2020
Posted in Anxiety, Depression, Ego, Emotional Intelligence, Human, Love, Meditation, Memorial, Mental Health, Poetry, Prayer, Recovery, Spirituality
turning and spinning
towards the center and back
esteem hits below the belt
love only takes one more
the inevitability of karmic debt
meets the prayers of the saints
halfway to providence and back
I should have learned it then
the silence I long sought inside
now returned an echo of dense
that old son of a bitch is dead
chattering on from his grave
chance took my chance away
with misery born of longing
solitude’s underbelly exposed
while guilt slow nurtures the hounds
10 Friday Jul 2020
Posted in Art, Book Review, Ego, Environment, Human, Love, Male superiority, Sameness, Trump-Hole
BOOK REVIEW
Book Title: The KING, the MICE, and the CHEESE
Creators: Nancy and Eric Gurney
The KING, the MICE, and the CHEESE, by Nancy and Eric Gurney is a book I read at least 40 years ago, and I’m just getting around to telling you about it now. It was absolutely in the top 10 favorites I would reread. It’s illustrated with fantastic cartooning, especially the mice. I absolutely love how expressive their faces are.
It’s a lighthearted tale of your usual self-important, rich white guy who has a series of problems he needs to solve. In typical fashion, he throws his weight around and until he can get someone else to satisfy his petty whims.
His subservient advisors go to outlandish lengths to please their tantrum-prone Mucky Muck. They begin to bring in everything from cats to elephants in order to try to solve the latest problem. Yet each new catastrophe is really nothing more than the growing happiness of these animals as they begins to relax and settle in to the new home they’ve found themselves in.
Each one is brought there for a specific reason, with never a moment’s thought given to its well being or happiness. He would use them only for what he needed, and after they’d outlived their usefulness to him he would quickly mark them as the next problem his kingdom must eradicate.
The book itself is of course, a work of fiction. Nothing more than childhood stories of the outlandish. I mean, could you imagine the leader of a country being so self-aggrandizing, and so hyper-focused on only his own comforts and whims, yet so blind to the suffering of everyone and everything he can’t use somehow? Thanks just crazy talk.
That’s whackier than a mouse eating a nice cheese dinner, with very good manners.
29 Friday May 2020
Posted in Anxiety, Brain Droppings, Ego, Emotional Intelligence, Hate, Human, Love, Middle Way, Open mind, Prayer, Spirituality
I have come to believe that people pray to God not because One exists, but because our Ego does. I believe Prayer works because it takes our most naturally destructive energies (intention, will, hope, judgement, etc.) and channels them outward, rather than back toward ourselves where they do the most damage.
22 Sunday Mar 2020
Posted in Change, Coronavirus, Ego, Guns, Human, Making Sense of Guns, Revolution, Trump-Hole
The Renaissance came after the Dark Ages because people had started to engage in critical thinking and using something that became known as the scientific method. The natural result was to grow away from the teachings of The Church at that time, because the results science was getting threatened the validity of the Church itself, the authenticity of its edicts, and its iron grip on power.
Now the United States has a leader who is in a position of power he neither earned, nor deserves. And like the church, he is so frightened of being wrong and losing power that he is willing to put countless lives at risk just in order to appear as if he isn’t wrong.
And so, here we are centuries later slowly sinking back into the same dark abyss of magical thinking, selfish prayer and quack ‘cure-all’ medicines. We are again leaving behind rational observation and thought as we bound head first into cults of personality and brand identity, as if they offer something more substantive than a street gang mentality and some Second Amendment bumper stickers.
