I was just reading the Theravedan Buddhist text called the Dhammapadda. I came across a passage that really struck a chord. It goes like this:
"Through many a birth in samsara have I wandered in vain, seeking the builder of this house... O house-builder, you are seen! You will not build this house again."
First, some definitions. Samsara is the Buddhist concept of cyclical existence. Birth, death, rebirth until one achieves the ultimate state of detachment and peace with the universe. Second, the "house" is the body. The verse essentially means "I've lived enough to see the universe for what it is -- I need not be born again."
I have been working on thoughts lately -- trying to banish those dark lines of thought that lead to depression and hatred. It's hard. I pass a street preacher every day on the way to work, and I'm always thinking in my head how hypocritical and contradictory his rhetoric is -- how falacious his logic. Today, I took a step in the right direction. I countered those thoughts and a few that followed about the people outside on "smoker's row" that I also pass daily outside the hospital. It was a small thing, but it was the first time I realized how deeply I was invested in these angry thoughts -- and about such trivial matters!
Today's meditation: Prajna Paramita, from the Heart Sutra, the mantra to calm all suffering.
A few years ago, I came down the stairs in the house on Arsenal and on the last step my ankle gave out. The doctors said I'd sprained it as badly as I could have without breaking anything. I went into shock, my lower leg turned technicolor purple, and I was limping for weeks. Yesterday, I tripped going up a flight of stairs with the vacuum cleaner in my hands and kicked the vertical portion of the stairs with my big toe and fractured it. Both times, it was my left foot. I think I might be cursed -- no one has my kind of luck and lives.
Just thought I'd throw up a quick "I'm alive!" note and update folks on a few things.
First, love the new house. We're still in Wilmington, but further north in a MUCH nicer neighborhood and in a much roomier house. We have a roommate, Brian, whom I have known for years. I'll post pics after the housewarming next weekend, when the house *will* be finished.
I set up a CafePress site for a few things Rob and I have always said would make great bumper stickers. Visit cafepress.com/imeister and have a look. It's only two items right now, but I'll be adding more as I think of things.
The restaurant review blog is going well. I've done a dozen places now, with more to write. I'm getting comments more and more frequently, and site stats are rising steadily. I even had a friend ask for one of my cards so he could pass it on to a friend who gets paid to do reviews in hopes that I might join their ranks. Getting paid to eat out? Hells yeah, I say!
Devoid of interest in life, moving only from day to day as flotsam on the tide. Moving with my fellow automatons to do the tasks of a bidding society, unawares that they too are part of the ebb and flow. Perhaps this is a gift; a conceit they hold close and cover under their jackets -- that they do not know the numbness of the world around them. If this be true, then their ignorance surely is bliss. In knowledge, to be sure, the educated are left listless and impotent. Give me not the pain of existence in the body, but rather in baser substances -- the feather of the wing, the hair on the cheetah. Let me be one of those so that I may at least take part in the exhilaration of flight or the chase. If I am to be part of anything, let it be of the basic - not the complex. Let me participate in the creative, not the commercial. Let us all carriage ourselves through life with the grander purpose of living it, rather than trying so in vain to understand, mold, or caress it into unnatural shapes and molds sure to break with time. If nature is to reclaim this all when we are gone, then perhaps it is because nature itself is the mold, and we are the cats, unherded, escaping a mold made for us long before we thought of questions as goals. Let us relax into the shapes nature has made for us, rather than try holding the ocean in a plastic cup. Marvel at the cups complexity, but look not too deeply into it's capacity -- for like this tumultuous life, you will find it lacking.
Do you bring or buy your lunch during the work week? How much money do you spend on food consumed during working hours?
(I was amused by this question because I *just* finished updating my restaurant review blog.)
During the week I usually bring my lunch. Rob and I figured out one time that we'd spent about 25% of our disposable income on eating out -- and a large portion of that on a particular Indian restaurant we loved. That notion and a growing list of places we like in Delaware are what gave me the incentive to create the DelawareDiner blog. In an effort to, I don't know... keep a ROOF over our heads, however, I've been keeping my lunches light and portable of late. During working hours, the money I spend is generally less than $3 a day.
So, I've thought about doing this for years, but I only started really acting on it tonight: rating the myriad restaurants I eat at. I *hate* cooking. It's messy, I'm always bumping up against recipes that call for ingredients no GUY would ever have around, and I hate cleaning up after cooking almost as much as I hate cooking itself. So I eat out. A lot. And now, I write about it.
I know most of my readers won't ever be anywhere near these restaurants, but if you like the style of my writing, you'll get a lot more of it, more frequently, at my new blog, The Delaware Diner.
After fighting with various Linux distributions for the past week, I have come to the inescapable conclusion that I'm simply not smart enough to use it. Admittedly, part of the problem is that I'm cheap. I bought a $12 wireless card; a "fubatchu" brand card as my old pal Lars would have called it, and drivers for it are apparently non-existent in linux without doing some mystical and entirely undocumented NDISwrapper trick, whatever the hell that is. That's an exaggeration -- there IS documentation, but it might as well be written in Swahili. Someone, somewhere along the line apparently wrote a python script to do it, but by the time I got to it, it already had disclaimers about not working with the current revision of the OS. So after plowing through FreeBSD, OpenSolaris, Knoppix, Ubuntu.*, and CentOS, I'm done. I'm breaking down and trying a WAMP server instead. At least there will be documentation. *heavy sigh*
If only I could afford to buy a computer from the company I work for. :P
"How is it you came to be here," Airity asked.
"Oh, I've been many places. The places just sort of ... happen. I take them in, learn from them, and the place just moves on," Efram replied.
"Don't you mean that you move on?"
"No," said Efram, "I don't recall ever moving myself."
Airity looked puzzled, but decided not to ponder this particular one of Efram's mysteries for the moment.
"Can you tell me about another place?"
Efram looked at the girl thoughtfully and said "I think I should tell you about Fellen."
"Fellen was a place in a valley full of life. Trees, animals, flowers, and every manner of thing lived there in balance. Harmony came and went from time to time, but balance was always maintained."
"Isn't harmony a kind of balance," Airity asked.
"Harmony is the result of balance -- the effect. It is not a cause of balance however. Trying to achieve harmony without balance is like trying to catch a breeze in a teacup. Trying would make you look foolish, and even if you succeeded, you'd have nothing in your cup for proof!" Efram laughed at his own little joke. Airity filed this away for future pondering.
"In any case," Efram continued, "life there existed always in balance... until a great warrior came to pass through. So taken with the beauty and splendor of the area, he decided to retire and make his home there. He dismounted from his horse and scouted out a site for his future home. He ordered his two squires to help him clear the chosen site of trees and brush and to level the ground for the house's foundation. As the men gathered their tools and began to hack at the trees, they were suddenly beset by a mass of creatures. Birds descended from the treetops, monkeys threw down fruits and dung from the branches, and insects swarmed from all sides. The men were forced to throw down their tools a scatter to the winds for shelter and escape."
"That's awful!" Airity exclaimed.
"The warrior agreed. He and his men returned with a vengeance. They wrapped themselves in thick linens, covered their faces in gauze, and returned to continue their work. After winning countless battles throughout his life, the warrior was determined not to lose his honor to simple forest creatures. But they were shocked to find that termites had eaten the handles to their axes, and their swords and daggers were hung high in the trees, stolen by the monkeys. Utterly defeated, the warrior yelled and raged at the animals. He shook the trees with his hands and tried with all his strength to knock down the brush with his fists and feet. After exhausting himself, he collapsed to the ground and sat leaning against the tree. As he sat, his breast heaving, he heard laughing from nearby. Looking around, the warrior noticed that in the trees sat several monks who were, at this very moment, laughing at him."
"'What are you laughing at?' he shouted at them."
"'You, of course' they replied. 'You struggle and fight against that which is clearly stronger than you, you get angry at yourself for not defeating your enemy, then when you can fight no more, you take comfort against the very trees you seek to fell. Do you not see your own folly?'"
"The warrior sat, stunned, and had his epiphany. His whole life had been spent in struggle -- often in struggles not of his own making -- and now, when he was ready to retire from that life, he still sought to fight against nature itself for the sake of his own comfort and without a care for those he would hurt. The warrior dismissed his servants and joined the monks in the trees, enlightened."
Airity grinned at the happy ending, but asked "So where were you in all this?"
"I was here. Just as I always have been."
Airity looked puzzled again.
"You will understand one day, my daughter. Until then, continue to watch."
With that, Efram left Airity's room and turned off the lights. Airity looked at the ball in the corner, now dark and covered in pinholes. The remaining light in Airity's room seeped in, and she rose quietly and crossed the room to it. She peeked through one of the pinholes and with the eyes of a god, looked down into the world once more.
I've been depressed the past few days -- unhappy with my career, a little lonesome since the move, etc. Rob assigned me the task of writing for an hour a day to help me vent. This is what came out. There is no order to it, there is no need to respond, it's just my inner workings made outer for a change. These are surface thoughts and some of the depth behind them.
Immovable. Intractable. Some would call these words words of permanence; words of finality. I know though that these words are a falsehood. Nothing – no absolute we can define with language – can be true. To coin a phrase, the only sure thing is change. I’ve given a lot of thought lately to the things in my life that I think are intractable. Things that, on the outside, look like permanent conditions of my existence. I know in my mind that they are not though, and I have set my mind to the task of overcoming this obstacles. I have decided that in order to overcome these obstacles, I must be like water: fluid, stable, conforming, yet gently and slowly changing my environment. Like the waters of the ocean, supporting myriad things in life, yet eroding the very rocks over which it flows, I must become as water.
Not an easy task, to be sure. But I am, as my mother once described me and information gatherer. I know that I do not know, so I seek to learn. I look through books, through my past experiences, through the role models I have and have had in the past, and through modern means like the internet. And armed with this new information, I make small changes in myself and to the vessel in which I reside. I both live in the life I’ve created and I change it to conform to my wishes – flowing over rock and crag, smoothing the rough spots, stirring up the settling silt, and redepositing it where it serves the highest good.
I recently met a man – a new friend in my new life in my new home – who is like a mirror. He is me if I had been born earlier in a different place. His mannerisms, his affect, his trials and tribulations are ones I can relate to and internalize. Some of these reflections are comfortable, some are less so. But I welcome the image as I welcome the new day – another opportunity to see the world as it is, and another opportunity to see how the world sees me. Why is this important, because the world is the rock I must shape – the rough stone I must smooth over. It is the reality I must manipulate to bring my perception of what I think it should be to fruition. It may seem grandiose to think of manipulating the world, but the idea is simple: I do not have to change the whole world, just the piece of it that interacts with me, and this is well within the capability of the water-soul.
I spoke today of changing jobs. I spoke of expression, of wanting more than anything to be an artist – a creator. For now, I do that through words. I find it a crude medium; so fixed, so limited in its scope and so easily misinterpreted. This crudity is the reason I put no stock in the Bible – it will only ever be a text, written down by man, expressed through a man’s mind, a man’s hand, and limited by a man’s intellect. God, if he wanted us to truly know his will, would never have chosen this medium for his divine power because that power is so quickly and easily diluted by man’s limited ability to comprehend the power of communication. I think instead that he or she daily chooses to express divine will in sunsets, storms, squalls and auroras – truly expressions of creativity and divinity. Had he never seen one, man would never have conceived of an event in nature composed purely of color or air or water in such massive motion – his mind is too small, his vision too meager. Let God reveal herself in nature. And let me reveal myself through my contribution to culture and art; not through my mending of broken computers and trivial music players. Let me be the music, the photograph, or the program that brings life and enjoyment of those devices to the user. But for now – let me be the words that inspire someone to think or do or move. Let me be the catalyst. Please world, let me just be.
