Observations on returning to Philly/Facebook/etc. after a week in a Buddhist monastery

 

 

Oh my god, people are fucking crazy....

 

Breathe...

 

Breathe...

 

Breathe...

 

(That's about it, for now).



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(Calligraphy by Thich Nhat Hanh)
(Thanks to all the kind people at Blue Cliff Monastery)

Life is Messy

often, the state of the kitchen is the state of the mind, confused and unsure men, pliable men, are the thinkers. their kitchens are like their minds, cluttered with garbage, dirty ware, impurity, but they are aware of their mind-state and find some humor in it. at times, with a violent burst of fire they defy the eternal deities and come up with a lot of shining that we sometimes call creation.... the man with the ever-orderly kitchen is the freak.... his kitchen is his mind-state: all in order, settled, he has let life condition him quickly to a basened and hardened complex of defensive and soothing thought-order....

Charles Bukowski

...badly underemployed and working on a novel about dysfunctional superheroes...biking downtown daily for the most intense and demanding vinyasa yoga classes I can find...discovering new ways and means for exploring and exploiting edges...leaving a pile of sweaty t-shirts, along with other laundry, by last week grown to the point that now I don’t want to deal with it simply because there’s too much to carry...sunlight can, now, be seen through four significant areas of my yoga mat...in line with hands and feet...which might seem cool in a sunny, happy, yoga hippie kinda way...put it in the right words along with a picture of a sunset and it’ll get a thousand “likes” on Facebook...but maybe, really, I just need a new mat, badly...writing about other people’s books*...piled around the deteriorating Ikea chair friends find so comforting...mp3 player blasting X, Cat Power, Mary Halvorson, Arvo Part, Frank Zappa, Miles Davis, and the Stones’ Get Yer Ya Ya’s Out...coffee ready if I can get up the gumption to go and pour a cup this early in the morning...glasses held together with tape on both sides under disheveled hair badly in need of basic grooming....for a while, I was getting haircuts from this old guy who’d be asleep in the chair when I got there, and I’d have to yell to tell him how I wanted it cut...the last time, he seemed so out of it, didn’t even ask...

....one thing you have to get used to living in the big city is that it never really gets dark...wildlife is the birds always coming and going from the power lines outside my windows, their flight sometimes causing shadows inside the apartment, making me think, for a moment, that they’re in here with me...

...Democracy is messy, by definition...the trouble with the concept of heaven is that none of us, in the long run, could really be comfortable there...an eternity of having our every failing magnified in comparison to the perfection all around...messiness is our condition, underneath all the careful ordering and cleaning products...but that doesn’t mean I don’t need to do something with that pile of dirty laundry, and soon...

* my latest rants & reviews at Elephant Journal: Addressing the Question of Whether Matthew Remski should be burned at the stake for Yogic Heresy and Ahimsa Be Damned: When Buddhists Attack...

New Leaves in October

 ...went out n’ got me a house plant...

...which is a big deal...really...

...in the secret world of houseplants...(communicating through faint stirrings of leaves, one windowpane to another, down the street, across the world)...I imagine I’m whispered of, furtively, as he who must  not be named...or, perhaps, derisively, as The Black Thumb...or, maybe, I am simply called...........................DEATH...

...okay, that might be a bit melodramatic...but I don’t have the best track record...Raheem the rubber tree plant gone but not forgotten...along with others, gifts from former girlfriends, now not even Facebook friends...(but maybe that’s a story for another time)...

...now, though...moving in to the new place...trying to turn over a new leaf...(no pun intended)...(really)...seems fitting to try to cultivate life again, past failures left to the past, where they belong...and so...(see photo, above...actually had this post ready a couple days ago, but the camera was still packed away somewhere and I couldn’t find it)...welcome, Phil the philodendron...

...paradoxical as it might seem to talk about new leaves in October...

25 Ways of Looking at Facebook

1. I got tagged on Facebook for one of these 25 things about me things.
2. I’ve decided to kill two birds with one stone by making it a blog post.
3. I don’t actually approve of the expression “kill two birds with one stone.”
4. I consider throwing rocks at birds to be cruel.
5. Nonetheless, I suspect it must take impressive skill and perseverance to kill two with one.
6. I once read a quote: “one does not talk to the skilled hunter of that which is forbidden by the Buddha.”
7. I don’t really know what that means, and am probably misquoting it, anyway.
8. “Kill two birds with one stone” is not the only common expression I have problems with.
9. Recently, someone gave me something and then took it back, and I told her I’d call her a non-racist equivalent of “Indian giver” as soon as I could think of one.
10. I haven’t come up with a good one and, anyway, the moment has passed, so I’m not trying very hard.
11. People I never expected to hear from again keep contacting me through the Facebook thing.

12. That's cool.
13. For the most part, though, we only seem to be reconnecting through comments like “I liked that Narnia thing much better before I understood the symbolism,” or “Battlestar Galactica’s cool, but I’m paranoid enough as it is.”
14. One exception would be my friend Joyce, who I worked with at Greenpeace a long time ago, and recently met for Mexican food—which was nice, but we haven’t talked since.
15. I was the worst canvasser ever.
16. I also keep getting friend requests from people I used to know but didn’t particularly like.
17. I'm positive they didn’t like me, either.
18. I’m wondering how long it’s gonna be before I get a friend request from somebody who beat me up in seventh grade.
19. I’ve run out of things to say about Facebook.
20. When I was a kid, we had these gerbils named Ralph and Rachel that lived in one of those plastic gerbil contraptions.
21. When they were in heat...or one of them was in heat...we had shocking displays of sexual violence in our kitchen at all hours.
22. When they had babies, we took them to the pet store, thinking other little kids would get to take them home as pets.
23. The pet store employees were happy to take them off our hands.
24. They fed them to snakes.
25. But that’s still better than throwing rocks at birds.