Dukka

My yoga teacher hurt her back, which sucks...for couple of reasons...I mean, she’s feeling better, thankfully...so that's cool...but there’s still something disturbing about it...downright ominous, in fact...specifically: yoga teachers aren’t supposed to hurt their backs...I mean, if she can hurt her back after all these years of dedicated practice loosening up and strengthening and eliminating tension throughout body, mind, and spirit, what does that say about my chances of being perfectly healthy for the rest of my life? It’s like when this other yoga teacher I knew broke up with his wife...and she was a yoga teacher herself, for chrissake...I mean, shouldn’t theirs have been the perfect Tantric union? Could it be, somehow, that these kinds of expectations are, in fact, nothing but a lot of incredibly stupid bullshit?

Well, obviously...

There is no safe place.
Anne Sexton

Same as it ever was.
Same as it ever was.
Same as it ever was.
Same as it ever was....
David Byrne

...but it’s natural, too, as we struggle to amass as much money and stuff as possible, subsuming all to the overarching need for financial security, so we’ll never have to worry about money again...similar to the endless development and stockpiling of ever more advanced weaponry and the sending of so many soldiers to “rid the world of evil”...even as rights dissolve away without a fight and prisons grow to the point that 1 in 142 Americans is incarcerated...all to make us completely safe...free from all fear...so that, once disease, injury, poverty, and the dangers of terrorists, hostile governments, and criminals have all been vanquished, we’ll all live happily ever after...

but that's never gonna happen, is it?

Trying to get lasting security teaches us a lot, because if we never try to do it, we never notice that it can’t be done.
Pema Chodron

Shit happens
popular American expression

I went for a hike on Friday with my dog friend Bella. The high point of the hike for her...and the low point for me...was when she decided to roll in shit. Actually, correct that—the low point for me was trying to get some of it off, using dry leaves and creek water, so she wouldn't get it on the car upholstery, and ending up with it all over my hands. And, yet, through it all, she was so utterly nonplussed, so thoroughly oblivious to how any of this could possibly be a problem, that I couldn’t stop laughing. I was gonna have to deal with it...like I’ll always have to deal with shit in one way or other...so what else was there to do?