Awakening: Compassion, Contentment, Etc.

...saw a group of young guys...looked like college kids...a block or two down Sansom Street from where I live...standing on a corner taking pictures of themselves and laughing...a second look showed what was so funny....a homeless man lying unconscious on the sidewalk, and they, arrayed in their brightly colored polo shirts, tennis shorts, and unexamined privilege, taking selfies with him...

...from my bike, across the intersection, I wanted to yell you stupid assholes!!!!...just to let them know that somebody passing by didn't think they were nearly so clever as they thought...to just maybe make them think about what might be wrong with finding amusement in the suffering of those less fortunate than themselves...possibly thereby awakening apparently dormant compassion in an admittedly roundabout and perhaps contradictory way...but didn't...

...wondered what someone more enlightened than I might've said....not that it was hard....no doubt, there could be all kinds of gentle ways to start a meaningful dialogue, and I'm sure that if Thich Nhat Hanh or Nelson Mandela had been there, that's just what they would have done...

...but...in order to do that, myself, I realized, I'd have to awaken my own sense of compassion...for them...and as it was, couldn't think of any way of doing that short of knocking their heads together...

...maybe the point here is that sometimes you need to work on yourself first...one's own angry, cynical, yet still strangely idealistic self that can't stand the thought of people finding fun in an unconscious homeless person, even though worse things happen every minute...and one might in the moment like to make worse things happen to them...

Sunday morning, and I'm falling...
Lou Reed, Sunday Morning

What is divinity if it can come

Only in silent shadows and in dreams?

Wallace Stevens, Sunday Morning

 

...I just dunno...right at this moment, I'm trying to practice contentment...sitting here on a late Sunday morning in the threadbare but ever-comfortable Ikea chair in a filthy apartment in my (clean) underwear, listening to some really really good music, reading and writing stupid shit on Facebook, and alternating between a tall glass of room-temperature water with lemon (the yoga crowd says it's good for me) and some tasty hot coffee (in Sanskrit, they call it prana), having been too lazy from the past couple days' bike rides to get up and ride across town for morning sangha practice...grateful there's nothing much that absolutely has to be done today except to figure out what I'm teaching in my 7 pm Yin Yoga class this evening...and pay some end-of-the-month bills...but eyeing the three books I've started reading in the past couple days (not even mentioning the novel I'm ever-so-slowly writing)...kinda wishing I had a smart, sensitive, beautiful girlfriend with whom to share an endless lazy brunch, but....recognizing that it's all okay...really not bad...not bad at all...pretty good, in fact...practicing that...

Somewhere Between the Hotel Chelsea and Nirvana...

...who knew that Dharma Mittra has his home base a mere block or two from the legendary Hotel Chelsea...home to great authors and musicians, alcoholics, junkies, great alcoholic and junkie authors and musicians, and, no doubt, lots of not-so-great authors and musicians, alcoholics, junkies, and otherwise...where Dylan Thomas may or may not have raged raged before succumbing to the dying of the light, Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey, Sid Vicious murdered Nancy Spungen, and Bob Dylan pined for the woman he’d marry, bear children with, and, through a process detailed over three or four truly classic rock n’ roll albums, divorce...

...stayin’ up for days in the Chelsea Hotel, writin’ Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands for you...

Bob Dylan

...in Dharma’s class even the pranayama kicks my ass....a truly yogic exercise, perhaps, is learning to be cool about the fact that everybody else in the room is doing handstands in full lotus and I’m just kinda squatting there ‘cause it’s the best I can do....after the two-hour class, Dharma recommends lunch at the vegan place across the street....got a thai “chicken” wrap and an ultra-natural but still tasty cupcake....but somehow not enough to get me all the way back to lower Manhattan, an hour walk along Broadway where I can’t help but grab a couple slices of cheap pizza...

...whiskey bottle over Jesus, not forever, just for now...

Uncle Tupelo

...couple glasses o’ wine and a beer, with mom in the fancy assisted living apartment watching Netflix, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf...based on the Edward Albee play...now those people are fucked up....been writing with a fever this past week or two, like I haven’t in way too long...makes me wanna move into the Chelsea Hotel with a beaten up old manual Smith Corona and a crate full o' whiskey bottles..and how convenient it’d be to be right down the street from Dharma’s yoga studio...

...He never supposed divine
Things might not look divine, nor that if nothing
Was divine then all things were, the world itself,
And that if nothing was the the truth, then all
Things were the truth, the world itself was the truth.

Wallace Stevens

Timeless Wisdom du Jour

...one way to see how mindful you can be is to bike to yoga class in a cold winter rainstorm...then try to get through the class without thinking constantly about how much it’s gonna suck to put your soaking wet socks and sneakers back on for the ride home...
Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 15:357

Silence is the mother of truth.
Benjamin Disraeli

Death is the mother of beauty.
Wallace Stevens

...truth and beauty are a couple of heartless, ungrateful bastards who can’t be troubled to send so much as a lousy Mother’s Day card to silence and death...
Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 643:278

The universe is not only stranger than we think, it's stranger than we can think.
a Hubble scientist, quoted by Barbara Crooker

...all is impermanent...except perhaps for that lingering scent of fish in the microwave...
Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 316:239

...it's better to give than to receive...but both beat the hell outta having to go Christmas shopping...
Swami Yoganandasutkatasanatikkamasalakaliyugaroseannadanna (author of much maligned 19th Century commentary on Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 316:239)

Life is both dreadful and wonderful.
Thich Nhat Hanh

Dogsitting, the Universe, and Getting Lost in Suburban Neighborhoods

We live in an old chaos of the sun...
Wallace Stevens

...I’m dogsitting this week...which means I have no choice to go on long walks with my good friend Bella...and, sometimes, get lost...like last night...

...as an adolescent read practically nothing but science fiction and fantasy...certainly didn’t read much that was assigned as homework...kinda burned out on it midway through college, though...too many space wars...too many elves...barely touched the stuff since...then, just recently, visiting mom’s house, decided to dig out the Foundation Trilogy...which is probably more interesting now than back in eighth grade when my eyes likely drifted over pages, waiting for old Isaac A. to cut the philosophy and break out the laser beams...

....one thing occurred to me, though, in reading all that about planets and stars and galaxies...I hadn’t seen the night sky in quite some time...not really...couldn’t remember the last time I paid attention to the stars or moon....partly, no doubt, the result of living in the city for two years...so, late last night, hopelessly lost with Bella the dog in a suburban neighborhood, spent a good amount of time looking up...

...some people look at the vastness of the universe and see proof of the existence of God...since how else can you explain something so awesome...others see quite the opposite...since how else can you explain something large and yet so empty...

...all I know is that we were lost for hours late at night...but it didn’t seem to bother the dog...so I didn’t let it bother me, either...

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.