I get all excited about blogging, and then I get distracted. Mostly I get distracted by work. Sigh. And, you know, since I just moved into a new place, I’ve got a to-do list a foot long, and the little piles of things with no places keep catching my eye. Here’s an example. (That black thing in the distance is Scout.)
Anyway, as you probably know, Buddhism has this Sanskrit word, samsara, which is the endless cycle of suffering that we’re trapped in, not realizing that we can end it like that. [She snaps.] It’s a point-of-view thing.
This morning, Scout was doing his usual circling—tight and fast, like he was chasing his tail, but he wasn’t—it was more like he’s trying to listen to the sea in his butt. Anyway, he circled his way over to the doorway of my bedroom and only stopped when he clunked his head on the doorjamb.
After that, one thought led to another, and I started thinking about some of my friends in unenviable relationships. I was thinking about how those relationships are not unlike Scout’s circling. You try to hear the sound of the sea in your own butt, and then, one day, you hit your head on a doorjamb, and you remember: Wait, hello!—why am I living my life in little circles with my nose up my ass? There’s more to life than this. (You could be, for instance, sitting in your shack in East Marion, thinking about the melon in your fridge and blogging about your dog.) And suddenly you want to break up.
It’s all samsara—the dog, the relationships, the thinking about the relationships, the writing about thinking about relationships. This blog is samsara. You reading it is samsara. Then, you get off the computer, and what you read here leads you to do something, or say something, and that’s samsara. And karma.
Anyway, we can get depressed about it, or we can realize that this is fantastic. We’re alive and it’s amazing. Yay! (I think.)
Deitch 