Don’t Take My Word for It

Don't take what I write in any particular blog too seriously. What I write today or tomorrow is what I think I know today or tomorrow, which will be at least yesterday by the time you read it. It will be today for you, and course reading it in the morning or afternoon will mean a different person will be reading it; you will have thousands and thousands of new cells, deposited a whole new layer of dead cells on the bathroom floor, and changed a host of oxygen molecules into carbon dioxide. You will be some hours older, and the time in which you have aged you will never get back. So you should feel bad about that. That’s a joke. But think of me by the time you read what I wrote in something from maybe two weeks or two months ago: creakier, having forgotten what I wrote and about to reinvent it again differently, now. Still, you will catch the surface resemblance, and if you aren’t focusing sufficiently on the detail, you might say, “hey, she wrote about this already!” But you see, I couldn’t have. That person, and now both of them, are gone now and disappeared as each letter hit the screen. Whoa. True.

And don’t look to what you find here to start down the Buddhist path. Once I was following a friend in my car. He was ahead in his; it was a rainy, very dark night and I was paying attention. I followed carefully; this turn, that one to the right, out onto the big highway, exit. After a long while, my heart fell into the car seat. I didn’t recognize the license plate of the car I was following! I should have been there a long time ago! This was in the days before GPS. I was lost for a long time.

My father was in the car with me; he had no idea I was lost, and I didn’t tell him. He didn’t know the city and so was just letting me do the navigating. He thought I knew I knew what I was doing, and so quietly and even contentedly got as lost as I was. Don’t be like my father. I may be following the wrong car. If you start to get a funny feeling, check a good Buddhist map by a fully cooked Buddhist. Though good luck finding one on a rainy night.

Finally (for this afternoon), I have been studying and trying to meditate for thirty years. I also have a bulldog mind. Give me an idea and I will not let it go. So I have lots of ideas and experiences in my head that have put together and have fallen apart in lots of different ways. It's kind of like a teenager’s closet up there. I am not starting at the beginning and explaining Buddhism. I’m not even starting half way through. I am just trying to put down the process of my practice as it is now and as I can remember it (we know how reliable that can be), in case it might be useful to you. If it isn’t, maybe I will like it.

I have always wanted to know the tiny steps of things, like how a flower unfolds. I have wanted to be able to watch in slow motion how someone learns and develops a Buddhist frame of mind. I seems to take years, decades, and even multiple lifetimes and eons for some of us. So at least I can put down here a few years of my own process. I am watching the world’s strangest and therefore most liberating ideas work their way into a primitive brain dedicated to a fiction it calls “me.” Maybe it is good to consider me a fish in a tank and just watch.