I'm discovering more and more the beauties of the low alcohol reds, the Pinot Noir, the Gamay, the Cabernet Franc wines of Central France...  Easy on the esophagus, and for an enthusiast, self-controlling.  The geology, the terroir of the season comes through such wines, making them sometimes acidic, other years more lush...  Of course, as the French know, they are great versatile wines to highlight the flavors of the food reasonable people tend to eat.

The world of wine, jammy high alcohol fruit bomb irrigated vine wines aside, let nature take its course, is indeed interesting.  It presents a way of interacting with our fellows, facilitates some conversations, perhaps, it's a staple of diplomacy, and indeed, in Washington, DC, a mode of being important to the easy functioning of things, where the ego is almost a virtual necessity.

But drinking is part of being mired in suffering, in the dream of existence of subject and object.  There is to it an honest acceptance of the suffering of life, and for good reason do we associate the glass of wine with the Christian understanding, its story and ritual and deeper meanings.

There are parts of it that are, for some people at least, medicinal.  But ultimately, for the sake of clarity of the mind, it must be put aside, enjoyed less and less, and hopefully, finally, not at all.

Poor chaste mature Lincoln (experienced in the world) had an understanding of drinkers, accepted that they could be good hearted people, aware of suffering.  Never one for a taste of it, beside the occasional diplomatic sip of wine, he put it aside.

To really grasp suffering, it follows that you need to be beaten down.  It needs be that you really have to see how the mind itself is what causes us to suffer, through its needs, through its constant whining, through its immediate urges, through all its misdirections.  Some of us, I suppose, can neatly avoid that, and live a well-functioning life amidst that suffering condition.


Thus does one see the great gentleness to the body, to each muscle, the offer of a tender stretch to realign, to re-realize, that yoga is.  One sees the beauty of its greatest most gentle practitioner seated lotus style under a Ficus tree, right hand touching the earth, I too have the right to be here in this space on this ground, the clear atomic power insight emanating from him.

In waiting on people I am allowed to trust more and more the things I'd naturally say to them.  My line as I held the door open to a nice lady who's going climbing in the Tetons, "even Robert Kennedy didn't like heights so much."