My lovely Polish neighbor tells a story. She and her husband have escaped from Soviet Bloc Poland to Stockholm. (They were putting him on a train to Siberia. He slipped away.) They have with them basically just the clothes they are wearing, a few photographs. Free of possessions, she describes the moment as a feeling of bliss, the joy of freedom.

Such a moment is rare, for the most of us, for much of our days, but every now and then, there comes a pleasant whiff of that feeling, maybe a day off, so maybe it's not so rare. Today I will tell the reader the story of finally deciding not to buy the cheap car a friend had interested in me. Good little car, nothing against it, but between the bureaucracy of parking in the rare free zones, that of getting a mechanic to pre-inspect it before seeing if the car would pass DC Inspection, fixing a few things, new seat belts, insurance, temporary tags, etc., to say nothing of traffic, I finally came to a simple decision. (Maybe the fact that the AC doesn't happen to work was part of this today.)

I went and parked out back behind the Bistrot, where I had first picked it up and driven it, not quite legally, away. To celebrate, I went grocery shopping, and walked home through the woods with my groceries on my back.

I sometimes think that by simple virtue of being incarnated, i.e. living, in the world, we are cast as forms of mental patients. We are very simple beings, in as far as our minds operate. And of course the modern world throws complications at us in the course of living. Stuff that is really a bit beyond us, but that, good creatures that we are, we manage. Cars, bank accounts, telephones, jobs and bosses, and, if we're lucky, careers. To say nothing of family. Yet, balanced against that, is, maybe, a deep sense of some intangible issue, largely unconscious, but which, at times, we are awaken to. The matters of simple kindness, of being easy and peaceful, mindful of the nature of our deeds, responsible toward good ones.

Maybe in time we grow up, to integrate the automobile into the sangha, into the community which acts are good. I hope for such days. But in the meantime, I don't so much mind walking. Plus it's good exercise.



Post-script, dated 5/29/10, about 1:15 PM:

Interesting enough, May 27, 2010, brought me further liberation, as if to prove that if you can say no to one tempting demon of Mara and illusion's offer, you'll find a clear enough mind to let the bully's brethren fall. What you were down on yourself for not finishing, not providing, not doing, turns out to be quiet good fortune, a weight lifted, a bad self-image (which was based on some illusion of self one seems obliged to buy into) taken away, removed. Doubt, too, is a demon, one of the bad actions a person can fall to.

And what was left was like all good people in their good moments, a quiet content person, delighted with the world and its designs and all its lovely loving details, within and without.

There I was, without a car, without something else that might bear on a personal life such as a marriage or a career choice would, a complete figment of my imagination anyway I am, if I were selfish, embarrassed to say with respect to all parties. Other minds, rejecting, are wiser than my own, and I am grateful to the common wisdom. There I was, free, and happy, and feeling good, at peace, once again. Bless the stars above, the freedom they bring.