Thought sketch:


It is like being a prison, working that job, particularly more than four shifts per week, or at least when you were sick, not feeling well.  You wondered how it must all be worth it.   Great place to ply my trade, could not have been more perfect, but at the end of the week, three days exhausted.  Sleep.  No social life at all.   Turned inward, sexually, intellectually, spiritually.  Sexuality becomes self-erotica, auto-erotica, and, so it goes, homo-erotica in its very essence.  At least it doesn't cause you any trouble, and it's safe.

There is a further benefit, in that the drive we term sexuality is the same flow that any yogi or yogini feels coming up through the chakras along the spine, from base at the tail bone up through all seven of them and to the top, the seat of consciousness.  There is the Buddha in my Tibetan statue holding upward in his left palm a pine cone sort of a thing with seven, perhaps eight, layers rising gracefully to a point at the top, as his right hand reaches down beyond his right knee to touch the earth, as his justification, as his witness, "here, Mara, and your legions of tempting devils and fears and emotionally preying show of thunder and arrows and demons, I belong, perfectly fine."

This, at least for some of us, the enlightening power of sexual energy and pleasure, drawn to do the work of physical and mental health.


Out there at the restaurants and the markets, on the sidewalks, there are the people who have other people to talk to, and they are in synch with each other, and they act in such a way that makes you feel further excluded.  Their style is in, yours is out, they belong, and you don't.

This is why I've always favored a kind approach to strangers, non judgmental.  The attempt to be the Good Samaritan, at least in the form of paying attention to other human beings.



Well, you wrote a book.  The book as its moments, some humbly decent prose here and there.  But when you don't have time for it, those achievements are far away and strange, intangible.

And all you have left to turn to, is the Buddha.  Much of the terminologies of understanding popular life, or is the popular understandings of life that I mean, such terms are completely inadequate and unjust.  Not only are the dualities we must stick to, attractive/not attractive, sexy/not sexy, wealthy and responsible to the world/not wealthy, nor responsible to the world, right/wrong, thoroughly out of place in the deeper Buddha understanding of the world, they are judgmental and vastly inaccurate to ever mutable life and one's own travels through the ever-changing river of life and time and space and mental activity and psychological reactions.  And people who would push clear judgment and emphasize the rightness (of themselves) and the wrongness (of others), is, like calling the hard work of the news reporter honestly trying to develop a view and some truthful consideration, reinforce the opposite of thoughtful and workable reactions.



Mind you, I went into the workweek, having returned from a not easy visit with my lovely old man who lives with her cat, too far away, I vowed to be good, I even had one night without any wine at all.    And still I was good, even at work, though I succumbed to be convinced by the girls at work to go to the Russian place where there is Karaoke on Wednesday nights upstairs, which I should not have done, though being a good sport, as it took away from my efforts to practice the Noble Truths and Eightfold Path, out of some strange thought it my mind that it would be nice to lay eyes upon some hot Russian chicks at the end of one week.

I needed to make some money, though, to pay off another round of missed wages and car rental and groceries for mom, etc.  What can you do.  I went back to work, and that was the schedule, and Restaurant Week was timed with the usual hacking summer cold that comes with the ups and downs waiting for the arrival of ragweed season.  I went back to work, selling dinners of meat and serving to people whatever intoxicants they are legally allowed as they wish.  Whether or not this is simply life and the middle path the Buddha spoke of,  as long as moderation is preached, who is to say...  Would I rather be leading hikes and spiritual retreats, yes, but here, just so, there are the lessons of life in this job I do amidst the life in this crazy world.


At one point does karma allow one to, in effect, depart from the world, so to speak, to sit under the Ficus Religiosa Tree, and achieve our own little form of great understanding and acceptance, I am here, the Earth is my witness, and I have a right to be here.


What was it that Hemingway wrote, about how we are broken, that we are strong in the broken places, that we are not defeated...  It's a thought not far away from Buddhist thought.  Realize you are broken, that all is burning, that life is change, miserable, until we learn to accept the present moment as it is.