Month: April 2009

  • kitten haiku

    black and white kitten
    romping, bopping ‘cross the floor–
    dit dit dit dit dit.

    (Author’s note–I have a new crop of kittens in the cabin and one of the black and white ones, named Zorro, is the most intrepid–first out of the nest box, first to venture out the door onto the porch. I saw him just bopping along the floor this morning and the above just popped into my head, dits and all–with some re-writing after the fact.)  

  • I denied God yesterday

    Denying God is not as melodramatic as the gospel might have you believe. Nor need it be a angsty as shaking one’s fist at the sky and screaming “There is no God!”

    God is not some invisible friend in the sky, nor a super Santa Claus who keeps a list of who’s naughty and who’s nice–God is infinite, not confined to a mythical heaven, but is in all of us, and everything.

    God is love, and God is the most loving and grateful and charitable and noble and honest part of us. We deny God when we fall short of our greatest and grandest conception of ourselves and what we can be.

    We deny God when we are impatient with children or the elderly.

    We deny God when we observe beauty in nature and scurry past, failing to take a moment to appreciate it.

    We deny God when we have a kind or loving impulse and fail to act on it.

    Yesterday, I was at the local box store, and used the men’s room. As I left, I noticed an employee cleaning out the women’s room. I felt like thanking him, telling him I appreciated his efforts, that his work meant a lot to me, since I don’t have running water in my cabin. It might have brightened his day, and that small act of kindness might have spread and grown–small acts have a way of doing that.

    But I didn’t. I was too busy, and thought he might resent my intrusion or think I as being patronizing or sarcastic. Truth is, I was fearful. And fear always drives out love.

    And now I am ashamed.

  • Advice

    Here is some advice to guys on what women to avoid, based on some fifty years experience.

    1.  Clothing is a good clue.  Avoid women wearing t-shirts that say things like “death to the penis-wielders,” “testosterone sucks,” or “condom-free blow jobs, $20.”

    2.  Hygiene is important.  Avoid a women whose nose ring is dripping green pus.

    3.  Avoid a woman carrying a sword, unless you are at a D & D con, or an SCA event.

    4.  Breast-feeding an infant in public is a good sign.  It means she is nurturing, and may be a desperate single mom.  Avoid a woman who is breast-feeding another woman, or a pet.

    5.  Avoid a woman with a swastika tattooed on her forehead especially if you are Jewish, UNLESS you are a member of the Aryan Brotherhood. 

    6.  Avoid women with webbed hands, especially if they have matching gills.

    7.  Avoid a woman wearing camo and carrying a gun, UNLESS A) you are also wearing camo and carrying a bigger gun or B) you are in Alaska.

    8.  Avoid a woman who has a beard, UNLESS A) the circus is in town or B) you are in Alaska.

    9.  Avoid women who pay too much attention to the wrong things, like a women who has braided her arm-pit hair.

    Finally, never have sex with a shemale who has a bigger penis than you do.  This may lead to  all sorts of unexpected complications–like finding out you are gay.

  • everything matters/nothing matters

    I have read, and accept as true, that simply being born into this world gives you the right to try to change it. Thing is, you need to be very wise and very kind and very careful about what you do to folks, what you say to them–and to avoid taking something from them unless you are prepared to give them something better in return.

    On the other hand, one might argue that it doesn’t matter–that at the Highest Level, good and evil are the same. And that since we all have immortal souls, what happens in any single lifetime cannot possibly matter in the long run. This too is true.

    But we don’t exist in “the long run”–we exist–or at least ideally, we do–we exist in the here and now. Right here. Right now.

    When you get down to it, right now–this present moment– is all we have to work with. And every moment is a gift–which is why we call it “the present.”

    So, how do we resolve this paradox? Or is it even a parodox, but rather a paradigm? Brother, can you paradigm? Or does three of a kind beat two paradox? And what does this mean, anyway?

    We create our own reality. (Except for when we don’t.) So it all means exactly what we choose for it to mean. That is, events–what some might see as deep omens or portents–have NO intrinsic meaning. This is not nihilism, I think, but enlightened materialism. That is, we create our reality, our own personal universe, out of the one billionth or so of the vast chaotic quantum soup that passes for subjective reality which our limited senses can perceive–or misperceive.

    How do we avoid misperception? I would suggest this–look through the eyes of love, and you will always see that which is most bright, most true, most enduring.

    Look through the eyes of fear, and you will see snares and delusions.

     
    __________________
    Disquietude is always vanity because it serves no good. — St John of the Cross
    What is known as the teaching of the Buddha is not the teaching of the Buddha. — Diamond Sutra
    Can I explain the Friend to one for whom He is no Friend? — Jalal-uddin Rumi

    (Submitted for Featured Grownups topic of “change.” )