And So Now

I am not walking today which makes me feel so guilty but Mr. Moon and I went out last night and played bar trivia with Hank and it was fun and we got in late and I was half-wakeful all night and the boys are coming out soon to be taken care of and so here I am, waking up for real and wholey and feeling as if I'd let the entire universe down by not walking and once again I am reminded of Anne Lamott's words in Operating Instructions where she said something like, "I am the piece of shit the world revolves around." 

This is probably not a healthy state of mind. 

I had written my Buddhist friend K. about self-compassion because he is my go-to guy on such matters and last night I got an e-mail from him and in it he wrote this:

This is the stuff that Buddha, not Dogen or those hard Japanese monks, is talking about.
And he's not scared of using mind vs. mind kind of action (abhorred by the Zennites). He has some "set up exercises" that largely revolve around introducing positive states of mind to counter the three poisons of greed, anger and ignorance. One of them involves the active practice of metta or, as HG and manyothers translate it, Universal Loving Kindness (you know all this, I know). Before you sit, or after you sit, or before bed or whenever, you spend a bit of time banishing thoughts of self-hatred and self-condemnation and, to that end, recite the following to yoself. You say:

May I be well, happy, and peaceful. May no harm come to me. May no difficulties come to me. May no problems come to me. May I always meet with success. May I also have patience, courage, understanding, and determination to meet and overcome inevitable difficulties, problems, and failures of life.

You continue on for seven more stanzas, but instead of the "I" that you ask for, you ask in turn for the "good fortune" of your parents, your teachers, your family, your friends, all persons who are strangers to you, and then, radically, for your enemies, and finally all living beings. Who are you asking? Nobody. But it's medicine they say, one that the Dalai Lama says he takes a lot.

Wow. Is that even possible? 

I don't really understand Buddhism at all. The very wings of it fly from my mind just as I think I grasp the slightest image of it from the corners of my vision. K. has recommended a book, Henepola Gunaratana's Mindfulness in Plain English and perhaps, yes, it would be a good thing for me to read. He says he is going to read The Billy Bob Tapes so it would be only fair.

I don't know. 

It is still cooler, the air is moving today, Elvis crows to be let out, I am struggling these days not to feel like an empty seed pod on the tree of life and my boys are coming soon and if there is an antidote to that feeling, it is the care of them that I provide sometimes. It is so easy to practice loving kindness when I am with them. My grandmother soul seems to have come preloaded with the software for that. 

Anyway, there you go and this is how it goes some days and maybe tomorrow I'll discuss something like side boob and the celebrities who bare it or maybe potty training which I hear is going fairly well with that boy, my Owen, who will be three at the end of this month. Or perhaps I will give you a recipe or a story about a child who grew up on a river with pirate dreams and waking nightmares or perhaps I'll bemoan aging again but... wait. I just went to a news site and I see that the American ambassador to Libya was killed by angry mobs who were protesting a film that supposedly ridiculed Islam's Prophet Muhammad.

What an insane world we live in. 

Would it be appropriate in the least to feel sane within it? 

I'll let you answer that because I surely cannot.

May you be well, happy and peaceful. May no harm come to you. May no difficulties come to you. May no problems come to you. May you always meet with success. May you also have patience, courage, understanding and determination to meet and overcome inevitable difficulties, problems, and failures of life.

There. It's a beginning. I don't believe any of that is truly possible but I do believe it's okay to make the wish of it. To accept the fact that difficulties, problems and failures of life are inevitable.

In Loving Kindness...Ms. Moon