yuk yuk

Two little kids are in a hospital, lying on stretchers next to each other, outside the operating room.

The first kid leans over and asks, "What are you in here for?"

The second kid says, "I have to get my tonsils out and I'm a little scared."

The first kid says, "Don't worry. I had that done when I was four. They put you to sleep, and when you wake up they give you lots of Jell-O and ice cream. It's a breeze."

The second kid then asks, "What are you here for?"

The first kid says, "A circumcision."

And the second kid says, "Whoa, good luck buddy. I had that done when I was born. Couldn't walk for a year."

another way to observe the threat of war

The patient person is one who can see the overall event, that things change, move and flow. What seems so terrible today may seem quite all right tomorrow or next month or next year. What was so urgently required and needed a year ago makes absolutely no difference today. In this manner one pays non-judgmental attention to whatever is happening. If it isn’t exactly as one had hoped it could be, all of it is looked upon as just part of the flux and the flow.
--Ayya Khema
From the book, Being Nobody Going Nowhere, published by Wisdom Publications, Boston

Okay -- I guess this too is all just part of the flux and flow. Nevertheless, I plan to write to my Member of Parliament and the Prime Minister this week to voice my dissent against going to war against Iraq. I'm not even supportive if the UN Security Council agrees to do it -- nobody has made a strong enough case for it in my opinion. I'm not convinced that this has anything to do with a humanitarian desire to disarm a dictator -- it's seems much more likely to be motivated by an American desire to protect its oil interests.

(no subject)

I've been placing a lot of quotations in my journal lately. In part, this is because whenever I sit to write something about my own experience, I find that no words are coming. I want to describe this experience of no-mind that I have, but its very nature prevents me from saying very much about it.

In practice, what's happening is that I'm using time as a physical construct according to my logistical needs of the moment. I think Tolle calls this "clock time." I might spend a few minutes out of every hour engaged in clock time; this is when I plan out my meals for the day, decide what I need to get done that day or week, or schedule any appointments, meetings or other tasks that I might have.

Apart from these moments, the rest of time is spent just being here, and mainly being with Z. She's a babbling crawling machine right now, so I have to watch where she is most of the time and I also enjoy getting down on the floor and playing with her. Several hours a day are passed like this, often including a walk with the dogs outside. Eventually, B comes home from work and I make our dinner. Sometime after dinner, I clean up the kitchen while B bathes Z and puts her to bed, and then after Z's in bed, I listen to B talk about her day, and I tell her stories about Z from that day. Then we go to bed, usually not much later than 9:30 or 10. We read a little before bed (right now I'm on my first reading of To Kill A Mockingbird, which I'm really enjoying -- I read Life of Pi last week, which was fantastic), and then we go to sleep. Once the lights are out, I'm usually asleep within 2 or 3 minutes. I wake up only when Z cries, and then I go and soothe her briefly, replace her pacifier, and go back to sleep myself.

It's an extremely simple life. Each moment unfolds very peacefully, and for weeks, I haven't found much of anything that gets stuck anywhere inside me. Days and weeks flow through me like water through a sieve, and as I said before, there's not much else to say about it.

And no, it's not boring in the least. If I had to qualify the experience, I'd say it was perfectly beautiful. It's characterized mainly by an utter acceptance of whatever is happening each moment, which in turn leads to an utterly friction-free passage of time. I have no idea if I'd be as peaceful if I was living in Afghanistan or if I had a more stressful job, but since neither of those scenarios apply to me, I'm not worried about it. I tend to think that I'd be essentially the same way, though. Unless I made some kind of conscious decision not to be.

(no subject)

While watching a video of Ari Fleischer talking about what to expect in the State of the Union address, I clicked on the "visualization" link to see what would happen. The picture below is what replaced Ari's face. I thought it was too funny not to share.