hemoclysm
Another great run/walk today, which will score me 3.5 glasses of wine, some of which I intend to use. I ran to music -- mostly Lucinda Williams who has now risen to ascendancy as the woman I don't know at all whom I love the most. I had a tiny moment of awakening, much like those that I used to enjoy from time to time when I was meditating regularly, when for a brief instant I felt as though I understood something. I'm not even sure I could put this into words that don't sound like something that you might see as the text logo on a Gap commercial, or a beautiful Apple advertisement on a glossy magazine. It had something to do with the differences between the young people I saw bobbing down the trail all filled with vitality and shiny faced lust for life and someone like me -- a puffing middle-aged out-of-shape old guy running not so much to celebrate life's shiny edge as to try to stave off the inevitable decline of years. We were all out there resisting something, in a way. So I had this moment where I realized the futility of that resistance and as a consequence just a tiny, beautiful little feeling of acquiescence to the moment. Yeah, there's the commercial...the logo moment.
I came home, kept my yap shut about my little epiphany, knowing that it wouldn't make a whole lot of sense to anyone not trapped inside this seedy little cranium with me. Instead, I drank water, ate a cookie, fired up the web to see what was new. Coincidentally, I'm a member of a little Buddhist newsgroup that has been absolutely aflame for the past few days over happenings in Tibet. I won't recount the content of the posts, evenly split between those who thought we should all move to Tibet somehow to fend off the Chinese, those who thought that all such conflicts had the same kind of roots and one was just as bad as another, to those who thought the newsgroup should really only be used for discussing the esoterica of various sutta and not for politics. I must say I had some sympathy with all of these points of view. But then one poster offered up an astonishing statistic -- if you laid out all of the people who had died in such conflicts over the course of the 20th century and walked the route of the dead, it would take you 4 years to traverse the whole line if you covered 100 miles per day. That's roughly 150,000,000 people, folks. I don't know enough history, so I did the obvious -- I googled the stats. I found this .
Jeebus but we're a bad species.
Why are some of us struggling so hard to save our species?
Let the earth be rid of us and pass the wine.
I came home, kept my yap shut about my little epiphany, knowing that it wouldn't make a whole lot of sense to anyone not trapped inside this seedy little cranium with me. Instead, I drank water, ate a cookie, fired up the web to see what was new. Coincidentally, I'm a member of a little Buddhist newsgroup that has been absolutely aflame for the past few days over happenings in Tibet. I won't recount the content of the posts, evenly split between those who thought we should all move to Tibet somehow to fend off the Chinese, those who thought that all such conflicts had the same kind of roots and one was just as bad as another, to those who thought the newsgroup should really only be used for discussing the esoterica of various sutta and not for politics. I must say I had some sympathy with all of these points of view. But then one poster offered up an astonishing statistic -- if you laid out all of the people who had died in such conflicts over the course of the 20th century and walked the route of the dead, it would take you 4 years to traverse the whole line if you covered 100 miles per day. That's roughly 150,000,000 people, folks. I don't know enough history, so I did the obvious -- I googled the stats. I found this .
Jeebus but we're a bad species.
Why are some of us struggling so hard to save our species?
Let the earth be rid of us and pass the wine.
posted by Colin at 3:55 PM
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