Bedtime Story

I am telling a story.

Rocking the Microphone

Taking my cue from digital disaster, I realize that all the wonderful things to do in Madison this evening including rare occasions such as Evan's birthday party (aka time to spend with Ultimate folks, my people), Senegalese hip hop at the Union Theatre with peaceful people I admire, MotoPrimatives show at Revoultion Cycles, and a gallery adventure with friends at the Humanities building had to sit down for a night and leave me to write. It has been a good night of it, too. I doubled my paper on Habermas's notion of the public sphere in Tibetan spiritual landscape. This feels very good considering I lost most of it in the electrostupidquake of 2006.

In Better News

Madison was wonderfully warm today and I collected many sympathies for my computational challenge. I am shopping nerds to excavate data from my shiny new, washed (as in tortured until assenting to falsehood) hard drive.

It was the kind of smiling day during which Madisonians coaxed their loved ones, guests, and dates out onto the ice to experience what is usually a March bound paradox: delicious warmth on top of frozen water.

Hamas now runs the unborn Palestinian state much to the chagrin of freedom loving rightists everywhere. Perpetually ignorant freedom lovers are faced with yet another example of democracy at work. As liberal political society marches on around the world it will become more obvious that just because some folks voted, doesn't mean they aren't going to elect a party that is pissed off.

It is a bit upsetting, actually, that some find it surprising that democratic elections are not going to distill common distaste for being bombed, isolated, demonized, and colonized. Are seventy percent of Palestinians angry enough to elect a political party with a history of armed resistance to seventy percent of assembly seats? Isn't that representation? Would you re-elect a government that caved to US and Israeli interests (namely the systematic destruction/genocide of Palestinian culture?) and stood by while 10 meter concrete "fences" were erected around Palestinian towns?

Jeez.

On my way to the office tonight, I walked by a chorus of Christians singing "Jesus loves me" songs in Library Mall. Their orbit of solicitors (young, beautiful women) asked me, "do you need something to read tonight?" I replied, "Uh...I have plenty to read tonight, thanks." I walked by. Then, I turned around and went back to sit for a few of their 2 minute songs. I like choir music. I like people who believe something enough to stand in the middle of the city of sin and sing about it. I like that there were 30+ of them, men and women. I like the idea of trusting Jesus's words. Many evangelists seem cynical. They come to Madison knowing it is a hateful place already with satanists, UUs, and (gasp) Buddhists. These kids, though, they seemed to be happier, calmer. They seemed to have purer intentions. I like that. Even if their purity is only skin deep, if they embody purity even for an hour of singing, I want to be there for that.

Peace.

Backup? What Backup?

It is all gone. 2 and a half years of work: reformatted. It sounds like such a nice process, doesn't it? I was so happy as I watched the little blue bar grow larger and larger indicating my computer was on its way to a new life/operating system. Little did I know the horrors going on behind that blue bar. The gruesome blue death of my academic life's work being shredded by the cold blades of redefinition. Call me. Ask me if I am writing. If I hesitate, bludgeon me with the reality of my situation: If I don't write I will have nothing.

Nothing.

No thing.

No.

N.

Storming

The infinitely vast code slowly continues to click, digit by digit, into demonic place. This secret language arcs through an ocean of being sending fractal branches into its cold depths. Somehow that arc strikes directly, if deliberate and slow, and raises the spine of a swelling crest.

The arc is not alone. The amplitude of the surge emerges from an upwelling underneath. Ubiquitous iterations fill in an adrenal system that excites every lost corner of the oceanic body. Those distant and still quarters add their wavering to the forced harmony of liquid constitution.

A storm comes.

It will go.

Irreverence and Comedy in LA

Thanks to CCW over at Walking Alone/Together for this one. Please leave a comment revealing how long it took for this to load for you. If it takes too long, I will dump it.

Home Away From Home

Zombie Defense

Before you get back to work make sure you are prepared for the necropalypse.

Sushi

Cherry Blossom Friends
Creeping Sun Swiss Trip Web Mist
We Recalled Far Days

Reactivated: Phone

I am back in the cellular mix. The NSA can safely track my every move once again. Please call me, because I don't have your number any more.

Aversion

By Melissa Morton

Averting Aversion

Over the new year I served a meditation course in the wilds of northern Illinois, just south of the border. The course was 10 full days long. I was not a sitter for whom the course is designed. I worked as a volunteer on the support staff for the sitters so that they need only work on their meditation. I did some sitting as well, myself.

The sitters sit for 10-12 hours a day for 10 days. As a server, I sat 4-6 hours a day and worked in the kitchen another 6-8 hours. Sitting means sitting, doing a form of analytical meditation in which one focuses one's awareness on bodily sensation as well as attempting to maintain a mind free from attachment or aversion to those sensations, to emotional responses to those sensations, and to distractions from concentration.

I have returned to this other world, the real world, in which people are not paying close attention to their minds nor to their reactions to the people and world around them. It is hard to avoid feeling a bit of anger, sadness, and disappointment about the state of the world out here.

I write this post to mark the realization that this the task ahead of me: to let go of my strong aversion for what I often consider to be world lost to greed, hate, craving, and stupidity.

The aim of the retreat and the technique I practiced was not to bliss out and escape this mess. It is to develop and equanimity towards the mess. The mess is bad enough itself, it doesn't need me to go hating it. This equanimity, as well as a good dose of compassion, is the balm that will heal and transform my reactions to the world into action. Rather than hating the world which does it no good and does me worse, I am charged with pausing, putting the brakes on my aversion, and letting the world (and myself) simply be as it is. Then, with the peace of equanimity, I can act with compassion and intention in the world.

Any thoughts on what to do?