The Parable of the Honey Jar

I flung down the spoon. "All I want," I said, "all I want is a couple drops of honey, and I can't get them! If I had a spatula I could get it out, but this damn spoon doesn't work."

Martha hefted the jar and looked at it cautiously.

"I know, I know," I said. "If I could scrape better I could get it out. It's a poor craftsman blames his tools."

"Well, maybe that's the problem," she said dubiously.

"Okay, I know," I said. The real problem is that I shouldn't be attached to honey at all."

"I suppose that might be it," she agreed. "But I was thinking it might be because this is a peanut butter jar."

Refuge

I wrote this yesterday, in response to a comment thread I may have misunderstood completely. My interlocutor, by the way, said genuine human connection was nearly impossible, not impossible. I don't have time to edit this properly, even to try to mitigate the sanctimonious tone I fall into so easily, but I'm posting it anyway, because if I don't I will try to edit it, and I need to get other things done. And besides I already said I was going to post it.

----

I see. Yes, you're right, of course: I was getting hung up on terminology. But I agree. The thing you're calling "genuine human connection" is indeed impossible.

What does "genuine human connection" mean? It means three things, I'm guessing. One is lucid communication, that is, communication in which the receiver gets precisely what the sender is sending. This is clearly impossible in ordinary worldly relations; I suspect it's impossible even for those -- supposing they exist -- who can communicate without material mediation. Short of complete enlightenment (which is to me a purely theoretical state that I don't particularly believe has ever been or will ever be attained) such communication is impossible.

The second thing that "genuine human connection" might mean is a connection in which neither fails the other. This too is impossible in worldly relationships. The lack of lucid communication would render it so in and of itself; but even picturing a relationship in which neither ever let the other down even by the lights of such communication as they have, there's always the final betrayal. One dies, leaving the other alone. (You can make up car-crash fantasies if you like; it so seldom works that way that I don't find it interesting.)

The last thing I can conceive of "genuine human connection" meaning is, a connection which is untainted by ego-gratification. Only beings untainted by ego could pull such a thing off. I don't see a lot of those around, and I'm not expecting them to show up any time soon. As Yeats's old priest says,

...only God, my dear,
Can love you for yourself alone,
And not your yellow hair.

The concept of Refuge is a terribly important one in Buddhism. The vow that marks the difference between Buddhist and non-Buddhist is called the Refuge Vow. And the gist of that vow is the recognition that all worldly refuges fail. Including, of course, genuine human connection. So we turn away from those refuges and take refuge in something else.

Note that the pleasures of the world are not what we turn away from. Likewise human connections are not what we turn away from. What we turn away from is what we call "false refuge." "Genuine human connection" is a perfect example of false refuge, of leaning on the world for things the world, in the nature of things, simply can't supply.

There are two reasons to turn away from false refuge. One, the most important to me, is that it turns us away from true refuge, from the things called, in my tradition, the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha (read, if you like, in the widest sense, "my own pure mind, the teachings of any spiritual tradition, and everyone who practices them." Or in the narrowest sense, "Siddartha Gautama, the sutras, and the great bodhisattvas.")

But there's another reason, which you don't need to get all religious to take seriously. By taking false refuge in things, you can ruin them. How many friendships have I destroyed in my life, by pushing them till they broke, by trying to make them "genuine connections?" Too many. I almost did it again recently, and I'm still white from the shock. And not just that. When do they break? Precisely when I lean hardest on them, that is, precisely when I need them most.

Moonlight

If you read anything today, read Susurra's contemplation of spider love:

I wonder if I had one dance to complete, and when it was done my life was done too, how much time I would spend getting it exactly right.

-----

This blue moon lingers, its baleful distortions running in all directions, drowning all the stars. Cold light. A travesty of peace.

Peace.

To Mercy Pity Peace and Love.
All pray in their distress

Counting up the lies I have told, explicitly or implicitly, in the past few days. It comes to an impressive total. I told someone I didn't take his friendship seriously anymore. What bullshit.

Love to give or to withhold
Is not at my command.

They say that anger is like fire, but I think it's like moonlight. Making all warm comfortable intimate things into cold unrecognizable strangers. I was so angry yesterday. Misunderstood so much, misconstrued so much. And at the end -- how does that go?

Feet to the East or West may run
They patter still on the same small stone.

I could no more not take his friendship seriously than I could walk up to the moon and paint it in a nice warm color scheme.

We are taught that, while anger on our own behalf is wrong, anger on others' behalf is just fine. More bullshit. There is only one kind of anger, no matter whose behalf it's on, and it feeds on half-truths and shits poisonous pure lies. How many times must I learn that lesson, before I get it by heart, and remember it before I pour out words? Words come to me altogether too easily, too quickly.

To Mercy Pity Peace and Love.
All pray in their distress

A Spontaneous Trot

I've lost enough weight now that I sometimes break into a trot, or even a run, without thinking about it. Just twenty or thirty yards, to catch a bus, say, or to "run back to the house" to get a notebook.

If you've never been heavy enough to have gradually subsided into never going faster than a walking pace, without due consideration and examination of consequences ("Are my knees up to this today?" or "Just how stupid will I look, flopping along?") you probably have no idea how wonderful, how liberating, how exhilirating it is. Picture looking up at the blue sky and finding yourself just flying up into it -- that gives you some idea.

Kiltartan Cross

Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan's poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.

----

Those lines from Yeats's "Irish Airman" have been coiling through my mind all day.

----

What I really wanted to do for a living -- what I really want to do for a living -- is massage. I get so sick of words and images, keyboards and monitors.

The moment I yearn for is that moment when I lay both my hands lightly on a person's back and just listen, listen to their body. Listen for the distress. It's so clear, usually. And the love then doesn't have to be translated or justified or excused or isolated or extenuated. Follow the path of the distress, and hear it with my fingers, and work with it, till it opens in my hands. That's a love that I've never mistrusted. That's all I ever wanted to do.

I bought a massage table, a few years ago. It sits in my closet. Never been used.

First Gentleman. And just how would you put two children through college, then?

Second Gentleman. "All you ever wanted to do?" Oh, really! It seems to me I've heard you voice some other desires, from time to time. I must have been mistaken.

Yeah, yeah. I know.

Second Draft
 
Well, there's this piece. I look at a beautiful woman, and I want her. Sure. That's pretty simple. It's desire. It's very like looking at a hamburger and wanting it. Neither complicated nor problematic.

Then there's admiring a woman and falling in love with her. Lots more things in play here. My own worth is on the table. She is such an admirable person -- if she loved me, then I would be an admirable person. The whole catalogue of virtues is a catalogue of things I want to own, have a stake in, be associated with. Do I admire her apart from that? I don't know. I know I admire physical beauty, apart from desire. Maybe it's the same sort of thing. Don't know. Not sure I've ever experienced pure moral admiration, in the way that I know I've experienced pure appreciation of physical beauty. This kind of infatuation, it seems to me, has more to do with ownership and territory, than with compassion. I don't want her to be happy, if she's going to be happy without me. If she's going to be without me, I want her to suffer and pine about it. I want her to want me desperately.  And I want the other people who want her to be disappointed.  How is that compassion, by any stretch?

(Not that this is confined to erotic love. I see many people respond to lama Michael in precisely the same way. We want to be special to him. We want to be his best student. The vajrayana exploits this ego-investment in our teachers shamelessly.)

Where is compassion, in all this? Where it always is -- mixed up with every goddamn thing in every possible way. I do sincerely desire the happiness of someone I'm in love with. Simple friendship and kindliness leaks through. And the more it does leak through, the more the infatuation dwindles. Isn't that in itself something to make me a little suspicious of "being in love?"

Yet the ferocity of infatuation resonates with something deeper, as Dante knew very well. It resonates with any rapturous reponse to something beautiful. It's a hunger for God, as Dante would put it, or for the transcendance of the self, as I would. It's not even exactly misplaced -- just misunderstood and misapplied.

Casting Grief before Monkeys

The occasion of the grief is nothing; you'd laugh at me if I told you. Laugh even more, if I told you how short a time I've had to bear it. Remember when the people all tell Curious George that he's been a brave little monkey? They would not say as much to me. I am not a brave little monkey. Especially not today.

I have poured water into offering bowls, wine into glasses, rice into measuring cups. The slow filling. Like that. The grief filling me up. There is not much room for anything but grief. I've been filled carefully, so that I won't spill. There's space for the grieving to tremble, and run from rim to rim. I can do my work, minimally. Chat with Martha.  Read to the kids at night. But I'm walking around carrying, really, nothing but grief.

How long? What for?

Well, those are two good ways of turning grief into suffering. I wave them away. Like persistent mosquitos, they sidestep, and make for the dark places. Not gone for long.

I'm balanced between two void spaces, and feeling the loss of my youth, sure. (How long? What for?) Losses left and right. And this is a good life, remember? A life devoutly to be desired.

Blue-sky morning. Cool air. Crows scolding. (How long? What for?)

Flickers of joy, of ferocity. Moments of openhandedness. Is it all a pretense? Sure. For seconds at a time, it can be a pretense. Next question.

Long power wires, slowly climbing over my head. The sun is tangled in their braids, and their shadows are swaying. (How long? What for?)

6:27, and the omze's cushion is empty, and the candles are unlit. Quick, light the candles, offer the liturgy. Ring the bell. Oh, I love to ring the bell. Like a little boy loves to sit at the steering wheel. I've stepped into someone's shoes. Meditating, the persistent thought arises: how do I make sure everyone knows I stepped into the breach, even though it wasn't my turn, without appearing to want everybody to know that? Back to the breath. Back comes the thought. Back to the breath. (How long? What for?)

I reach with my mind, but I know I can't do it. I don't know how. Not strong enough even if I knew, I bet. A raw recruit. ("...and they pronounce him fit to fight. / There are blackheads on his shoulders, / and he pees himself in the night.")

Grieving songs and poems come to me. "O Margaret are you grieving, For golden groves unleaving?..." and "If you had seen my Charlie at the head of an army, / He was a gallant sight to behold..." and "ghastly through the drizzling rain / On the bald street breaks the blank day."

(How long? What for?) Wearily, I wave them away again. Just the grief. Just keep the grief. Celebrate the grief. It's the gift that today's wind has blown to me. Treasure it. Kings and emperors have gone to their graves with no such gift of grief.   Else speak "Of one whose hand, /Like the base Indian, threw a jewel away,  / Richer than all his tribe. "

Draft

(In response to Andi's response to Kurt.   I am, by the way, exagerating my personal history here, which has been quite a bit more nuanced, not to say boring, than I find I am representing it to be.)

Know the sex, and the sex will make you free.

Nobody ever actually said that to me, but it was scripture in my early life, implicit in all kinds of Rousseau-ish manifestos I swallowed whole back in the sixties and seventies. I did my best.

Came a time when I had to look back over my life and ask, all right, so when has sex ever made me free? When does it make good on this promise? Easy to see how it binds me. So when does the freedom part come in?

I don't see how I can honestly answer anything but, probably never. At my age you start unloading the future a bit. Bets that you've made all your life, that have never come off -- you start to think of cashing out and calling it a day on them. I kept betting that if I just found the right circumstances -- the right constellation of partners, and the right supportive culture -- sex would take me somewhere other than obsessive-compulsive land. It's time to step back from the green felt tables and say -- what if maybe it's time to stop playing this game? Now that I've lost steadily for thirty-five years, might it be time for me to see if there's any information to be gleaned from that?

Panic. Because my sexual openness has been a foundational piece of my self-image. Ego-panic. Remember the story of the monk who constituted his Self on the basis of his collar? I have always constituted my Self on the basis of my free sexuality.

I started off to write some nonsense about human society being biologically programmed to be hierarchical -- that we are pack animals, like dogs or baboons, who always arrange ourselves in power relations, and that sex is one of our primary methods for sorting. Who knows, it may be true; I don't see what asserting it could lead to but endless wrangling. The fact is that I am a pack animal, obsessed with hierarchy, and that my strategy has always been one of subverting the ostensible pack order by surreptitious sex. Doesn't much matter how much the alpha male swaggers it, if you make off with his mate. There's the formal hierarchy, but then there's also a shadow hierarchy of illicit sex. Clearly I was never going to make it in the first, but I had a shot at the second.

One of the stories I told myself was that I was not participating in any hierarchical structures at all. I was tearing them all down. I would liberate people from all hierarchy. I don't think I ever very clearly asked myself why I so particularly wanted to liberate the pretty young partners of dominant males, and why I rapidly lost interest in anyone I could actually have. The fact was I was an abjectly hierarchical creature myself; that sex and domination were completely tangled up in my own mind. But I was only vaguely and intermittently aware of it.

There was a fierce joy in being a rogue animal, admitting no laws higher than my own desire, and owning no master. It draws me even now. That predatory intensity, that single-mindedness, that exultation of power. The political story, the anarchism, my very own brand of liberation theology, was just a cover for it; I had no intention of giving it up.

Do I mean to give it up now?

No, not really. I want to turn it. Decisively turn it away from friends and lovers. I don't want to prey on anyone, anymore, not in reality, and not in my mind. But one of the many eerie unexplained results of practicing Ngondro has been a strong resurgence of that ferocity, at odd times, in odd ways. It can float free of human relationships. I'm not quite sure what it is, when it does that. This is one arena where my Nihilism had never taken hold. I had always believed devoutly in the reality of beautiful women. But growing older, and having children, is gradually eroding that belief. Not that they don't exist (do we need to run through that old business again?) but that they don't exist as I perceive them.

What is this thing that burns, then -- this ferocity? I know whose it is. It belongs to Vajrayogini. But how exactly it's supposed to play in my life, I don't know. And really I think I don't need to know. " Just do the practice, and the meaning will reveal itself." The ferocity itself was never a mistake. Attaching it to particular fantasies, and believing in them -- that was the mistake.

Tourism, Narcissism, and  Buddhist "Nihilism"
 
This post seems too long and rambling and a little disjointed to me, but the longer I wait to post it the less chance there is that anyone will believe me when I say I wrote it before reading N.'s posts, and the comment thread on this topic, at the Glinting Web.  Maybe I'll edit it later.

I have been irked a couple times lately by Buddhists taking the spiritual affliction that we Buddhists call "Nihilism" to map nicely to the psychological affliction we Westerners call "Depression." It does not. The things can overlap easily enough, but they are not the same thing. If Buddhist Nihilism maps to any Western psychological category, it is to "Narcissism."

Buddhist "Nihilism" (which, by the way, has very little in common with Western philosophical "Nihilism") is an affliction of the spirit, which is held to be caused by a precocious realization of emptiness. The Nihilist understands (conceptually, anyway) just how much of his perceived world is projection. He understands that the ordinary distinction between subject and object is a false one. So he no longer takes the world at face value; he no longer views it as "real" in quite the same way as people ordinarily do. He tends to think of it as a hall of mirrors, or a theater, and to treat the people in it as characters. He takes no responsibility for his actions. Why should he? He's not real, either. He is indifferent to the suffering of others, except as it may impinge upon him; after all, it is illusory.

Buddhist teachers generally refer to Nihilism as a pit -- something that is easily blundered into, but not easily climbed out of. They tend -- it seems to me -- to avoid the subject, as if even talking about it were dangerous. As far as I understand -- which I readily confess may not be very far -- Nihilism is not actually wrong. That is, it's not a doctrinal mistake, not a mistake about the nature of reality. But it is a terrible practice mistake, and one that's difficult to recover from, because it prematurely cuts away many of the (in some senses illusory) motivations for practice.

We are already enlightened. There is nothing to be done. Samsara doesn't need fixing, and it can't be fixed. All of Mahayana practice takes place in the context of this paradox: we are working very hard to do something that needn't be done, in order to cure ourselves of afflictions that aren't there.

-- supply your own transition here --

There are two antidotes, they say, to Nihilism. One is the compassion practices, and the other is the contemplation of karma. "The contemplation of karma?" I thought, in disbelief, when I first heard it. "How does that help?" I have never gotten a satisfactory answer, and I wonder if the contemplation of karma is only a valuable antidote to Nihilism if one comes from a culture that already believes in it. Maybe it's as simple -- if you already believe implicitly in karma -- as recalling that actually everybody's suffering impinges upon you, and that all the suffering you cause is going to come home to roost.

Or maybe it is just something I have yet to learn. But the compassion practices are another matter. Nihilism is a precocious realization of emptiness, I said. Precocious, because it has outstripped the realization of compassion. Without an ingrained habit of compassion -- of taking on other people's suffering and delighting in other people's joy -- the conceptual understanding of emptiness can be toxic.

I'm not sure why this is so. I'm also not entirely sure that there may not be some kind of difficult back-alley route out of Nihilism; it's hard for me to see how a really complete realization of emptiness wouldn't eventually undo it (and all other afflictions). But of course, it's possible to sail from New Zealand to Australia by going east, too; It just takes a bit longer.

In any case, much of my own escape from Nihilism was accomplished before I met the Dharma. It was dumb luck, by any rational reckoning. I met Martha.

I have never known anyone whose compassion is as deep and wide and concrete as Martha's. I have never forgotten, 25 years ago, arriving in London with Martha at dawn, American tourists who had almost never been abroad before and knew nothing of London, or indeed of big cities. We walked along gaping at this and that, greatly amused by the pictures of pushme-pullyus on the streets which warned us to look both ways (since Englanders drive on the wrong side of the road, they helpfully warn strangers this way.) We saw an old bag-lady sitting exhausted on the sidewalk. "Oh, look," I was thinking. "They do have street people in London."

But Martha was having an entirely different response. She walked over, sat down next to the woman, and put her hand on her shoulder. "Are you all right?" she asked.

Now, Martha is not a convenient person to live with. To live with Martha is to find oneself building a handicapped-crow access to one's apple tree, so that the broken-winged crow can hop up to a safe perch. It means spending serious money repairing a stray cat who's lost a quarrel with a racoon. It means intervening in a "domestic" three houses down the street at 3:00 a.m. It means taking a bag of groceries to the family living in their car down the street. It means that visiting my mother at the convalescent home also involves visiting with a number of other ill and aged people who happen to be in the same wing, who have no one else to visit them (because, in some cases, they are extremely unpleasant.) It means that spotting a dog trotting uncertainly down a city street almost always means trying to capture the dog and look for its owner.

But if you are someone who needs to learn compassion, you've found the right person to live with. Because it also means you get to see an old London woman light up, with an incredibly beautiful and unexpected smile, and say "I'm just a little tired, dearie, thank you so much!" It means that you live in a world in which no living creature is just scenery. It's a smelly, awkward, inconvenient world, but it's not a theater, not a hall of mirrors.

Before I met Martha I was not just a tourist in London. I was a tourist everywhere, a tourist even in my hometown, in my own family. But Martha has never been a tourist anywhere. She is incapable of watching people as quaint picturesque figures on a screen. They're all always people to her. She's never just visiting. When a narcissist's attention is on you, it's fixed with intensity, but when that attention shifts, it's as if you were never there; you simply disappear. My whole family of origin operated that way. It took me a long time to understand, when we first got together, why Martha generally wanted to know where I was, and when I'd be back. Eventually I learned it was the way normal couples and families operated. They didn't simply wink out of existence for each other when they went away. They were still connected.

When I came to the practice of tong len, "taking and sending" -- maybe the foremost of the compassion practices -- I could almost have laughed. I recognized it at once: I'd been training in it for years, under a master.

Chiasmus
 
There is in it some symmetry and justice --
That, having spent my childhood
In grief, learning resignation,
I should spend my later years in joy,
Trying to learn decorum.

In the Service of my Lord

Take pity on one who has worn himself out in your service, lord.

Except, as you know well, desire takes pity on no one.

Battening upon the throat of this one, and sucking, sucking till my teeth ache. And even as I suck, my eyes wander to that one's throat.

No. I'm afraid you don't know the half of it. I was born among such creatures. Believe me, I know them better than you. You can see them in great sobbing clusters, frantically drinking as the fluid is drained from their bodies. These are not nice creatures. Don't take one home.

A quiet spacious well-scrubbed kitchen, with nothing new in it. That's a good starting place. They will find it hard to enter such a place. Well-tended gardens make them nervous and uncomfortable. So do mended clothes and careful workmanship They gather in the waste spaces, the untended lots. They like places where new, untried goods are jumbled up with discarded things. They come eagerly to where promises are broken. Persistent they may be, but they are not intelligent. Lure them somewhere once, and depend upon it, they'll come back again and again.

But don't mistake their places for hell. There's affection there, too, in all its forms. Recognized, though it is, as a luxury that no one can really afford. Still they indulge in it. They indulge in most things.

A haze of cigarette smoke, a pale watery morning, and a distant coughing that won't stop. Morning is a hard time for these creatures. They blink painfully, and dig their way unsteadily under piles of loose rubbish. Astonished, abashed, indignant and frightened by the coming of the sun.

Teachings

I didn't know Michael very well, back then. I didn't know how hard he works -- few people do. How he'll get called out of the blue, in the night, by someone who is on the brink of suicide, some stranger just checking in to see if the Dharma has anything in it to keep them from pulling the trigger. He'll talk to them for two hours, sleep a few hours, and then get up to lead an all-day sit. Most everyone else goes home from that, after sitting and receiving teachings all day, exhausted; Michael goes on to the evening meditation, and ends his day by teaching for two more hours. And at the end of that two hours his mind is as sharp as it was in the morning.

He may or may not learn whether the person he talked to pulled the trigger. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. He gets to live with that.

A person in a position to know -- not Michael -- once told me, "People think of being a teacher, and think how groovy it would be to have everyone admire them. In fact, people usual come to a teacher pissed off, fed up with him, or fed up with the teachings." Having watched for a while, I see that it's true. What really inspires me to schedule interview time or blast off a two-page email is exasperation, anger, or despair. Michael gets a steady diet of that. But you'd never guess from how readily he laughs, from how delighted he seems at the questions he gets.

One evening I was to be omze, so we arrived a half hour early to open up the center. Sitting on the porch was a young man with wide eyes. I grinned at him. "Were you waiting for us to open up?" I asked. He looked at me blankly for a few moments. You get these people, sometimes. Sometimes they're people just off of retreat, rusty at the brisk patter, the rapid back-and-forth, of communication in the ordinary world. Sometimes they're mentally ill. Sometimes they're stoned. Slowly he focused on me, and made a gesture that might have been a nod, or might have been shaking his head. I went on past him to unlock the door, cravenly and wisely leaving him for Martha to deal with. Martha is gifted at dealing with such people.

As omze, I sit sideways to the shrine, so I could keep a bit of an eye on him. He sat restlessly, distractedly, twitching every now and then; not like someone with a nervous or muscular disorder (you become something of a specialist in twitches, if you observe much meditation), but like someone who just can't keep his mind on his work. Definitely not someone just out of retreat. Ill or stoned, then. But he seemed harmless enough. Martha had taken him under her wing, and gotten him seated.

After an hour's meditation, Michael fielded questions for an hour or so. It was by now nine o'clock, and he had been teaching for twelve hours, and he knew he would have still to talk to people after we officially stopped, too. He cast an eye across us, and spoke to the young man. "Did you have something you wanted to say?" A lot of us had made our evaluation of the young man by now -- there was a sizeable contingent of people in the room who had been hippies in the 60's, and they knew their stoners -- and I could see a few apprehensive looks, looks that said "for heaven's sake, leave well enough alone!"

The young man made some vague noises, clearly undecided. Michael encouraged him. More apprehensive looks from the gallery. The young man finally launched into a speech which I'm afraid I can no longer remember, nor simulate, except to say that if your youth was mispent like mine, you'd immediately recognize the wandering, disjointed, repetitive mystical observations of someone far gone on (at my best guess) mescaline. He went on and on. Most people were staring at the floor, in various phases of mortification.  Michael's time was precious; we wanted Dharma, not chemically-induced maundering.  But I just watched Michael. He was listening with deep, deep attention. When there was a pause, he asked the young man a question, which set him off again. When the young man finally ground to a halt, another twenty minutes later, dimly aware maybe that most of his audience was not altogether with him, a heavy silence fell. I could tell that half a dozen people were trying to think of a way to wrap this up and get our visitor out the door. But usually Michael is the one to end the question period, and he usually does it after responding to the last question.

Michael was holding this young man's gaze very steadily, and smiling. There was clearly a connection being made, a sort of luminosity between them. When Michael spoke, he surprised me again, as he so often does. "What's your name?" he asked.

"What?" said the young man.

"What's your name?" repeated Michael.

"Daniel," he said warily.

"Are you from here, or just visiting?" The questions were so gently put and genuine, that Daniel realized as quick as the rest of us that this was no rhetorical trick, no teaching-moment. Michael chatted gently with him for a few moments, established that he was staying with friends and did know how to get back to them. I had the clearest possible vision of Michael carefully bringing a kite safely to ground, patiently and happily, as though he had no other interest in the world just then. We were an hour over-time by then.

"Thank you," Michael said to him, feelingly, as if he, Michael, had just received a wonderful gift; and then he ended the session.  We had, in fact, gotten Dharma.  It just took us a while to recognize it. 

I wrote this in answer to a very shrewd and compassionate response to my "old religions" post.  Reproduced here by permission.  My correspondent remarked that her discomfort with my post could be boiled down to my having said "that's what you go to a religious tradition for" rather than "that's what I go to a religious tradition for."
 
Heh.  "that's what you go to a religious tradition for."  The comical thing about my universalizing statement there was that I did no such thing.  A religious tradition came and found me.  I didn't consider myself a Buddhist or any other kind of -ist, seven-odd years ago, when I walked into the evening community college class where lama Michael was to teach basic Buddhism.  And if I had been going to pick any religious tradition in all the world, Vajrayana Buddhism, with its florid, baroque art, outlandish practices, veneration of living teachers as if they were gods, and naive delight in miracle-working saints, would have been possibly the last I would have picked.  I was the son of a scientist, for God's sake, raised strictly athiest and rationalist.  But the things Michael said worked.  Hearing his teachings, and doing the things he urged us to do, woke up something in me that had been sleeping fitfully for twenty-some years.  After a long torpor, I felt as alive again as I did when I was twenty (not to mention as foolish and unstable.) 
 
The things he asked us to do were never things such as to believe something, or to give anyone money.  He asked us to meditate.  He asked us to just "try on a view, and see what happens."  He insisted that our own experience was the only valid authority.  He was maybe the very opposite of what I expected from a "religious" man.  It was obvious to me within a couple weeks that I had never before met a real scientist, someone who really treated his assumptions as working hypotheses and really gave them up when the evidence was against them.  Compared to him every scientist I had ever known was a bigot. 
 
So anyway -- I urge you to to say "it hasn't worked for me," rather than "it doesn't work for me."  If that door's closed, leave it that way -- but don't lock it.  I understand very well the pain of yearning for a community.  Probably nothing in my life has grieved me more than not having one,  and the half-ressurection of the desire, and its half-fulfilment, has been intensely painful at times.  So I don't urge staying open to its possibility lightly.  I realize though that this sort of waking up again wouldn't necessarily happen in the context of a teacher and a community.  I stay with this because I'm pretty sure that without it I'd fall asleep again.   If I'm more than a week or two away from the center, my practice and intention start to waver.  I start taking distractions more and more seriously.  It all starts to unravel.  I can't afford that.  I'm 46 years old; another twenty-year sleep would probably about wrap things up for me.  But that's just my story, and it's just today's story.  Michael could die tonight, and the sangha could go to pieces within the month.  Would I really show up at the local Catholic church next month, if it did?  I doubt it.  I'm not at all sure whether this letter makes any sense or is any appropriate kind of answer.  What I set out to say was "whatever you're doing that works, just keep on doing it."

Ways in which I am Wrong 
 
I

The trouble with Westerners, said Chogyam Trungpa, is that they want to witness  their own enlightenment.

II
 
William Blake wrote:  Sooner murder an infant in its cradle, than nurse unacted desires.
 
III
 
A rabbi, a minister, and a priest walk into a bar.  The bartender looks up and says, "what is this, some kind of a joke?"
 
IV 
 
You know, if you'd all just agree to post a comment every day saying, "I like you, Dale!  You're really cool."  Then I could stop doing all this tedious religious blogging.  Think how much time we'd all save.

Interlude: Why I Favor Old Religions

I wanted to pull this up out of the comment thread and elaborate on it. Susurra wrote:

I'm sort of surprised to find you saying that you believe a religion has to be old to be validly transformative. Is that what you are saying? To me, that's sort of like saying seniority in a job matters more than talent. Or that it matters more how long the religion has existed than how well it works for me individually?

I was glad to get the question. (For one thing, it helped me see that my protest against Wicca's claims to being an old tradition could easily appear to be just idle witch-baiting.) I answered:

Well, two things, Susurra. All paths were new once, of course. But an old path 1) has encountered and coped with a number of cultures -- so it's less subject to the culture-blindness of assuming that one's cultural presuppositions are simply universal. And 2) it has acquired an enormous amount of experience and lore and accomplished practitioners. It's likely to know what to do with a broad range of personality types. Most modern paths, I think, appeal mostly to just one or two personality types in one or two cultural contexts, and are fairly helpless to deal with others.

But more than that, and maybe most importantly -- we always tend (appropriately enough) to focus on the next necessary transformation. It's our dearest hope that it will actually succeed, that we will grow into a significantly different person. Any one such transformation is incredibly precious. I'm sorry that I dissed Wicca even as much as I did, because the only spiritual path I would really want to diss is no path at all. Contempt for transformation and indifference to its possibility -- that's a path that leads, I think, straight to hell, and you don't have to wait for death to get there, either.

But we tend -- anyway, I know I tend -- to think of the next transformation as the last one we'll need. It's almost certain not to be. There are doors after doors, thresholds after thresholds to be crossed. (This is only a discouraging thought, by the way, if you're not really paying attention to what it means.) I think that most new paths are likely to be one-trick ponies. There may be one transformation they know how to work, and maybe even to stabilize, but I think if you take to a new-ish path, or a self-devised one, even if it really takes you through a metamorphosis you're pretty likely to need to go find another path after that or devise another one, without having much useful guidance about where to go next.

Now maybe the only sensible response to that argument is, "Jesus, I should have such problems!" But that, anyway, is my pitch for old established religious traditions.

I

One day I was called out of my third-grade class and sent to the office. No one saw fit to tell me why. I walked past the speculative gaze of my peers, out into the dusty hall -- the halls of my elementary school were always dusty, despite (or maybe because of) the janitors with their yard-wide mops, who seemed always to be listlessly sweeping them. So far as I could tell, what they did all day was to push the dust from one place to another.

Down the halls, my stomach feeling empty and queer. I stepped carefully over one of the lines of dust left by the mops, and went into the office.

The secretary directed me to the counselor's office. I didn't know the counselor -- a shy earnest youngish man -- but I could tell immediately that I wasn't in trouble. He explained to me that they were thinking of moving me up to fourth grade. First they had to give me some tests, to see if that was really the right thing to do.

That was a relief. I liked tests. He got out the colored blocks that you could make patterns with. "Oh, I like that one!" I said. He raised his eyebrows. I could have explained that my mother was a graduate student in psychology, and she, being the only one of her circle with kids, donated me whenever someone needed to give a kid an IQ test for an assignment. (This, you must remember, was the mid 1960's, and giving intelligence tests was something any grad student in psychology would be expected to know how to do.) But the idea that adults might need information from me was one I had not yet absorbed; whereas the negotiating leverage conferred by silence is apparently something that every ethnic Norwegian knows from infancy. I sat and waited. The young man, nonplussed, pulled out more intelligence tests, looking more and more desperately for one I wasn't familiar with. Finally he hit upon a vocabulary test. "I've never taken that," I said.

I exulted in my heart, because if there was one thing in this world I knew, it was words. I read constantly. There was a supposed two years' worth of readers in the back of my first-grade classroom; I had cruised through them in a month. The only naughtiness I commited in school -- I was very obedient and docile, as a rule -- was to slip science fiction books inside of my textbook, so that I could keep reading during class.

There was only one word I didn't know, on the test -- "ascend" -- and it was easy enough to guess, since I knew "descend." The counselor said that meant I had a college-level vocabulary. Apparently I was going into fourth grade next week.

II

Back through the halls. I stopped at the door of the classroom. Was I supposed to knock? I had no idea. I opened it as quietly as possible. Everyone gazed at me even more curiously, examining me for the signs that would tell what sort of being-called-to-the-office it was. My friend Gary whispered to me, as I slid red-faced into my seat, "What was it?"

"They're skipping me maybe," I muttered.

"I thought that might be it," he said quietly, out of the corner of his mouth.

So in the middle of the year I stopped being a third-grader and became a fourth-grader. I'm sure this made sense to somebody at the time, and I imagine it delighted my parents, but it was not a wise thing to do. The fourth-grade classes were every bit as boring as the third-grade classes, and my extravagant sense of being special, a uniquely gifted genius, was just reinforced. And now I was also uniquely slow and small. An acknowledged freak. Why they didn't put me in a class with other bright kids, and give us really hard work to do, I'll never understand. It would have fed my mind, instead of starving it, and it would have cured me of my sense of being a vastly different being. It wasn't until I got to graduate school that I was surrounded by people who were as smart as I was, and that I realized, very belatedly, that there were some sixty million people in the world who shared that top percentile of intelligence with me, and that most of them were a great deal smarter than I was.

But there's the story that I swallowed, hook, line, and sinker. That I was a lonely genius, subject to no laws but my own. No sooner had I swallowed the story, than it turned around -- as stories will -- and began to swallow me.

III

Speaking of being swallowed by stories, I've been carried away by this one, fashioning it into a social critique that I no longer much believe in. True, I don't think much of some parts of my public schooling. But if I hadn't swallowed the story of the lonely genius, I would have swallowed some other one -- psychologically less damaging, maybe, but no less of a spiritual poison.

Of all the realms inhabited by sentient beings, the Tibetans hold that this one, the human realm, is the best jumping-off place for enlightenment. The reason being that, unlike beings in the hell realms, the hungry ghost realm, or the animal realm, we human beings actually sometimes are free enough of suffering to stop and look around. But, unlike beings in the various heaven realms, we suffer enough that we never lose sight of our urgent need for transcendance. So I'm not sure I ought to call the suffering of this story -- minor enough by any common human scale -- unfortunate. It was at least a story that kept me restless.

In any case -- fast forward to sixteen. I've graduated from my hippie free school (which required only the few things the state of Washington then required for a highschool education, quite easily done in a couple years.) Back home in Eugene. Going to Lane Community College part-time. I took a World Lit class, and one of the things we read was Lao Tzu.

I read the Tao de Ching over and over. This man knew something. He knew something I didn't know. He teased me, confused me, and frustrated me, but I understood from the very start that in fact he was playing fair. He wasn't getting off on baffling me. He was saying what he had to say as straightforwardly as he could.

I had met a contemplative for the first time, though I didn't know it. I was very young, so I can be forgiven, maybe, for thinking that just listening to him would change me. A door seemed to stand open, when I read him. But I had no idea what to do about it. I stood there waiting for the doorway to get up and walk over me, so that I would be outside.

Other doors opened. I went off to Evergreen State the next year, and I met Dante and Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Doors were opening all over the place. I just couldn't get through them.

And all the while the story was chewing on me. I was going to be a great novelist. I would be an apostle of free love. I was going to set a flame of anarchist revolution throughout the land. Or maybe socialist revolution? Sexual revolution, at the very least. My genius surely was going to manifest somehow.

But the world was oddly indifferent to my genius. It tiresomely demanded proof that I was a great novelist, in the form of great novels. My fellow revolutionaries obstinately preferred other manifestos to mine. Women, inexplicably, did not stand in line to be converted. The horrible suspicion that I might be an ordinary person began to occur to me. But only when I was drunk or fatigued. Everyone still told me I was bound for greatness. If I had known then what I learned later, as a teacher -- to wit, how very seductive the fantasy of being the teacher who recognizes genius can be -- I might have received this encouragement with a little more skepticism.

Lightning. Enter Witches.

I awake slowly, nestled against Martha spoon-fashion, my hand on her breast. Our usual sleeping posture. Flickers of blue lightning through the skylight, but no thunder that I can hear. A spatter of rain. I turn a few times, ending up on my back.

My thoughts climb their way through their spiderweb lattice of schemes and anxieties and desires, Restless little movements of pride and humiliation. I watch them, idly. Eventually I sleep a little more.

Morning. I pad silently downstairs. Past Alan, asleep on the couch, his hair tousled and his mouth open. I wonder when he got to sleep. Last night I came down at 3:30 and he was still up, playing gameboy. He's taken suddenly to sleeping out of his room. I did the same thing at his age. A restlessness that comes on with puberty, maybe. I wonder, not very hopefully, if there's anything I can do to ease this time of his life. It was a nightmare time for me. I hope it's somewhat better for him.

Into my room downstairs, the exercise-cum-shrine-room, to do my stretches and back exercises. I like to do them, which is fortunate, because I have to do them. If I skip one morning, I may pull my back that day. If I skip two mornings, I almost certainly will, and then I'm looking at weeks of pain and disability. So I don't skip any at all, not any more.

Clean the shrine. Empty the dishwasher. Brush my teeth. Upstairs to say goodbye to Martha, who is still mostly asleep, and then out to the car, my backpack over my shoulder and my laptop under my arm. I drive through the bright morning. The streets are still wet from last night's brief rain. My windshield is clotted with moistened pollen, so I spritz it and run the windshield wipers, wondering, for the umpteenth time, what they make that windshield-cleaner with and whether I should use it. I make a mental note to check on that. I recognize, as I do it, that I have made that note well over a hundred times, and that I am almost certain never to follow up on it. That's okay.

At Tosi's I run through my routine, lovingly practicing my Chinese characters, and then doing the exercises in my book. Reading simple, made-up Chinese sentences. Real Chinese is beyond me, even a first-grade primer with a running pinyin crib defeats me -- even when I know all the characters, just about every sentence I try to read comes apart into a meaningless jumble of semantic atoms. But this carefully predigested pap I can work my way through, if I'm patient. I am patient.

I could bring my laptop in from the car and blog. But maybe not today. I start drawing a napkin, a portrait of a weak-chinned man with bulging eyes and a pointy nose, his jaw dropped, his expression one of consternation. I never know what I'm going to draw before I draw it. Is that me? Is he waking up to lightning and silent thunder?

Too much space below, so I fill in the bottom right corner with a cryptic flourish. A meaningless symbol. Is it meant to assert my wizardry? Maybe. It has the specious appeal of such frauds as the "Theban language," which I learned over the weekend.

"It's not a spoken language," she said. "It's very old. Witches use it. I write in it a lot, that way I can write in my notebook at work, and nobody knows what I'm writing."

"Not a spoken language? I've never heard of such I thing," I said, in considerable delight. She shows me her notebook, written out in an unfamiliar, awkward script, interspersed with schoolgirl pictures of women brandishing swords, and being pierced by them. "See? This is an m," she says. My delight dwindles. Not a language. This is English, written in a simple substitution cipher. But she thinks it so very cool that I'm still charmed by her enthusiasm.

I find it easily on the web. Earliest known use by Cornelius Agrippa -- so it really is old -- and ascribed by him (falsely, I'm quite sure) to some Theban magician. An ugly and unwieldy script -- a tyro's alphabet. I've invented far more graceful and useful scripts. But I learn it. Write a few pages in it, experimenting. I like the challenge of trying to make an obstinately ugly script beautiful. The back-leaning 'u's and 'w's definitely have to go. The letters have to be collapsed a little, so the awkward middle space is less apparent. The crosses across some of the letter-stems can be made into flourishes that use some of that space too. But it's still ugly. So much of witchcraft strikes me this way: made-up, parading a mystery and power that's quite beyond it, solemnly asserting that commonplace modern platitudes are really ancient traditions. My ecumenical tolerance is strained by Wicca, I admit.

Oh, I'm sure that "drawing down the moon" brings real visions and authentic spiritual experiences. I don't doubt that part at all. But those are the easy parts. Anyone can lead a person to a vivid experience of the numinous. Any Victorian table-turner, any TV evangelist, any psychotherapist or crystal-gazer can do that. The hard part is transformation, and stabilizing transformation. That's what you go to a religious tradition for. That repository of hard-won experience, the breadth of an understanding that has survived a dozen different cultures. What's the use of being possessed by Artemis if, when she leaves, I'm the same person I was before? That's not a spiritual practice. It's just spiritual intoxication.

Why am I so afraid of fraud, I wonder? Why am I so convinced I am fraudulent? My mind turns that direction stubbornly, persistently. I wonder how much of every day I devote to hunting down the inauthentic in myself, and (publicly, of course) nailing its antlers up on the wall? What's the use of this hunt? What does it serve? It might be of some profit to think that over.

Poking my Nose up again

Here goes with "mole." This stopped being a practice journal long since, so the old name of "vajrayana practice" was misleading, vaguely hectoring, and a lot more than I feel like trying to live up to. The accurate title would run something like "whatever Dale feels like writing today," but I thought "mole" was catchier.

I've twiddled a few things, mostly invisible, I suppose. But mostly I liked the look and kept it. (Words, words, words; that's what I do.)

Cascade Locks

I lie on my back on the wooden platform, and watch the cloudy sky, dotted with flying insects. Looking down to the horizon I can see the flowing silver of the Columbia, and the huge hills of the Washington bank. But mostly it's the sky that I watch, the Western Oregon clouds that I have always loved. The hills try to fool you with a show of permanence. You could learn their names, climb them, map them, draw them. It's smoke. They're not permanent. You can see, if you know the story, where the great slide came down from Hamilton Mountain and blocked the Columbia for five years, back in the 13th Century. Dante in Italy was wandering from city to city in exile, transmuting his bitterness into sweet terza rima, and Waclellah Indians were walking across the course of America's second-greatest river in dry mocassins. The hills are shifting like the clouds. Just a little slower.

But you don't need to know any stories, to watch the clouds shift. Magnificent shapes, but you don't think "I'll come back next week with a good lunch packed and climb that cloud." Or "I should pick up a survey map of that bank of cumulus." You can watch a great slide in a matter of minutes, a mass of cold air tumbling down a shoulder of bright warm air.

They sway and struggle and drift, silver and gray and white. The Waclellahs watched them too. They imagined no doubt that the mountain and the river and the salmon platforms and the flattened heads of their people were permanent. But probably they watched the clouds pretty much as I do. Just shapes going by.

Martha rests her chin on my knee. She grew up on the river. When first we walked along the waterside park at Cascade Locks, she gazed in puzzlement at the works just upriver. "There are locks up there," she said. I didn't even know what they were, much less why their presence would be mysterious. but Martha looked, baffled, at the barges going up the middle of the river, and immediately saw the oddity. What need for locks along the side of the river, when the middle of the river was perfectly navigable, a fine deep uncomplicated channel? "Oh," she said a moment later. "They must have built them before Bonneville dam." Sure enough. We learned later that when Lewis and Clark came this way, they had to shoot a falls of twenty feet and some "most horriable" rapids. Then in the 1920's the restless, industrious Europeans who followed them built locks to open the traffic past the falls. A great work, at the time; a generation later, still restless and industrious, they built the even greater work of the enormous Bonneville dam, which flooded the falls and the rapids, and turned the locks into a quaint artifact to puzzle the river-wise of the next generation.

Twilight. The lights of the sternwheeler moored at the marina come on; lights begin to twinkle in the village across the river, on the Washington side. Stevenson, I think it's called?

We walk back slowly, favoring Martha's bad knee. In all the time we've been here, we've seen no one but a woman our own age, in a dark green embroidered jacket, who prowls the shore looking at leaves in a fashion I recognize immediately, from a thousand walks with my father -- she's a botanist, or I'll eat my hat. A shy one, though. She keeps her distance from us.

Am I happy? Yes. No. I may remember this day in my old age as the summit of my happiness. And it may be. But I'm restless, too. Longing for bright lights and familiar restaurants and studying Chinese; longing for the drive to work channel-hopping the radio hoping to run across Tom Petty or Sheryl Crow. Longing. Always longing. I hope the botanist was not as lonely as she looked.

Dear friends, thanks very much for your sympathy and support. Just a note to say that I'm fine (and more than fine), and I'll probably be pretty quiet this week because I'm on vacation & I have to duke it out with the kids to get online. I'm also contemplating a long-overdue redesign of my blog, so if I ever can get Alan off of Baldur's Gate and Tori off of the Harry Potter fan-fic site, that'll probably be what I do first.

So if you come here and there's nothing to read, use the time to do a few minute's shamatha or zazen instead. -- Actually that's probably what you ought to do even if there is something here to read, but that's your problem, not mine :-)

Love --

Losing the Words

"Better out than in," says Hagrid cheerfully, when Ron is vomiting up slugs. It's on more or less that principle that I post things like my last. That, and I suppose that I harbor a fantasy of being some kind of "apostle to the skeptics," a Buddhist version of C.S. Lewis, and I know how reassuring blasphemy is to those of us who grew up viewing faith with superstitious dread.

I hadn't reckoned, maybe, on how deep the tear would go. I spent a lot of last evening crying. Reciting the bodhisattva prayer embedded in the Ngondro practice -- which I have had by heart since I began a year ago, and have recited pretty much daily since then -- I lost the words twice, and had to go to the text to find them. My voice cracked and stopped, and I had no idea what came next. As though I had called a curse of wordlessness and confusion down on myself. Which I think I had.

How many other things I may have torn, I don't know. I expect I'll be finding out in the next few days.

In a Quite Different Key

This about sums it up too.

This

And this about sums it up.

Ridin' with the Queen

If you are having a day even remotely like mine, go see the Queen and remind yourself of what really bad days are like.

Next, Walking

A shrub a little like gorse, but unstickery, with stiff outthrust fingers covered with yellow blossom. Bee-flies wavering drunkenly among the fingers.

Two green dragonflies under the oak trees.

At least twelve different varieties of grass-plume, each clotted with seeds.

On a ragged row of purple batchelor buttons, five bumblebees and one mason bee.

Above the cool brown creek, more dragonflies, one of them huge and brilliant blue, cruising above the water looking very like a B-52. If B-52's could stop abruptly in the air and hover.

Bleeding Rabbit

Screw it. The Buddha's long dead, taking his secrets -- if they were ever anything more than a gift for wowing the crowd -- with him. I've got no Buddha nature, and neither have you, and neither have these precious Rinpoches. What I've got is a cesspool of anger and baffled ambition. There's nothing else in here. No compassion. And it's thoroughly "in here." I am completely circumscribed by the walls of this filthy self, completely cut off from everyone else. If anyone else is even out there.

All the beauty is gone, all the delight, all the joy. And in this moment I don't believe any of them were ever here. Fantasies. And even those fantasies, drenched in dreams of empire, or in nightmares of loathing. Like an old dog feebly kicking in his dreams, chasing non-existent rabbits. Catching them too, no doubt, and tearing them to shreds with his dream teeth. I'll wake up soon enough, to find my real teeth as rotten as ever, though the bleeding rabbit may be real enough. A botch of a life.

Wonderful Stuff

I'm smitten with Andi's two blogs, Overboard and Ditch the Raft. Sensitivity and clarity. The kind of thoughtfulness and richness that carry you into completely new waters while you think, "Oh, yes, really I knew this all the time; I just didn't know I knew it."

"Make it as simple as possible," said Einstein, "but no simpler."

The only thing I dislike about Andi is that she takes cuts in line. She's way too young to know so much, understand so much, and write so beautifully. It's not really fair to have achieved all that without having spent several decades screwing up.

Bray and Swagger

So I wrote this much -- the italics down below -- and learned again why I'm not old enough yet to write about political matters.

It was very easy to write my list of the awful things that Reagan had done. They've stayed with me, and roll out effortlessly. They may even be true, who knows? But in fact almost the whole thing is made up, invention and pastiche, phrases parroted and hastily re-upholstered in the cheap fabric of my own prose. I'm talking through my hat, talking about things I really know very little about, with that tell-tale daily journalist's bray and swagger. I hate that. It's the stupid noise of prattle like this that drowns out the sound of people who talk about what they actually know, people who have actually bothered to do their research, and who have engaged with people who disagree with them. It is precisely the flood of this kind of posturing, brainless drivel that makes people loathe political talk and retreat to the purely personal. The bray and swagger become a little too obvious, when you're among friends talking about the realities of your own life in your own house. So until I've grown up a bit, the piece below is the last of such stuff you get from me.

Ronald Reagan's Gift

I forgot to acknowledge a debt of gratitude to Reagan, when I was writing about him earlier. I owe him for teaching me that yes, presidential elections can indeed matter. After watching Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon grind through the Vietnam War with exactly the same grim obstinacy, and watching Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter muddle their way through the slush of the waning Cold War with identical awkwardness, it was easy to believe that it didn't really matter who sat in the Oval Office. But Reagan changed all that for me. The destruction he wreaked on institutions, the energy he lent to the future (mercifully brief) takeover of congress by the radical Right, the plethora of enironmental and judicial regulations that he eviscerated by the shrewd deployment of executive orders, the unprecedented financial irresponsibility he introduced, the crippling blows to organized labor, the gang of criminals he brought into the White House, the deep and lasting conviction he engendered around the world that the United States is a dangerous lunatic -- the election of that man mattered. Cured me of muttering about "Republicrats" and thinking of Democratic Party workers as patsies, I can tell you.

Dwindling

I'm shrinking. My elbows stick out in bony lumps. My face emerges with a new fine net of wrinkles around the eyes. If I lean forward, my shirt hangs free from my ribcage. I can easily slide my balled fist inside my waistband. My suspenders, always useful, have become indispensable.

It occurs to me -- this is an ordinary thought for most people losing weight, I think, but it's a brand-new thought for me -- that I'll be needing new clothes if this keeps up. That I can probably wear old clothes that have been the closet for years, if the moths haven't gotten to them.

Very odd, becoming smaller. There's been an unconscious comfort in being a large person, in knowing that I could put more weight behind a punch, if I had to, than a lot of people have in their whole bodies. I've never been inactive. I have a fair amount of muscle stowed away here and there amid the fat, and I have felt -- though I didn't know it -- physically powerful. I knew that a mugger would think twice about me. The prospect of being little is disturbing. I remember helping my Dad out of his hospital bed, and being momentarily overwhelmed by the smallness of his body under the hospital gown. He's not frail, by any means -- fit and in terrific health for a man in his seventies -- but he was just so small, compared to me.

For a long time, now, I have thought of myself as an orangatan. Slow, powerful, dignified, and deliberate. Not someone anyone would mess with. Not someone anyone would brush aside. Slowly transforming into a plain little monkey is rather frightening. I'm losing my gravitas. Dwindling. I almost expect the pitch of my voice to be rising. I might at any minute start chattering shrilly and hopping about, developing nervous tics and a flighty attitude. Soon I'll be shrieking and brandishing my fist from the treetops; as unnoticed, as inconsequential, as a scolding squirrel.

Salt

It doesn't say who she looked back for. Lot's wife. A young man she had a soft spot for, maybe. An old friend in the trade. Someone she passed the time of day with at the well. No one who deserved to live, we know that -- we have it on unassailable authority.

We may dread a life with no decisive moments. But do we dread it more than a life in which a backward glance at some love -- any love -- is so worthless, that following it is annihilation? In which the history is written so that Lot's wife's young man can never be known, and her love is nothing but salt?

To believe in decisive moments, you must believe that there are other moments than this. And if someone can be on the right side of a decisive moment, someone can be on the wrong side. I think I will stay here, with Chenrezig, white as salt, the jewel glowing between two of his hands, the crystal rosary flickering in the still fingers of his third, the lotus opening in his fourth. Chenrezig would have looked back, too. In fact it is Chenrezig who looked back. No wonder his face is so pale.

Exception

I am wont to say that all sentient beings possess basic goodness, or buddha-nature. It turns out that this is not true. Someone has taken over the last radio station in Portland that actually played music in the morning and replaced it with yet ANOTHER perky-girl-and-yuk-yuk-guy morning show, in which brain-damaged people telephone in to talk about sex, and produce irritating guffaws that occupy endless stretches of air-time. This person clearly has no goodness whatsoever, and should be taken out and shot repeatedly, in whatever areas of his alien body might contain clusters of nerve tissue, until he is quite dead.

Thank you. I feel better. We now return you to our regularly scheduled mealy-mouthed Buddhist piety.

Rivers of Slurry

Tired and worn. Cobwebs of unease settle on my face. They whisper to me that I am forgetting something important. They have lied to me before, but -- how can you ever know that you have not forgotten anything important? They might be telling the truth this time.

Rivers of slurry, eddies of doubt. My mind is full of faint accusatory whispers. Fat chance of confronting these witnesses. They don't seem to have heard of the sixth amendment in there.

Yesterday I sat on the low wall by an empty but well-kept up building, surrounded by flourishing oaks and pines. I watched the wind toss swirls of glossy green oak leaves, which skittered like the sun on the sea. Behind them were dull, gray-green sprays of pine needles. And behind them again the high blue sky. I ate my can of tuna in splendid solitude, sitting cross-legged on a sidewalk that can never have been used much, even when the building was not empty: it's not an obvious track from anything to anything. Now it's littered with crunchy gall-shales.

So this morning I picked up my Chinese books and learned my first forty characters over again. I don't know why I ever study Chinese. It drains out of my head almost as fast as I learn it. I'm so good with Western languages that it seems like I ought to be at least adequate with Eastern ones, but I'm awful with them. But I keep coming back to Chinese, because I love the characters, even if they won't stay in my head. Once every couple years I have to spend six months with them.

Yu, fish, I am learning for the umpteenth time. A little head on top of a tian on top of the "four-dots" for an animal. Terribly satisfying. Why? No clue. Not the most powerful imagination in the world could make this figure into a picture of a fish. But it is a fish. That delights me.

Okay. Enough! -- or too much. Good night. xoxoxo.

An Inarticulation

There is something not quite articulated -- or possibly just wrong -- in the relation between this odd unexpected resurgence of my youthful utopianism, and my Buddhist conviction of "basic goodness."

I've seen people shipwreck in just this way. The Buddhist hope for transcendant happiness gets muddled with ambitions for worldly happiness, and in short order the fact that Buddhism isn't fixing the world is taken for evidence that the hope is foolish. It's a good way to ruin a Buddhist practice. And it's for that reason that I take a rather dim view of "engaged Buddhism." I'm all in favor of political engagement, and I'm all in favor of Buddhism, but that doesn't mean that I favor mixing the two.

I've been sloppy, or at least vague -- and speaking in personal shorthand. Il buon tempo verra -- what does that mean to me?

The unrepentent radical Shelley, in Italy, had it inscribed on a ring that he wore. "The good time will come." And its message for him, was more or less the same as the message of his Ode to the West Wind: my success or failure in life is not to be judged on whether I bring tyranny low and establish universal brotherhood in my lifetime -- because I certainly won't. I may not even be read in my lifetime. My lifework is to plant seeds, which may well lie dormant for generations. But someday, the things I have planted will come to fruition.

Now, this is an idea that slips easily into a number of unpleasant forms. It easily becomes contempt for all these backward apes who are living in the present, while we are living in the highly-evolved future. It also easily becomes a complacent sojourn in a fantasy world in which none of our ideas need ever be tested against reality, or even against other ideas. And in any case it's a perfect example of granting conceptualization priority over perception. An invitation to "be there then" rather than "be here now." As such any Buddhist might look askance at it.

But there's another way in which it can dovetail with a Buddhist view. We're urged to view every sentient being as a Buddha. Exhorted to remember that any one of them really might be. What does a Buddha in the form of a grocery checkout clerk look like? Well, like a grocery checkout clerk, is my guess. Treating any old person you meet with the respect, affection, and devotion you'd accord the Buddha -- probably nothing in the world, not all the practices or rituals or philosophical understandings ever invented, will ever work more powerfully to evoke the Buddha in that person.

We can view the social and political world with the same eyes, the same expectation. This is a "pure land" -- it's just one that does not yet know that it is. The political and social structures of our world don't have to be viewed as horrible impositions -- they can be viewed as structures of liberty and justice that just haven't flowered yet. Obscured and confused, certainly. Capable, as is any unenlightened person, of inflicting enormous suffering. But if any Jerusalem is ever to be built in England's -- or America's -- green and pleasant land, it will be built of these materials. There's nothing else to build with.

Well. I'm not at all satisfied that this has been a successful raid on the inarticulate. I haven't entirely convinced myself, at any rate.

Il Buon Tempo Verra

It is not necessary to hope, said William the Silent, in order to persevere.

Well, he should know. But it helps.

* * *

George Washington and Admiral de Grasse embraced on the deck of the Ville de Paris, when the French finally, finally arrived with serious help for the rebellion. When De Grasse, it is reported -- an even larger man than Washington -- kissed him on both cheeks and greeted him as "mon cher petit general!" Washington's staff found it difficult not to laugh. But somehow I don't think Washington did.

(Washington never lost hope. Why not, I wonder?)

* * *

I hold that man very foolish and very wretched, wrote King Alfred, who will not learn all he can in this life, and ever hope to reach that life in which all will be made clear.

* * *

William Blake wrote:

I shall not cease from mental fight
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.

* * *

I still say, with Shelley, Il buon tempo verra. The good time will come. Not because I know it will. Not even because I can see that it's at all likely. But because every time I say it, there's a flicker of truth in it at that moment, and it's another piece of life snatched back from Satan.

I used to think it absurd that Christians held hope to be a virtue. William the Silent was my ideal -- face the full despair, and fight on anyway. Clear-eyed, dispassionate evaluation of the odds is what's needed, not soft-headed enthusiasm. But that was back when I bought the pseudo-materialist schtick that the world was there outside of my skull, and my consciousness was here inside my skull, and the two were made of completely different stuff. The world was real, and my thoughts were not.

Now I think that the material world's claims to reality are, if anything, somewhat shakier than those of my mind. My thoughts are not subsidiary to reality. They are part of it.

My only doubt now, is whether it would not be still wiser to say "the good time is already here."

Nobody that Tiny

I've been glad of the press coverage of the rites of Ronald Reagan's passing. President Reagan was a mysterious figure to me. But he captured the hearts of a large proportion of my countrymen, and I'll never really understand them if I don't understand their love for him.

He'd barely flickered across my consciousness before he ran for the presidency. He was known in my lefty academic circles as the man who, as governor of California, had taken the best educational system in the country, and in a few short years made it one of the worst. We disliked him, but we didn't take him very seriously. He was rather a joke, outside of California -- as Arnold Schwarzenegger is now. I remember being pleased when he got the Republican nomination. He was so ignorant and so far-right, I thought, that he would certainly bomb in a national election.

We wandered away from watching the election returns the night he was elected, silent and shell-shocked. He hadn't just won; he'd won big. Against a man whom I thought, and still think, was the best man to occupy the oval office in the 20th Century. I admired Jimmy Carter, though I thought he was a poor president. So who was this man, this joke from California, who had beaten him?

I never did find out who Ronald Reagan was. I found him distasteful, but I didn't loathe him. Maybe you never loathe anyone like you loathe your first political bete noire. Richard Nixon was the man I hated, deeply and enduringly. I've practiced a long time to soften that hatred. It hasn't been easy.

But I didn't hate Reagan. He gave me the creeps -- I certainly would never have left him alone in a room with my children -- but mostly I was just baffled by him. He'd make a really poor showing in a debate, and I'd find in the morning papers that he was considered to have won it. The famous Reagan charm was invisible to me; I just saw a bad actor, overdoing his lines. For me the Reagan years were surreal. I have never felt so alienated from America, not even during the Nixon years.

So I've listened closely to the NPR reports and retrospectives, hoping to understand this phenomenon. Trying to make that leap of imagination. I listen to the snippets of his speeches and try to imagine how I'd hear them if I thought he really believed what he was saying. I think I'm beginning to get a glimmering. And I think he really did believe what he was saying. Clinton (who I'm sure was just as baffling to the Right as Reagan was to me) helped when he referred to Reagan as exemplifying "the indomitable optimism of the American people." And it helped me a lot, trivial though it may seem, to learn that he was outraged when he found out that Nixon had paved the horse-trails at Camp David.

One evening at KCC Martha -- who has always been the person to ask, in pure humble curiosity, "Mommy, why is the Emperor wearing no clothes?" -- asked Lama Michael about how it can be that the Dalai Lama meets with someone like George W. Bush and comes away saying -- as he always does -- that he's a very good man, a very sincere man. You sometimes get the feeling that the Dalai Lama would have come away from meeting Saddam Hussein or Adolf Hitler saying the same thing.

Michael, who has been known to tell us that, to step out of the strait-jackets of our egos, we should try wearing polyester suits, and has advised us, knowing us mostly to be deep-dyed liberals, to go out and vote Republican for once, and try driving a big SUV around -- immediately confessed that this troubled him, too. After thinking about it for a while, he said that he thought the Dalai Lama could see a lot more than we could. That we make our political opponents into little caricatures, and freeze them as such in our minds. "But nobody is really that tiny," he said.

So I listened to Reagan talking in his hushed, intimate tones about the Shining City on the Hill, and I suddenly made the connection to a night, when I was a teenager, and I brought myself to tears picturing the secular paradise I was going to help build someday. "The City of Man," it would be called. Like all utopias, it needed just one founding condition: that everyone in it have pretty much the same prejudices, temperament, outlook and ambitions as me. And since my prejudices, temperament, outlook, and ambitions were clearly the right ones, why should that be hard?

I don't pretend to understand everything about Reagan and his appeal, but I think I opened the heart of it when I made that connection. And I found myself listening to Margaret Thatcher talking about his large-heartedness not with contempt, but with wistfulness. It's probably true. There was something large-hearted and magnanimous about him, just as there was about that ignorantly arrogant damp-eyed teenager, who dreamed about the City of Man.

Chloe and the Ice Cream Truck

One of my favorite students at Pacific Crest was Chloe. She had impossibly wide-open light blue eyes in a fearless face. She was a disciplined student; one of the few in my War and Peace class who always kept up with the heavy reading load. She'd take up any question. She formed opinions readily, and defended them warmly, but not doggedly; she was always interested in what other people thought. A joy to have in class.

One Spring morning we were upstairs, deep into Tolstoy. I think we were discussing Ellen Vasilievna Kuragina, whom they all despised, none more fiercely than Chloe. (They never did learn to like Prince Andrei, but they loved Pierre, and watching him fall into Ellen's clutches filled them with dismay.) I was trying to nudge the discussion on to why Tolstoy had created this character at all. The conversation faltered, and quiet fell in the room. Several students seemed to be surreptitiously checking the contents of their pockets. I was bewildered for a moment, until my middle-aged ears picked it up too -- the sound of an ice-cream truck's music.

After a minute, Chloe stood up, with the air of a person who has considered gravely and come to a serious decision. "I'll be right back," she said.

In a twinkling two-thirds of the class had followed her out the door.

"I think we'll take a ten minute break," I said to the nearly empty room, and the rest of them shot out.

Five minutes later we were reassembled, and discussing Ellen Vasilievna again, sometimes in indistinct mumbles, over ice-cream bars and popsicles.

Graduation at Pacific Crest Community School

I sat there with tears leaking from the corners of my eyes. Tori stood behind the lectern, huddled a little forward, her face incandescent. "First of all I have to thank my parents," she said. The tassle of her mortarboard trembled. "You've been great. I wouldn't have made it without you."

We're a Norwegian-Irish-English-Scottish mix: we color up easily, and besides Tori'd gotten sunburnt two days before. She was a radiant pink; her face glowed against the black cap and gown. Emily had spoken about her: how within two weeks of starting at Pacific Crest, she'd been elected to the judicial committee, and been re-elected every year since; how she'd determined to finish a long story for her senior project, and succeeded in finishing a hundred-page novella; how she was "any teacher's dream." And how she has absolutely no sense of geographical direction, and can be made to yawn if you say "yawn." (Which she had demonstrated, there on the stage; Tori, blushing and laughing, did indeed have to yawn.)

Tori went on to thank her science teacher, who bears the improbable name of Tigerin, and her writing teacher, Julie, who helped her with her long story, and then her friends, and everybody. "I'm pretty quiet, and you probably don't know how much I like you all."

They all get introduced, and they all speak, at Pacific Crest. Fifteen graduates this year: their largest class ever, I think. I've cried at every Pacific Crest graduation I've been to. The love is palpable. The introductions are frank, verging on roasts at times; there's no attempt to mask how frustrating teaching these kids can be. But no one can walk away without being staggered, I think, at how well these teachers know the kids, how hard they've worked to make their educations meaningful, and at how much they value each one of them. And the students understand it as love, and return it. They treasure their teachers, and their fellow-students, in a way that would seem outlandish to most of their peers.

At the heart of it are Becky and Jenny, who started the school, and who have the gift, above all, of valuing students for what they are. It's all the truisms. They believe in these kids. And they really do value the kid who rebuilt his Mom's transmission for his senior project, making an automatic into a stick, every bit as much as the kid who did an elegant study of the survival value of intra-special variation. The kid who wrote and illustrated a children's book about her horse, as much as the kid who designed and taught a sea-kayaking class, culminating in an expedition to the San Juans, taking five of his classmates out to sea for three days.

I watch this extraordinary event, and I think of ordinary graduations, in which a few students may be singled out for praise, but most are shuffled across the stage as quick as may be, and it makes me sad. A graphic representation of our conviction that a few chosen people are valuable and the rest are dreck, that human worth is something you achieve by besting your peers and distinguishing yourself from the herd.

Every one of those kids could speak. Not all in elegant periods, with classical citations, maybe; but for every single one what they had to convey was more urgent than the fact that they were standing in front of a crowd. Not one of them, not even the quiet Tori, was overwhelmed by standing up in front of a hundred and fifty people. Not one felt that his or her voice could not legitimately be heard.

I can't think of any life's work more valuable, more precious, more rare than what Becky and Jenny have done in creating this school, and keeping it going for eleven years.

Stories

Kierkegaard argues very persuasively, I think, that we must at some point have chosen sin; we must have freely given up our freedom. Faced with a clear choice between happiness and unhappiness, we chose unhappiness. And the choice having once been made, we now want -- sometimes -- to renege on it; but it turns out that unmaking the choice is by no means so easy as making it. Kierkegaard gives the poignant example:

If a child who has received the gift of a little money -- enough to be able to buy either a good book, for example, or one toy, for both cost the same -- buys the toy, can he use the same money to buy the book? By no means, for now the money has already been spent. But he may go to the bookseller and ask him if he will exchange the book for the toy. Suppose the bookseller answers: My dear child, your toy is worthless; it is certainly true that when you still had the money you could have bought the book just as wll as the toy, but the awkward thing about the toy is that once it is purchased it has lost all value.

I have no objection to Kierkegaard's argument, except that it is not true. I never did choose unhappiness. I never freely chose unfreedom. Believe me, Mr Kierkegaard -- I would remember it, if I had.

That I am in a most wretched and lamentable state of what Mr Kierkegaard would call sin, and my own tradition calls confusion, is obvious. That buying my way out of it will cost (at a bare minimum) all I have, is likewise obvious. But why make up this improbable history of how it came about?

Well, we are hungry for stories. It's clear from the sutras that the Buddha Shakyamuni's followers pestered him continually for a story. I am a Buddhist now, 2500 years later, precisely because he steadfastly refused to tell one.

The Buddha answered "Malunkyaputta, I never said 'Follow me and I will answer your questions' nor did you say 'I will follow the Blessed One because he will explain these matters'.

"Then what is your position? You are like a person shot with a poisoned arrow, who says 'I will not have this arrow removed until I know who shot it, his name, his family, whether he is tall or short, young or old.....' This person would die before all these questions could be answered."

The stories can be useful. Assuming the guilt for my own confusion may not make much sense, and it may not really square with anything I remember, but it does bring home to me that getting out of it is my own responsibility. If I made this snare of sin, then I am going to have to unmake it. Every single moment of confusion is my own creation; every moment of loneliness is caused, not by God slamming the door on me, but by me slamming the door on God.

But the stories can be deadly, too. It's all too easy to make our fellow-sufferers into the enemies of God -- as if their rejection of Him was any different from ours! To pour contempt and loathing upon them. "Christians aren't perfect," we say smugly, "just forgiven." As if we weren't continually trampling that forgiveness underfoot, or escaping it with the skill of Houdini! And as if that was any different from the rejections that take the form of, say, doctrinal athiesm, or unreflective pleasure-seeking. It's no different at all: it's only the story that makes it look different. And that would be true even if, by chance, the story we clung to were the correct one, accurate to the last detail.

Frugality

Nicht eure Sünde - eure Genügsamkeit schreit gen Himmel, euer Geiz selbst in eurer Sünde schreit gen Himmel!

Not your sin -- your frugality cries out to heaven, your stinginess even in your sin cries out to heaven!

--Nietzsche, Zarathustra

A Prayer to Jesus's Father

I know we don't talk much. Too much water under the bridge. Some relationships just don't work out: faults on both sides, no doubt.

But I do have this prayer, stuffed in my jeans pocket. Or maybe a it's a recipe. I think it's addressed to you.

Pound me like tapa cloth,
Knead me like blood clay;
Beat until smooth, and the lumps are gone.

I learned a yoga pose a long time ago. You lie on your back, holding nothing, palms open to the sky.
It's called the corpse pose, because you just lie there, doing nothing.

"It's the first and the last pose you learn," said the yoga teacher. He was turning away from us as he added quietly, "it's the hardest pose."

Friday Morning

He pulls a piece of paper from his jeans pocket, limp and frayed at the folds, and spreads it open. "Oh, yeah," he mutters. "Fate."

Folds it up and returns it to his pocket. No time for that now. He has things to do.

Cedar Mill Creek

I am still not entirely reconciled to working in the suburbs, this queer hybrid of countryside and city, where freshly asphalted four-lane parkways sweep to trivial ends in empty fields -- building lots that were cleared during the dot.com boom and then left to turn to fragile, surprisingly beautiful meadowland, rich with lupine and blackberry, dotted with escaped ornamentals from the hi-tech light-industrial parks. It's quiet out here, except for the ubiquitous buzz of powerlines, and full of birdlife: meadowlarks, redwing blackbirds, shrill-piping running birds like overgrown sandpipers, barn swallows. Big campuses, half of them empty, darkened spaces full of disused cubicles. Almost no one walks out here but me. A few joggers. It's eerie to me, how many people work in these buildings -- hundreds, I think -- and how most of them are so incurious about their surroundings that they've never walked anywhere here, except from their cars, through the mammoth parking lots, to the ID-badged doors. Surreal. Truman show. Crews of Mexicans keep up our grounds beautifully -- for whom? No one looks, no one walks by these flowerbeds, but me. Not that I've ever seen. The Mexicans eye me impassively as I walk by. So far as I can tell, they don't give a damn that I'm the only person who appreciates their work. In fact, they look as suspicious of me as the people who glance at me from behind the tinted glass of their SUV's.

The wetlands have been left alone, out here. One thing to be grateful for. I'm sure, left to themselves, the developers would have dumped the marshes full of fill dirt, or something worse. So I'm glad the wetlands are protected. Beautiful marshes stretch across this land. I walk down to Washington County Bridge #1409, crossing -- so the sign tells me -- Cedar Mill Creek. (Cedars? In this kind of country? & Where, around here, does the water drop rapidly enough to turn a millwheel? I have a feeling the same people who dropped these hi-tech campuses out of the sky also named this creek.)

But anyway, this brown creek, less than ten yards wide, wanders through cattails and high grass, and runs slowly under Bridge #1409. I stand on the bridge in the afternoon, bright sun falling down on my head from above, and up to my face from a dazzling reflection below. A low bridge. Fifteen feet above the water. Barn swallows dive under the bridge, over and over, darting below my feet without a care. And today three muskrats, in a dignified line, swam strongly, calmly down the center of the creek, directly below me, appearing one by one on my side of the bridge, legs pumping rythmically, unhurried, clearly the masters of their brown, reed-lined world. So big I peered carefully at their tails to make sure they weren't beaver. They have nothing to fear from human beings, I guess -- human beings stay behind their tinted glass, roaring up and down the roadways, of no more interest to muskrats than the distant turkey-vultures.

This country keeps still -- as Tolkien might have said -- a disheveled naiad loveliness. For now. The next economic boom, so devoutly desired by the people of Oregon, hangs over it like the blade of a guillotine. Soon enough, the muskrats will learn that they have plenty to fear.

Footnotes

I took Tori to the Portland State library so she could read some articles for a paper she's writing. She studies steadily, with a calm discipline that amazes me. Read her way carefully through two articles in difficult academic journals, taking careful notes. She's old enough to look perfectly at home in a college library, now. Gave me a curious twinge.

As did wandering through the stacks at PSU. Wandered up to the Middle English section and pulled down my only publication (Chaucer Review, 1991 -- "Anelida and Arcite: Anti-Feminist Allegory, Pro-Feminist Complaint." Check the big department stores and airport bookstalls; bound to be copies there.) There I am, in all my glory -- quoting in French, Latin, and Italian (what a fraud! I knew not a word of Italian). Making a trendy and somewhat dubious argument. But it was a good reading of Chaucer's poem. Even at my worst, I've always been a sensitive reader.

And my footnotes are -- still -- magnificent. The only genre I've ever mastered is the footnote. The magisterial evaluation, the wry aside, the six-line demolition of unworthy critics, the hinting at vast learning and contemplation held in reserve -- I had it all.

Odd that I published that. I had already given up on an academic career when it was accepted. I had, in fact, forgotten that I'd sent it off, when I got the acceptance. It was an early chapter of one of my dissertations: sending it out may in fact have been a sort of surrender on ever finishing a dissertation. "Here: there's a piece out of all this wreck that might be worth saving, but there ain't no book here, I know that!"

A vanished life. And one just blossoming. And an accidental, grizzle-bearded father walking through the sour book-dust of his past.

Not a past I look back on fondly, for the most part. Like so much of my past, I mostly just feel grateful that I escaped from it more or less intact. So much of my past is a tangle of false hopes and masquerade. Pretending to know Italian, pretending that I'd read all of the Teseida in the original, is pretty typical of my past. I'm glad to be in the present. I carry on my various poses and pretences for only minutes at at time now, rather than years. It's a sweet, hard-bought freedom.

Happy Boy, Part II

Lekshe's back!