Okay but did you know
some animals have clothes
it’s called Hermit Crab
So it’s not dumb that humans have clothes
And also in humid hot places
like rain forest
they don’t use that much clothes
In hot dry places like desert
you do need lots of clothes. 🧕🏻
And it’s a way to get to hang out
with G-d on the daily
So don’t be discouraged
just cause Adam and Eve
noshed on the science fruit
Now
thanks to their li’l fruit snack
we know that we’re hunks of
spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones
and we just have to
live with
that knowledge every day. 💁🏻♀️
But
that’s fine
because the blood of G-d’s Lamb
made it so that
all sentient beings
could actualize buddhahood.
What’s that gonna look like
for us
today
this fine Friday afternoon?
Maybe a mindfulness exercise
or a hymn?
I feel bad for Kierkegaard
with his “leap”
when it’s just three centimeters away.
We can just reach out and touch it.
No matter how hard
all the flies
and decay
and absurdity
and entropy
makes it to see that.
That’s why the
beginner mind
is so great.
Even though we
have all these mountains of clothes and laundry to sort,
even the lilies of the field have raiment
and the hermit crabs have their ceramic doll’s heads
and sea shells.
Ligotti followed Zappfe in talking
about the four responses:
anchoring,
isolation,
distraction and
sublimation.
And of those four
sublimation comes closest
to the
real answer
but sublimation sometimes feels like
it’s just passing the buck
like a Sadako “Ring” tape.
Like the only reason you’re
talking about how bad it is
is so you don’t have to
think about how bad it is.
The real answer is:
showing up.
I’m grateful for these aching bones
and these heavy rusty breaths.
Beauty and ugliness.
It’s all there anyway 🤷🏻♀️
And thanks to
the life-changing magic of
“hedonic adaptation”
we humans tend to grade things on a curve.
In heaven we’re gonna be like
“OMG this harp-playing angel absolutely
sucks
compared to
this other gorgeous harp-playing angel”.
An inch of time is worth a foot of gems.
And even in the perfect Buddha nature,
our lives have texture and variety.
Right now,
my face and my feet
both hurt like heck.
That’s part of the texture of sensation.
I wish they didn’t
but thanks to hedonic adaptation,
if they didn’t,
some other ache would stand out.
There was this dumb ad campaign
when I was in my late twenties:
“it gets better”
and I was like when!???
And now I’m in my mid forties
and it never got better but
you know what did happen?
The gratitude attitude!
Even with tears down my cheeks
and my heart in pieces on the floor
and G-d’s kicks with both feet and boots on,
here I am.
One second at a time,
like the victory of a cat on a hot tin roof.
I was an unhappy child.
Hedonic adaptation to this
trash dump world
took a while
to kick in.
And Ligotti is right about one thing:
the idea that
“it’ll get better and better and better”
is delusion.
But that’s why we have
radical acceptance.
Probably better known as:
showing up.
And sometimes things do get worse.
Unrepairably worse.
Thanks, thermodynamics 🤦🏻♀️
Scrounging up
that sixpence for praise
can feel like
rolling a boulder up a hill,
forever.
And sometime it’s shiny and sometimes it’s dull.
It’s right here