No answer for the world and its impossible questions. Yesterday gone, tomorrow big and untamable.
Life is in the corner, making out with death. I’m prudish; I don’t want to believe what I see. I want to save life, though life doesn’t want to be saved. Life wiggles its fanny. Life explodes in a rage. Fuck you, life says. Take me the way I am, life says. Horny for death, in love with death.
Hunger, dressed to kill.
Nuclear weapons were never the cause, only the symptom. We’re not aggressive because we have guns; we have guns because we’re aggressive.
The hurricane knocks down everything in its path. We give it a name.
My daughter says she lost her English notebook and I scold her for not paying attention. Five minutes after I rush out the door, I realize she needed my compassion, not my anger. I wasn’t paying attention.
The judging mind shows little mercy, changes the rules on whim. It’s a hanging judge.
Why does someone else’s life have to make sense to us? How can we understand something as mysterious as a life, even our own? The world rushes toward us whether we understand it or not. Our beating hearts depend on nothing we’ve figured out.
Insisting the clouds part, the diet succeed, the Democrats stick to their promises.
Trying to change America into an understanding lover.
Jack Kornfield tells this story: after his enlightenment, the Buddha passed a man on the road who was struck by the extraordinary radiance and peacefulness of his presence. The man stopped and asked, “My friend, what are you? Are you a celestial being or a god?” “No,” said the Buddha. “Well then, are you some kind of magician or wizard?” Again the Buddha answered, “No.” “Are you an ordinary man?” “No.” “Well, my friend, what then are you?” The Buddha replied, “I am awake.”
Is what waits for us in heaven different from what waits for us here?
I keep trying to rearrange my life, as if the hours were furniture. Perhaps the wish to keep things peaceful and orderly is itself a cause of suffering.
Turn on the radio to see who’s killing who. Or is it whom?
Someone writes that the five daily prayers of Muslims aren’t just religious acts. They allow you to do your work in five periods, because between each one you have to stop and pray. Ideally, this means you can set smaller, more modest goals for yourself, goals that never consume you because in a few hours you have to stop.
Sunday afternoon seems to last forever — yet how brief these lives! Death polishes her fingernails.
I simplify my life by paying attention to one thing at a time, not by insisting reality become less wild or unpredictable. I can finish what’s in front of me, or worry about everything else. I can turn toward God, or search the heavens for signs.
The body rises from its dream, from the promises I couldn’t keep. A whole city built of words trembles.
