I was walking down the street, a few days after New Years, and I saw tons of discarded Christmas trees on the curb. It occurred to me that just a few days ago, these trees were precious object. People went to a lot of work to buy their trees, hurl them home, set them up and lovingly decorate them. For a few weeks they were assigned such deep meaning —…
I’m general, I do hate to ‘over-share’, but I’m afraid I have to kick-off this blog with a mighty personal detail about my life — I have irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). It’s a disease with no known cause, no cure, and a not-so-fun set of symptoms that include surprise attacks of uncontrollable diarrhea that always seem to come at the most inopportune times. For example, when I’m walking through one…
I had been contemplating a question from LP Thoon for a few weeks — what techniques does desire use to persuade me? — admittedly, I wasn’t making a whole lot of progress. Frustrated, looking for something else to contemplate, I ‘tuned-in’ to the KPY Facebook page and saw a post from LP Anan: It was a video of a group of people preparing a meal of grilled octopus, only the…
I was reading a book, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, about a group of WWII POWs who had been taken prisoner by the Japanese and forced to work hard labor in the jungle. They were tortured, beaten, starved — the details of their treatment were shocking to me; the fact that humans endure such horrors and that other humans inflict them… Anyway, it was one of those books that really…
A few years after my uncle had died of cancer my aunt began dating again. She met a guy she really liked, a fun companion and a good partner, and for around 2 years they were happy. And then, in less than 2 minutes, it was over. She had gone-out on a short errand and returned to a crime scene — her boyfriend had committed suicide by shooting himself. I…
So I want to offer a bit of a caveat, a prenote, before I launch into the first few blog posts in my “Peeking over the Fence Period”. You see, usually, the KPY method takes stuff external to ourselves and immediately internalizes. We put ourselves in the situation and run from there. But my Peeking Over the Fence period started off a little differently. My goal was to start seeing…
The main character of a book I was reading (The Orphan Master’s Son) was part of an elite unit of North Korean soldiers stationed to guard the country’s border. Other members of the unit used to like to go peek over the fence and peer into South Korea, to see what life was like there. But, the main character never looked: “He knew the televisions were huge and there was…
Dear Reader – this blog is a direct continuation of the preceding blog, An Interruption in Our Regularly Scheduled Program – Goodbye Goyard Part 1. If you have not yet read that post then please go back and read it before you start on this next entry. I am looking around myself at all these items I have laid out to consign, each one telling me a truth about myself and about this world. A part of me so desperately wants to…
Dear Reader, I hope you will indulge me in one more present day (Oct. 2018) interruption, on the topic of self and self belonging, before we get on with our usual program… I was thinking about the upcoming Kathina ceremony, an important holiday in the Buddhist tradition, and decided I really wanted to make an offering to the temple – to the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha – that means something special to me. It’s hard to explain, but I felt like money alone simply wouldn’t do. Sometimes, when I give money it feels like…
Before I close-out the Suffering and Self – Yummy portion of this blog, I feel compelled to share a few modern-day (Aug 2018 and Oct. 2018) contemplations on the topic of myself and my belongings, while it is still ‘fresh’. Only, instead of focusing on how my belongings feed and care for the self, I observe how actually, I am a slave to these belongings. As with all the other Interruption in Our…