I’ve had a nicely mixed day. In touch with people I respect and have great cognate with as well as new found friends who I’m getting to know and some prickly acquaintances I’ve known for a bit and never quite know what to make of; yet, I try to grow the connection and hope for the best in terms of me deepening my acceptance of people just as they are, not how I would think they would be better. Yes, that does come up a dismaying number times. Yet, that is really the point of all this Buddhism. First to learn to accept oneself. First to be compassionate to oneself. First to not judge oneself, And so forth; simply because the basic Buddhist teachings tell us when we know our selves we also know all others, because we are all the same. No exceptions! We may act and look and think differently, but we are, at our core, all the same. Motivated by exactly the same things and moved by exactly the same things. The minutia and details of our individual Greed, Hate and Delusion may vary, but those are the things that rule us all until we begin the process of allowing those Three Fires to be converted to Love, Compassion and Wisdom. Yes we allow. We don’t do it.

We participate in it as being the natural process of all existence. We are not God and there is no particle of us or any other thing or being that is not of God. I know the use of a “theistic” term gets some “Buddhists” all het up, but that is only being caught up in words.

Anyhoo. I had a reasonable day, and some lovely conversations and got a fair amount of things done or set in motion that were good to do. So, I plan to get off my high horse and have a light dinner,  a few more phone calls, a few pages of “The Honourable Schoolboy” by Le Carre and then, with any luck, some sleep, or at least rest. Part of my koan and result of my history is that I have a sort of hyper-alertness usually has me sleeping about four hours a night, which has been fine for many years but I’ve found a way to sleep 5-6  hours a night, not straight through but aggregate, and it has made a bit of a difference in my general outlook. Whooda Thunk?

I sit. I type, I write. I make

No sense, although some

Times I do, anyway, but

When I do I’m the only one

Who knows, sometimes; and

Then I try to explain while

The whole world has moved

On, and gone about the Busy-

Ness of life. Yep. Of Life. So

I go and sit with myself and

See I’m not by Myself. Rest.