I lived a lot of my early life in a world where gambling was an everyday activity. Everybody I knew had a bookie, or two, or three, and spent considerable time placing or figuring out bets to be placed. There were odds for anything. In todays world of online gambling I gather you can bet on anything.

It used to be that sports betting had “the official line” (ostensibly Las Vegas legit) which came out every Tuesday; because that gave everybody the weekend and after Monday Night Football to pay off or collect from outcomes of whatever games had played.                On Mondays, for those “in the know” (i.e. degenerate gamblers:), they had the ‘outlaw line” which was just an indicator to see how bets were lining up with balancing of bettors on both sides of a bet. Bookies make money on balancing the money between opposing side because they collect a fee for each transaction. You know, like Wall Street. Which I have been told, ad nauseam, is not like gambling at all.                                        Right. Brokers are not bookies. Right?

Anyway,  the last few years the U.S. has about 38,000 to 42,000 deaths due to gunshots, anually. About 2/3 of those are suicide. Still, a bullet is a bullet. A projectile fired from a gun.

This year, I bet, there are odds being offered, somewhere, about the total Corona Virus death toll. With lots of qualifiers as to determination process of final figures.

So, it crossed my mind this morning that even if this pandemic stuff occurs every year and we never get a handle on it, it’ll never equal gunshot deaths just in the U.S.

What if we gave Three Trillion Dollars to all the people in the gun business to just quit making and selling guns, except for military purposes?

I’d bet they would take it and move on to some other less deadly and socially disruptive enterprise.  Maybe. It really is hard to tell. Perhaps that’s a good ‘proposition’ bet with any bookie working on any Street corner, or bar where brokers  bookies gather.

Delusion is the mind telling

Its self it is not and

Can not be deluded

Because It knows that.

Back in the 70’s in North Beach of S.F. there was a slang usage of the word ‘naturally’ that I always liked but wasn’t used often. Someone would be telling some tale of having left North Beach and gone into the wilds of Marin County, or even deeper into Not-North-Beach, maybe even going all the way into Sonoma County or, God forbid into the Central Valley, and the story would relate to having spent hours driving into the country and back, “on the natch”, with indicated the privation of no drugs or alcohol used for a block of hours away from North Beach. This type of usage always occurred in Bar-room conversations of course.

I have been having a polar opposite experience of being on the natch during this time of consternation we are experiencing. Since I haven’t had a drug or drink in37 years and instead took up Buddhism and meditation I’ve been on the natch by choice. But, there is a natch, and there is natch.

What seems to be naturally occurring for me at this time is a settling into a rhythm of not being in a hurry while actually having no place to go and discovering there is no deep need at all, to go anywhere or do anything. In conjunction with a diminuendo of cognitive ability, as well as short-term memory fading faster than I would like, there is suddenly no real reason to be doing 90% of what I had invested habit-energy into for most of my life.

I’ve been training as a lay Buddhist for many years in conjunction with my sobriety, and have gotten used to thinking that, I go to the temple,  that I go on retreats,  I go and sit in meditation, I go to Buddha, Dharma and Sangha for refuge. These things are all true and have been good to do. But, currently all those thing seem to coming to me; as I just go through each day in a naturally quiet mode.

Many people are dealing with anxiety and worry as their main experience during this time, and I’ve certainly had those arise as well, but they don’t seem to maintain traction.

I suspect that most of us, as we go through this period of seemingly imposed restriction, will find small opportunities in-between the worry and anxiety relating to all the practical aspects of life; like school, work, debts, family, aging and the sensing more keenly the actual impartiality of death and dying. A dying that can be brought on by a loved ones kiss or caress or pat on the head, or a stranger passing by; and we may never know which was the cause.

The other part of this time is the concern and love for others that is moving forward in our awareness, time is a precious commodity and we can never know how much we have left. There have been many families walking and biking all over town, we’re having some nice Spring weather and many young people out or young mothers with their kids.

Bee’s buzzing in cherry blossoms and kids buzzing on all manner of wheeled conveyance. In the future, the High School graduates of 2020 throughout the whole country, will be talking and reminiscing about this Spring/Summer and it will be a fond memory of a nostalgic time.

Unless of course, if after this passes, we don’t seriously get down to business and alter our habits and how we relate to the world and its environment.

We are either in a Teaching

Moment, or just experiencing

 A small taste of things to come.

I’m hoping, Teaching moment.

Please, let’s all learn something

Helpful, and positive.

Within all the disturbance and discomfort and dis-ease and disease we are currently experiencing, I have become increasingly grateful for having found a path of spiritual life that gives me not only a context and a basket that holds everything, a basket I can put fear, worry, doubt and apprehension in; and from which I can take out the solution to those same worries, etc.

A mystical basket that has great depth and is also a very practical one because it offers refuge, understanding and a way to be with what I may perceive as negative aspects of life. Seen from a distance that allows some space between my feelings and reality. That space is impartiality.

I don’t have to choose a position on anything. Although I always have choices. Hmmmmm? When I take a position my view is altered and my choices biased.

When I try to stay closer to the middle (center) I can see situations and life in a more balanced way and perhaps be more reasonable in my relation to the day to day activities of life. Certainly not always, but way more than I used to be before I started on this path.

If I lined up all the Buddhist practitioners in the world and asked them to write a two hundred word description of meditation, no two would be alike. Neither description, nor practitioner. Buddhism allows wide latitude in how we go about gathering our faith together, not as a belief system but rather a system of core behavioral advice that will over time change how we are. Buddhism is a process, not an event.

Currently with the world situation being what it is, we think we are experiencing something new or novel, well we are, but most of the world has been in greater discomfort for many centuries than we have ever been. In my lifetime in U.S., we have lived at the height of Empire while 80 % of world was used by our educational system as proof we are special and that others need to be exploited so that we can grow stronger, and then help them. If we don’t stampede we have tremendous opportunities facing us

Here we are. Life is and always will be uncertain, if not now, later for sure.

So, here we are.

Our current big choice is how we look at the discomforts we are experiencing? I choose to see them as a teaching for my own good, whether I live or die, everything in my life is always being presented to me as a teaching for my own good and consequently for the good of all beings. I can choose to look past the end of my nose and look up, rather than down.

How can I help? What can I do? Please allow me to see and act clearly, and if unclear to refrain from acting ’til I know what is good to do! That is today’s prayer and deep wish.

Today is a beautiful Spring day, its not always

Rainy and dark when the Mongol Horde, or the

Einsatzgruppen, or British East India Co., or

“Go West young man” starts, or Bubonic

Plagues and Chinese famines and Vietnamese

Invasions commence or 9/11 just happens.

It’s never just one cause for anything, rather a

Chain of causation that stretches way back

Beyond the thought of man. Here we all are.

Yes, we can, we can change and accept and

Lean into the Sunset and welcome Sunrises.

After we ask, can we stay still long enough 

To hear the answer and then, see what is

Really needed,         for the benefit of all?

Interesting times. The news narrative, the political narrative, the economic one, the medical one, the mental distress one and the ‘subtle understanding shift’ one.

We have a strong sense that something is going wrong, that there is a New Normal.

Nothing is going wrong, this is all normal.

The world, as constituted, is woven through with danger, unpleasantness and fear. As Buddhism points out, there is birth, disease, old age, and death. The last three don’t occur without the first, or in a predictable order.

The world, as constituted, is also filled with compassion, understanding, co-operation and sympathy and empathy and love; endless amounts of all.

None of us can point to anything for sure happening tomorrow. You may say, “Of course I can, there will be a sunrise.”. Not if you die before then.

Yet, we live in a dreamworld that whispers to us that if we just follow our passions we can derive satisfaction, if our kitchen pantry is full and an array of exercise equipment is available we are on the right track. We really feel (justifiably we insist), that is the way things should be for everyone, we chant inclusively, but even in this dreamworld, unrealistically.

We’ve lived at the height of the greatest and richest Empire the world has ever known and we felt it was our due and rightful inheritance, and now it falls apart and not so slowly, but surely; and we struggle. We’ve lived the lives of ‘The Gods’ of just 2000 years ago (or way less) and we called it normal. Whoops!

Every human is born as a result of good past karma, but unless we comport our lives to reality, that karma wears out, often early in life. Certainly towards the end, unless we change how we live them.

It is never, ever, too late. Every human can individually change their range of choices to better ones, refine already good ones and start to refrain from poor ones. Just effort required.

Easy? No. If it was easy we would have been doing it all along. And, we haven’t.

Yet, here we are.

There are still birds and the trees,

the flowers and the bees; for real,

in our hearts and minds, for real.

We are not doomed, we have just painted ourselves into a corner, after all we are the ones who created the condition for this virus to be successful. Migrating birds interact with animals kept in close proximity of human habitation and raised for food and viruses, (science doesn’t know for sure whether they are a ‘real’ life form?) move from the birds to farmed animals to humans. Whoops! (Polite puzzled laughter.)

Somewhere within all of this is an opportunity and it is not of the narrative qualities  we’ve assigned to our Interesting Times. It’s in a very personal waking up to the possibility of co-operative change.

Co-operating with the world as it is; not how we have insisted it be.

We have a New Normal forming in the alternatives we choose to see, not the one’s we’ve picked in search of constant comfort.

Hope for the best

Expect nothing

Do the possible