Blogging is, if anything, more like the kind of pamphleteering the framers
had in mind when they guaranteed "freedom of the press" than is the New York
Times or Washington Post. -- Michael Kingsley in Slate, 10/20/05
If not an altogether happy week, it has certainly been an interesting one in the blogoBuddhaspere. A guaranteed successful retreat, depression, death and Gross National Happiness have all left their mark.
This is This … unusual autobiography technique.
Cliff Jones, blogmeister of This is This, is doing something pretty damn spiffy. He’s writing his autobiography, called “The Sum of All Years” in daily blog entries, with each entry telling the story of a year in his life – starting at age one. Cliff tells us, “The Sum Of All Years is an autobiography where the word count for each post is [equal] to the corresponding age for that entry.” His first three entries are: “The Sum of All Years – 1”: Born. “The Sum of All Years – 2”: Stood up. The Sum of All Years – 3”: We moved south. This week, Cliff completed years eight to fourteen. According to his profile, Cliff is 33 years old. By the time he’s done, Cliff’ll be writing short paragraphs. [Afterthought: In China, babies are born at age one; but elsewhere, other than American racehorses, the age at birth is zero. Shouldn't Cliff have a "The Sum of All Years - 0" entry?]
Modest Requirements
Vincent Horn writes in his eponymous blog of accomodations during a three-month silent retreat at Insight Meditation Society's Retreat Center in Massachusetts: "Bedrooms are simple and small, with a pillow, two blankets and a foam mattress on a low bed frame. ... Very simple and spare. Just like I like it…" Vincent is near completion of the first month of his stay. BUT this entry, like the others during the past month, are preceded by a note which tells us, "This is a post I prepared before going on retreat, so I could keep a small flow of content on VH.com while I'm gone..."
Now, I hate to be a stickler for journalistic ethics, but How can Vincent know in advance that he hasn't been given a second pillow? or that the mattress isn't giving him a sore back? or that the place isn't infested with rats?
I will be eager to read Vincent's blog two months from now to read how wonderful he knew the retreat was before he left for it. That Vince: I think he already had that "insight" thing down pat.
Up Close and Personal
James of The Buddhist Blog put up an astoundingly well-written and interesting post about his mental health difficulties. Samsara for James comes with being buffetted by schizoaffective disorder, which carries all the symptoms of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder (inc. mania and depression). Following is a snippet from the post where James describes dealing with an episode of depression:
The prevailing way to deal with depression in Buddhism seems to be meditating on compassion and and loving-kindness towards our depression. It is very easy for me to have compassion and loving-kindness toward others but often I forget to have compassion and love toward myself. This is probably one of the reasons that my physiological depression becomes worse with a lack of self-love and compassion.
So this morning I sat with my depression and just showed it love and compassion. I talked to it and told it that I understood it was warning me to "stop and listen." I told it that I loved it and thanked it for being so concerned about me and my life but that it could now go. I understood the lesson it was trying to teach me. I no longer needed it to fertilize the seeds of happiness that would soon grown and blossom out of the depression.
Reports from the Buddhist Frontlines
gendaku tells us that, according to an internet bulletin board post, Buddhism has been voted the most-tolerant religion, but the blogger warns, "As Buddhists, we pay attention and take responsibility. Taking responsibility does not mean basking in false, if much-supported, notions. Being encouraged is one thing. But falling into the belief trap is like shooting yourself in the foot."
JackZen of the blog jack/zen is impressed with the New Orleans Vietnamese community. "In the midst of widespread fragmentation, victimizing government dependency, bureaucratic finger-pointing, and chaos, this tiny community is fast becoming the story of what happens when healthy social networks encounter disaster."
In a wonderful post, Justin in American Buddhist Perspective, listening to a movie score, finds he’s not engaging his loving-kindness meditation practice quite so often as he thinks he should. He then muses “Eventually, so the story goes, our love and our awareness become boundless, and nothing in the world can break that. We become walking emanations of joy and understanding. We still live in the real world, but things 'out there' no longer dictate how we feel 'in here'.” The sweet music plays on, getting "a little deeper, a little richer."
Atanu Dey [At a new day?] of the blog Atanu Dey on India’s Development explores the national measurement GNH, or Gross National Happiness, that Bhutan’s government uses to understand how things are going there. Bhutan is a mostly Buddhist nation in the Himalayas. The GNH is somewhat like America’s Consumer Confidence index, but it attempts to be a measurement of personal well-being rather than one of feelings of economic security of a populous. Atanu is not impress with this measurement tool, preferring something fully objective. See Atanu’s posts GNH is Grossly Silly and GNH: The Cat’s Meow.
A Child and the Question of Death
Nacho of WoodMoor Village Zendo writes of his effort to explain death to his young son in a long post “Death and the Child, Part II,” a follow up to a post three months ago. Both now and three-months past the boy told his father at bedtime, “Dad, I don't want to die, but I know I have to.”
Nacho writes, "We talked a bit about how our love, our goodwilll, our deeds, survive our physical death. But this is understandably a difficult concept, and I don't expect it will bring him comfort immediately. ... We also talked about how many people believe in some kind of heaven, paradise, or afterlife where we meet again, and how he is likely to hear much of that, because it brings comfort and solace to people. I did tell him that I did not believe in such places."
Nacho asks readers, “How do you handle these conversations?”
genkaku had a similar experience -- though much less onerous -- with his boy, when, on the way to football practice, he was asked, "Papa, if you could be dead or alive, which would you pick?" Writes genkaku, "How nice it is to hear someone address one of those elephants in the living room, one of those questions which, when unaddressed, keeps shrinks in business."
Manufacturing Future Shock
Terrance of Republic of T often asks his readers for thoughts on books he should read. This week, he asks them for something by Noam Chomsky, whom he’s never read. Meanwhile, John of Inveterate Bystander has written a post called “Manufacturing Consent VIII: European Public & Media” which tells us there has been a decline in good information and news analysis. At the same time, meditateNYC’s Wednesday Blogma leads us to genkaku who finds wisdom in Paul Simon’s lyrics to “59th Street Bridge Song” [Slow down, you move too fast; you gotta make the morning last …]. Genkaku says, “This is a wily world, I imagine: Even ‘faster than a speeding bullet’ cannot catch up.” And then, there’s this: Kristian of Wandering where you will is in an angsty place, writing, “[It’s gotten] to the point where I'm not really sure whether this input is real, or whether it's something I've created over the years, slowly evolving and changing, some times this, some times that.. some times good, some times bad.. some times encouraging, some times devastating.. Am I becoming nothing at all?” This is also a week where it was revealed that TV Guide, for many years the top-selling magazine in America, stopped providing program listings, since that had all gotten too woolly and complex for a nationwide zine, reincarnating itself as a TV fan-mag.
The links in the paragraph above fit together, somehow. Each is a wonderful blog entry [except for the TV Guide thing], still I’m going to have Patrick Fitzgerald look into it and issue indictments. As to Kristian's angsty post, it's titled "The best is yet to come," so at least K's life is or will be on an upward path; he's not metamorphosing into a bug, like Georg Samsa [or, is it Samsara?], or otherwise is stuck in some Halloween-goulish Kafkaesque castle.
Harvests and Other Kudos
This week’s meditateNYC “Wednesday Blogma” recommends posts in tysonwilliams.com, gendaku and The Buddhist Blog. M of Zen Filter is keen on blogs this zen life, citing the wisdom in a recent post there, Kirin Pal because of its nice quotes, and My Zen Life which is clever and interesting.
Republic of T, Terrance Heath’s mostly-political blog, where T bills himself as “Black. Gay. Father. Vegetarian. Buddhist. Liberal.,” has been honored twice recently (1) with a big, fat quote in the Washington Post Express and (2) by prominent mention in Daily Kos, an uber important liberal political blog. Said Daily Kos in the leadoff to their report, “Kossack TerrenceDC of the excellent Republic of T, had a diary on this subject [the Millions More March] that scrolled off very quickly yesterday and it deserved more exposure; I've excerpted snippets in this diary.”
And, finally, Douglas Eye of Hundred Mountain Journal recommends Blogmandu to his readers: “It's a good way to discover and stay atop what's up in the blogoBuddhasphere.” Thanks, Doogie.
