A blog? Really?
I've tried for a long time to ignore blogs -- not individual blogs, the whole phenomenon. So it seems fairly absurd that I am even considering starting one now.
I've tried for a long time to ignore blogs -- not individual blogs, the whole phenomenon. So it seems fairly absurd that I am even considering starting one now.
My potential personal relationship to this new-ish format -- channel? what exactly is it? -- doesn’t differ at all from how I've thought of the old ones. Since my first urges to write, I have deeply questioned whether I have anything to say that is original or in any way interesting, meaningful or useful to anyone else. That, as I like to imagine, I can write pretty well when I want to doesn't seem relevant to that question.
But maybe my friend Colie has it right. "We are all so human," she says in her blog. And something about sharing both the every-day and the extraordinary challenges and the joys inherent to being human is useful, even if only for validation. If only for connection.
Sometimes I forget, but at least right now, I am under no illusion that my experience is any better or any worse -- any different -- than anyone else’s. Or that I am any better or worse. And maybe that is part of why we write and why we read -- to feel less alone in the journey.
I could use feeling less alone. And if I can make someone else feel less alone, that would be worth the effort and the potential humiliation of putting myself out there.
Defeating the wire grass
I am certainly not the first to make this analogy, but sometimes, I think, it really is all about defeating the wire grass.
Being healthy and happy requires constant tending of the weeds. Like wire grass, ego habits -- the kleshas, in Buddhist terminology -- creep into and threaten to overtake our psyches, inhibiting the growth and flow of life energy and awareness. If we let them, these negative mind forms (am I really saying that?) overpower and obscure our experience of the splendor of creation, and we forget that it’s there.
Or maybe I should just speak for myself. I forget that it’s there.
I don’t really know what I’m doing in the garden. I pull out things that look like they shouldn’t be there and hope I’m not mistaking seedlings of vegetables I planted for weeds. Over time I think I’ll learn to distinguish between them better. And I surely could supplement that essential experience (practice) with research, and thus benefit from the experiences of others who have gone before me.
The same principles are true outside the garden, in life.
But maybe my friend Colie has it right. "We are all so human," she says in her blog. And something about sharing both the every-day and the extraordinary challenges and the joys inherent to being human is useful, even if only for validation. If only for connection.
Sometimes I forget, but at least right now, I am under no illusion that my experience is any better or any worse -- any different -- than anyone else’s. Or that I am any better or worse. And maybe that is part of why we write and why we read -- to feel less alone in the journey.
I could use feeling less alone. And if I can make someone else feel less alone, that would be worth the effort and the potential humiliation of putting myself out there.
Defeating the wire grass
I am certainly not the first to make this analogy, but sometimes, I think, it really is all about defeating the wire grass.
Being healthy and happy requires constant tending of the weeds. Like wire grass, ego habits -- the kleshas, in Buddhist terminology -- creep into and threaten to overtake our psyches, inhibiting the growth and flow of life energy and awareness. If we let them, these negative mind forms (am I really saying that?) overpower and obscure our experience of the splendor of creation, and we forget that it’s there.
Or maybe I should just speak for myself. I forget that it’s there.
I don’t really know what I’m doing in the garden. I pull out things that look like they shouldn’t be there and hope I’m not mistaking seedlings of vegetables I planted for weeds. Over time I think I’ll learn to distinguish between them better. And I surely could supplement that essential experience (practice) with research, and thus benefit from the experiences of others who have gone before me.
The same principles are true outside the garden, in life.
