Friday, August 31, 2007

Immortal Power of Planning Ahead

Absurd    ~ist Post #  1.01 

 

 Now this is Planning Ahead * * *

  

       On my mortal soul I don’t read The National Review (not that there’s anything wrong with that) but someone brought this to my desk.  In the August 27, 2007 issue Jason Lee Steorts writes “In China’s Tibet ” there is a “new Chinese law forbidding any of Tibet’s hundreds of living Buddhas from reincarnating without government permission…”!  WOW.  Now I can’t read a line like that without stopping. 

      Since the "war" I have become so disgusted with t.v. and print journalists I literally tuned out of many current events because A.) they are too much dramatization for too little journalism and B.)I honestly can't take any more.  So I am not bound to talk politics much but, that said, I ask you.  How many absurdist things can a government think up?  Obviously this Chinese "law" is a control tactic against followers of the Dalai Lama but nonetheless, can’t mankind look over its shoulder at all the archaic things done in the name of pride, power and nationalism, cringe at its collective self and simply grow up?  What are we waiting for???

       People find it difficult to fill out a living will, the latest “in” thing to do—so loved ones do not get extra angst at any end point in the unknown time frame of a life’s journey.  Why do I feel afraid to write “in case of sudden death” or use the word “demise” here, or say out loud “deadly accident”?  We rarely deal with death in America, so we never take much time in our busy schedules to think about finding God or reaching absolute Buddah like immortality.  Ooohhh, no wonder the word death is a big living-man-eater; to most Americans death is a clammy dark door we half-unconsciously hear creaking at the far tunnel of our thoughts... (and ooo hhha I feel Halloween coming on like a fever suddenly). 

       Now I am NO Buddha, if I do practice meditation (and there are all forms of focused attention we all practice, not necessarily formal breathing and sitting postures) its to keep me stable (ha!) in a crazy world.  Since I haven’t attained enlightenment, I am unqualified to knock on the governmental Chinese door to fill out a special report stating in plain Chinese my Buddah intention to reincarnate.  I ask you, would a living Buddah honor or acknowledge the Chinese government?  Or fill out forms, or think of getting his drivers license renewed??

       If any of you are in the area of Lhasa Tibet, this reincarnating Buddah application would be the document to obtain and post on the www.  What would it ask? How would it qualify one's claim to true Buddha attainment in the first place?  Would one sit through a battery of tests?  Its not like showing up in your Girl Scout outfit and bearing your badges, is it Colin Powell? The application would surely ask when and where the Buddha would reincarnate... and as what?  We all need to know this answer.  I know the answer for me (at least today).  On Thanksgiving day in a small college town near Boston, Massachusetts for a good heaping of all the goodies spread out at a traditional New England Thanksgiving Dinner where I would swear to my new government, in proper Chinese, just how important this trip will be for my immortal soul. 

       O to appear thus in the future, to grace the table of one of my unborn relatives, to pick up the fork and just sharpened knife and carve the just roasted Tom turkey, or the roast beast (hi, dr. seusse).  Or if I got there late (typically do) I'd cut the first slice of hot apple pie while the vanilla bean ice cream just gets soft enough to melt…Oooh, my dead tongue is softening and coming back to me now!

       Can you imagine “transpiring” or “passing over” to the other side and then coming back for some ooohhh blueberry cobbler, or freshly baked biscuits with butter, or oreo cookies, or watermelon, or steak and onions, or to see the sunlight slant in the fall through the last golden leaves and smell the crisp air again; or to dance in the snow, to taste sparkling wine or orange juices just squeezed or to take a hot shower and sip even a simple pure good glass of water?  It would be amazing, like being born AWAKE again…  

       Fear... for, ha, the Chinese government's undeclared secret power to imagine it could actually stop a soul from "immortal" life at all, I mean what arrogance of arrogance award can we give?  To even empower the governmental mind and imagination in this manner, as if to stop a Buddha or anything from the right to live and dream, rights we take so for granted here.  I've witnessed some odd spiritual stuff in my life, but nothing recorded in a Chinese government (or any govternment) by a beauracratic clerk will stop authentic spiritual power or progress; it isn’t even gonna stop the rain from falling, let alone a Buddha from living--or going to Thanksgiving dinner at my house this year.  So set the table Mom!  We are having (unseen) Tibetan guests!!!

       Please, wait. How do you say don't forget in Chinese?  That’s what I will write on my government permission propaganda application--and we should all apply to reincarnate!  My application will have a p.s. note to the future relatives I am coming on down the spiritual ladder to visit.  It will say P.S. Don’t please, forget the pomegranate!   I have eaten a red ripe pomegranate, with all those tiny chambers of mouth-puckering juice packed seeds that stain my fingers every Thanksgiving (no matter how stuffed I am) ever since I was five years old.  All attained Buddhas love pomegranates.  Don’t they??  It’s an old symbol of fertility and as the philosopher said, “Why is it more amazing to be born twice, than it is to be born once.” I’ll be happy just to get through today.

 

Posted by Mansuetude at 15:03:39 | Permanent Link | Comments (1) |

Thursday, August 30, 2007

Sesame Street meets the Garden of Eden

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Su6HaAzpDt0

for spoonfullofsugah who loves cookie monster.

Posted by Mansuetude at 21:52:05 | Permanent Link | Comments (4) |

Claratin D and gutter-al gutter talk

          Ode to a Neighbor's Gutters ! ! !

            My neighbor's house sits close to mine in a patch of woods, and her gutters are like, well, gutters.  There isn't a homeless man sitting in them sloshed and wearing rags, singing into a mostly empty bottle of red ripple or whatever cliché word a homeless person’s drinking evokes--the gutters are more like an arborist's dream.  Little maple trees sprouted there this spring and they are now taller and stronger than anything born in a gutter, so to speak, should ever dream to be.   

     You know how the spring winds make those little whirli-gig spinning things go all over; I mean all over, cause my neighbor's little maple tree sends out these spinning spawning seeds on wings by the thousands.  No, the hundreds of thousands, no more--you go count them next year, disbeliever.  I am not going to stop you.  That tree spins them out by the millions, the billions—a trillion seeds come off that one little maple tree in a year flying around like locust come to take back the air from those of us paying to live and breathe around here.  Well, I can tell you, every spring with all that fluttering spawning spinning going on I get allergies (sound like a big nose full of wet tissue, become a wheez-er, a static breather).  When I can't take it anymore, I break down and take Claratin D which as anyone knows is allergy medicine.  We must sign up to buy it.  Know why?

     Because dopes (dope-heads) make Crystal Meth from it; a highly addictive drug.  So after I go to the local pharmacy and stand in line with a good wad of tissue stuffed in my leaking nose, my face half hidden like a Taliban wanna-be (o.k. not funny) and feeling like a drug addled criminal with the shakes.  I swipe my driver's license in a digital reader, and sign a notice that I promise not to make any speed or meth with my twelve day supply.  I mean really!  Look at me mr. man behind the surveillance camera I am stuffed up like a clogged toilet... I am dripping, looking like a hound dog without bark or a bite.  Wave at the surveillance camera, hello to you mr. 1984, here is my photo, here is my driver’s license # and its i.d. tag, here is my iris and my finger print, here is my signature and my credit card, you want a blood sample?  Urine sample? Do you need anything more to find me?

     No sooner than I pay I am out in the car, engine running trying to get that Claratin D out of its little airless sack and into my mouth, open up the diet coke and swill it down.  Ok maybe I drink Aquafina, but in this situation the diet coke is more dramatic, so tuff.  My nose needs oxygen, to breathe well makes a lot happier person.  You know man can not live on bread alone, she does need air.  Nonetheless, Claratin D will act like a sugar caffeine nicotine adrenalin rush on my body; so I may not make crystal meth and sit around all half-coked out of my mind with my little white pill—but since my body is generally drug free this stuff does make me speed up.  Like rocket fuel in an un-manned go cart, away I go.

     Its the ladder I get out first, the big one a woman usually leaves for the roofers or the men who know what a scaffolding is; then I get the bucket and a little trowel used for gardening and cause I am all jazzed up on my new nose decongestant and that same nose decongestant legally enters my bloodstream, brain and heart--I can easily knock down those gutters and mow the lawn and clear the deck of millions, no trillions, qua-drillions of whirli-gig maple seeds all in one ... minute...  I mean afternoon.  This drug is a bored housewife's dream, cause it is NOT that I want to do all these chores at once, my gardening gloves covered in muck, my knees tortured going up and down the ladder steps.  ... I can't help myself!  My mind and my hands are all abuzz and if I were a bee the whole planet would be smeared a bright light capturing sweet gooey goodness from a Claratin D week of making honey overtime with all the other drugged out Claratin D drones.

    By the end of yard work, I’m exhausted.  But because I bought the Claratin D 24 hour dose instead of the 12 hour version (which usually wears off by bedtime) (but was sold out) I can't stop moving.  I try to sit, to rest, the mind racing at the speed of blur, I think if only "I took this stuff in college I would've graduated early!"  I close my eyes and see masses of millions of zillions of one winged maple seeds go whirling past my inner eyes.  They will never spawn anything now.  Bagged and sent to the dump, maybe they could spill open and catch root on top of all the American tossed out garbage peels and un-recycled.  A noble idea, to plant dumps green by sending our maple seeds away in bio-degradable bags or some other subtle non-violent tactic.  Its one way to plant a tree for Arborist day, but what are the chances?  If just one of those billions of trillions of seeds did indeed root in at the dump it would be like that philosophical tree standing alone in a forest asking, "Do I live?” “How do I know, if nobody ever climbs me?"

     Kind of the way a blogger feels waiting for feed back (I'm guessing cause this is only my first week) but the idea of writing this is about the maple seeds.  The world is full with many kinds of seeds.  We are all seed ideas spawning seeds and we give birth to them one by one as we speak and create and share them.  The seeds we spawn and tend, the seeds we send out, act just like the multiplicity of winged seeds the maple flings into the wind, trusting they will land and root in.  Just by the sheer existence of our own creative pulse we should trust that our creativity deserves its own selfhood (its right to exist) because we have pulled it from the within; it has traveled against all odds to be born here; to show to us, as mirrors from the unknown inside us, a new aspect of our own face, hand, mind's capacity to create--to make a new place or way, to better our livings. 

    Not everything we do should and could root in, like the millions of seeds in any spring, like in a green pepper, an apple, a watermelon (imagine them all at the dump sprouting in); like in the sperm, the womb, an education, not all our creative endeavors will bloom but those tended will often grow other seeds in the next season.  This isn’t new info.  But sometimes we are surprised by what has cross pollinated within us, by engaging with others.   Bloggers--(I talk to all of u) some one of us must be doing something that not only satisfies ourselves and our own creative need but one other, at least!  Or two, or three or like the actual maple tree which has outside my window, within eyesight of its own growing grandeur, spawned a whole family of little sprouts; likewise some of us are (or will) reach countless.  (but not you poor Mr. Peanut--see Spoonfullofsugar's blog in the blogroll) 

     I swear the conservationist in me might just crawl up on a ladder in the middle of the night, maybe on a night like tonight while the moon is big enough to cast a bit of light, and steal from my neightbor's gutters.  I could scoop each small tree life up by the little white roots in a garden tool, put them by the hundreds, no the thousands, the trillions into the backseat of my vehicle and drive around the city with friends to plant them each in a place where someone's eye, someone's imagination and hope for a greener world might appreciate them.  Someone might water one.  It might also surprise someone to find a sudden tree in a spot that before had been barren or stop someone in a path they walk daily without seeing their surroundings anymore.  Each found infant-maple could be tended then, enjoyed.  It would take some work, but it might be fun.  This world is full of seeds, each if allowed to blossom, grows into a seed bearing entity and such are we, variety by variety, no catalogue could classify, while on and on we become bound and circled in by the bounty.
Posted by Mansuetude at 16:49:44 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |

Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Sesame Street Cake Baker falls down Stairs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cg71djeZfos

Because we still love this guy,  and though I'm not a fan of violent humor

some friends and i were talking about watching this ...

He sings out how many pies he has and then he falls down with them....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BRDQzfi234

Posted by Mansuetude at 21:02:57 | Permanent Link | Comments (1) |
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