sometimes life gives your jewels.....
it is amazing to have good friends...it is even more amazing when you feel honored to know them.....
scribblings from my friend Jim who is trying to help fund a school in highland Tibet.
moment of disappointment -- when magic and talismans take the place of Buddhist mind, shove 'sense' right out the door and let the local deities take over. Magic. When a simple request to pray for a dying Trappist monk turns into a search for a red undershirt to be blessed and FedEx'd to a monastery along the Shenandoah in Virginia, where he lays dying. And the lama says it's just a temporary obstruction, that if he wear the $2 dollar blessed red undershirt and eats a specially prepared longevity pill his life will continue on beyond the hopelessness of his failing kidneys. And me saying, "How bout a few bangs on the drum, toots on the longhorns, crashing of the dissonant symbols. Someone there in Virginia could whisper in his ear and tell him that monks along the upper Yellow River were doing a puja for his good next life. He'd like that, he would. I know." But the lama's got magic which I'm not buying it, because the guy who's dying is ready. Really ready A blessed undershirt and a pill the size and color of a single dropping of ship shit will not change the course he's on. But I do the ritual, which ends in drinking barley liquor, which I touch to my lips, wipe across my face, run my liquored fingers through my hair in a special darkened room with guardian deities. And I think, how did it get to this. We die. We all die. I'm not looking for anything more than that. But the lama, he keeps hammering -- get the shirt to VA, and I bury it in my pack and leave it there. Magic. A disappointment. You got to believe, but I don't. And either would my dying monk, though imaging the racket in a Tibetan monastery would please him as his life fades. I left it at that, and the red shirt is now in another room, waiting for someone to fit it. The longevity pill...got no clue. I guess it took a journey all it's own.
scribblings from my friend Jim who is trying to help fund a school in highland Tibet.
moment of disappointment -- when magic and talismans take the place of Buddhist mind, shove 'sense' right out the door and let the local deities take over. Magic. When a simple request to pray for a dying Trappist monk turns into a search for a red undershirt to be blessed and FedEx'd to a monastery along the Shenandoah in Virginia, where he lays dying. And the lama says it's just a temporary obstruction, that if he wear the $2 dollar blessed red undershirt and eats a specially prepared longevity pill his life will continue on beyond the hopelessness of his failing kidneys. And me saying, "How bout a few bangs on the drum, toots on the longhorns, crashing of the dissonant symbols. Someone there in Virginia could whisper in his ear and tell him that monks along the upper Yellow River were doing a puja for his good next life. He'd like that, he would. I know." But the lama's got magic which I'm not buying it, because the guy who's dying is ready. Really ready A blessed undershirt and a pill the size and color of a single dropping of ship shit will not change the course he's on. But I do the ritual, which ends in drinking barley liquor, which I touch to my lips, wipe across my face, run my liquored fingers through my hair in a special darkened room with guardian deities. And I think, how did it get to this. We die. We all die. I'm not looking for anything more than that. But the lama, he keeps hammering -- get the shirt to VA, and I bury it in my pack and leave it there. Magic. A disappointment. You got to believe, but I don't. And either would my dying monk, though imaging the racket in a Tibetan monastery would please him as his life fades. I left it at that, and the red shirt is now in another room, waiting for someone to fit it. The longevity pill...got no clue. I guess it took a journey all it's own.
posted by ~Sparrow | Thursday, December 08, 2005
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