October 10, 2005

I took two of those herbal sleep supplements an hour ago so I don't know how much sense this will make.

I went to bed tonight after smoking three cigarettes and crying for my ex-lover. again. I went to bed and I picked up this book Jen lent me months and months ago that I hadn't read because frankly I thought I would find it cloying and stupid.

I picked it up because it was short and because I felt so sad and crappassy I couldn't even manage to read a "real book". I try not believe in strange twists of fate but if ever there was time I needed a spiritual ass-kicking it was tonight.

I am up to page 52 and begging that the herbal sleep meds don't have their intended effect I will probably finish the book tonight, and start from the begining again tomorrow night.

Because I can only suffer so much of my rigorous self-distress.

Dig it.

..and the funniest part, is that the key to this whole thing is humour - to laugh at oneself and to forgive. And I can do both those things. I feel for the first time in ages that something is going to open up again.

I will probably cry again, and for the usual reasons, because I cry all the time, but I think it will feel better, and it will be pain and not suffering which will make all the difference, and I will try to listen to myself when it happens and not keep telling myself the same stories over and over again.

Trungpa Rinpoche once said, "Renunciation is realizing that nostalgia for samsara* is full of shit." Renunciation is realizing that our nostalgia for wanting to stay in a protected, limited, petty world is insane. Once you begin to get the feeling of how big the world is and how vast our potential for experiencing life is, then you really begin to understand renunciation."

One of my habits is to make light of things which come from my heart. I really wish to write some thing acerbic about how ned must be reading this and thinking I have gone off my nut...not the first urban jew to read a piece of buddhist literature and think they have found the answer to their problems.

So I am going to say it this way, and somehow between the lines there is a truth, about how uncomfortable I am trying to write this, and how happy I am to be reading something that sounds like real wisdom, and how thankful that I chose to read this book tonight of the seven I could have chosen from the bedside table.

Oh and Jen, thank you. I don't think Sandra had any idea what she was doing when she got you to be my mentor, you are certainly that. I think I might not be the excellent horse, nor the good horse, or even the lazy horse. I am the bad horse, and you are the best.

*the vicious cycle of existence - the round of birth death and rebirth- which arises out of ignorance and is characterized by suffering; in ordinary reality, the vicious cycle of frustration and suffering generated as the result of ones karma (actions)

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