saint amunet of the badlands

so, i participate in this website where you swap free books, bookmooch, which also involves these collaborative art projects called bookmooch journals--like chain letters that go to a bunch of strangers who add their art and pass the paper along.

this specific journal's theme is create a saint. here's what i added...




(better views of these images here.)

"as long as we are habituated to want to have ground"

"It causes you to feel a fundamental, underlying insecurity of the human experience that is inherent in a changing, shifting, impermanent, illusory world, as long as we are habituated to want to have ground under our feet."

--Pema Chodron, on shenpa

What really draws me about this passage, and the talk overall, is that she detaches the negativity associated with recognizing these pattern behaviors, and instead generalizes the patterns as a symptom of the human condition.

It seems so paradoxical and sad that, as humans, we're basically animals, and, as animals, rely on conditioning and repetition to guide us through a world that is ever-changing and unpredictable. Whether or not you believe that the world is illusory, the idea that the world is static and predictable is certainly an illusion, a construction of inaccurate ideas. So, to behave as though the same responses that worked before will work again (conditioning) doesn't make sense.

In fact, i find it sort of perplexingly beautiful that part of the task here in existence is to go against that comfort that arises from the animal aspect of conditioning for self-preservation and embrace the unpredictable instant, which we can also learn from that immediate, instinctual and responsive animal part of us. Doing that makes engaging with the present in an alert, unjudging way so much easier.

i also appreciate the distinction she makes between being present with sensation and seeking that sensation for the comfort it brings in satisfying that craving, because she doesn't dismiss the substance or emotion or sensation as worthless in itself, she points out that the attached association is unhelpful and unconscious.

i'm not Buddhist, but some of the buddhist teachings i've encountered are really excellent at identifying and acknowledging mental and behavioral patterns with clarity and practical insight. This is one of them.

This Cummings poem we discussed tonight also speaks to this, in the sense of being vivid and not stale, of feeling rather than knowing, and embracing life actively:

sonnet entitled how to run the world)

A always don't there B being no such thing
for C can't casts no shadow D drink and

E eat of her voice in whose silence the music of spring
lives F feel opens but shuts understand
G gladly forget little having less

with every least each most remembering
H highest fly only the flag that's furled

(sestet entitled grass is flesh or swim
who can and bathe who must or any dream
means more than sleep as more than know means guess)

I item i immaculately owe
dying one life and will my rest to these

children building this rainman out of snow