Notes:
- Source: Notes & Errata by Mark Morford – Your Awesomely Meaningless Life in One Simple Chart
- Related Post: Slate – This Is Your Life. As a Single Line.
- Image: Was modified with cross-out and *.
Tag: Funny
Reading in Sanctuary. With Chia.
Susan comes in with a spray bottle. I lift my head, but otherwise don’t move, following her silently as she moves across the room. She waters a small green plant on a white marble end table. She leaves. I drop my head back to my reading.
I’m in the Sanctuary. Sunday mornings and the end of each working day. The bedroom door closed; I’m on the bed. Zeke, with his head between his paws, is snoozing and leaning into me. We’re in the decompression chamber.
I glance over to my right.
I have never seen that plant.
I have never seen that end table.
I’m in the middle of Patti Smith’s memoir “Just Kids” and recall a line that stuck: “Nothing is finished until you see it.” Thank God for me for that. There’s a lot left to See.
Susan’s on the ground floor. I send her a text.
“How long has that plant been there?”
“Really, Dave? It’s been there for over a month.”
One month? It’s five feet away. I didn’t know it existed. I send a follow-on text. Continue reading “Reading in Sanctuary. With Chia.”
My Kind of Deity
Indeed, even as he seems the paragon of saintly forgiveness, he advances a claim to ordinariness. ‘‘I am a human being like any other,’’ I heard him repeat in several public appearances over the last year. In Tibet, he told me, too many superstitious beliefs had overlaid Buddhism’s commitment to empirically investigate the workings of the mind. Tibetans believed that he ‘‘had some kind of miracle power,’’ he said. ‘‘Nonsense!’’ he thundered. ‘‘If I am a living god, then how come I can’t cure my bad knee?’’
He similarly asserted his nonsupernatural qualities at the summit meeting of Nobel Peace Prize winners in Rome this December. When the city’s former mayor asked him how he coped with jet lag, the Dalai Lama, Newsweek reported, gave a frankly nonreligious explanation. He could train his mind to sleep well, he said (he goes to bed at 7 p.m. and wakes at 3 a.m. to meditate). ‘‘Traveling the world — time difference — no problem,’’ he added, ‘‘but bowel movement does not obey my mind. But this morning, thanks to your blessings — after 7 o’clock, full evacuation. So now I am very comfortable.’’
~ Pankaj Mishra, The Last Dalai Lama?
Source: NY Times Magazine – The Last Dalai Lama?
