Frozen in Place

The snow has melted, but the ground is frozen, so the outflow of my little fishpond has been caught in action--a scale of ice frozen on top of the lawn. I can follow the drainage course of the water all the way down the slight incline of the yard.

The outflows (asavas) are our predispositions, our mental defilements, which surreptiously keep the wheel of samsara, the wheel of suffering, spinning. The 3 outflows are sense desire, craving for existence, and ignorance. Huh?

It's hard to catch these rascals in action unless you're looking for them. This is what meditation can do: freeze those rascals in their tracks so that you can see tiny shreds of sense desire. You can see the particular ways in which you crave being. (Well, obviously, i don't want to die, for instance.) You can see how ignorance worms its way into ordinary, daily thoughts, words, and deeds.

And the wheel of samsara keeps spinning.

Draininge Ditch

It's been a rainy spring and summer, and already it's a rainy fall. Rainwater has drained into my garage and puddled in the basement. My sweetie has been waiting, waiting, for the road maintenance guys to put a crown on our private dirt road, a crown on our dirt driveway, and to do something about the drainage. When he flew to Portland, Oregon to meet me after my retreat, one of the first things he talked about was his exasperation with the process. "There's a great big ditch between your gardens. I can't possibly drive the truck over it. Call them and tell them to do something about it. They took away your beautiful garden soil. Now what are they going to do?!!"

Since the father of the road guys carved my driveway out of the woods 38 years ago, and his then-teenage boys were his crew, i have the utmost confidence in their artistry with a backhoe. Bill was the one who was bothered. "You call them," i said. "I can't quite picture it being as bad as you say."

When we returned home from our vacation, we found the ditch filled with crushed rock--all the better to drain the driveway. Hooray!

Worry is believing that something bad is going to happen in the future. Curiosity waits and wonders, "I wonder what's going to happen."

This ditch full of rocks is a better solution than i could have imagined.