First Day of Spring

By the time you read this, spring will already have sprung--at 5:37 a.m. Eastern. Good-bye winter. 

Dare i start waving good-bye to the pandemic? 26% of the people in our state have received at least their first shot.

The Buddha frames the teaching of the 4 Ennobling Tasks as a doctor might.

Dx--our diagnosis--Suffering (dissatisfaction, discontent, lack) exists.

Hx--the history--Craving causes suffering.

Px--our prognosis--Cessation: suffering can come to an end.

Rx--our remedy--the 8-fold Ennobling Path

The diagnosis of COVID on our planet can come to an end if we take the remedy--one or two jabs of a vaccine.

Welcome Spring!

Looking For.... What?

I visited a friend yesterday, and she showed me the decorative gourds in her apartment. One i particularly liked looked like a serpent blindly searching for.... What?

What is it we are blindly searching for? What is missing from our lives of plenty? Not enough.... What?

This sense of lack, of insufficiency afflicts all of us.

Some of us channel the lack into the desire for money or consumer goods. More, more. more. Or perhaps into fame--who has the most friends on Facebook? the most followers on Twitter? Some of us channel the insufficiency into a spiritual search. This meditation? Or that path? Or maybe that guru over there?

The ego can never fill up this empty hole of "something is missing." More children? More love? More stuff?

Counter-intuitively, what "fills" this sense of lack is giving not getting. Giving--generosity, kindness, compassion--brings us home to ourselves.