The Principles of Jewish Buddhism

This floats into my Inbox once or twice a year, but was really appreciated this morning after an awful day of trying to work with people who truly seem to believe in #10.

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1. Let your mind be as a floating cloud. Let your stillness be as the wooded glen. And sit up straight. You’ll never meet the Buddha with such round shoulders.
2. There is no escaping karma. In a previous life, you never called, you never wrote, you never visited. And whose fault was that?
3. Wherever you go, there you are. Your luggage is another story.
4. To practice Zen and the art of Jewish motorcycle maintenance, do the following: get rid of the motorcycle. What were you thinking?
5. If there is no self, whose arthritis is this?
6. Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out. Forget to do this and attaining Enlightenment will be the least of your problems.
7. The Tao has no expectations. The Tao demands nothing of others. The Tao does not speak. The Tao does not blame. The Tao does not take sides. The Tao is not Jewish.
8. Drink tea and nourish life. With the first sip, joy. With the second, satisfaction. With the third, Danish.
9. The Buddha taught that one should practice loving kindness to all sentient beings. Still, would it kill you to find a nice sentient being who happens to be Jewish?
10. Be patient and achieve all things. Be impatient and achieve all things faster.
11. Be here now. Be someplace else later. Is that so complicated?
12. Zen is not easy. It takes effort to attain nothingness. And then what do you have? Bupkes!

Definitely young and perhaps idealistic….

Here’s a little blast from the past:

Hang on for a bit, as the evening news went at a slower pace in January 1972. Towards the end, you’ll see an 18-21-yr-old talking about how to win the votes of other 18-21-yr-olds. Yes, it’s a darling little Karl Rove, learning from the masters at CREEP.

Five tons of rock

A dump truck just dropped what the driver estimates to be five tons of rock–lovely chunks of limestone–in front of my condo. Construction on the new section has required that trucks far too large for our curved gateway come through here, and it’s made a mess of things. They end up driving part way through the landscaping, demolishing the plants, obliterating the ground cover, and smearing great glops of mud all over my driveway. Now that the area has been pretty much dug out by the tires, it’s being filled with serious rock that can take the stress without making a mess.

And I get to be here to watch the work. Life is good.

What’s the plural of series?

Watching:

• in the middle of the second season of Tennant as Doctor Who with The Child
• just starting the second season of Rome all by myself–I love Netflix! It said there would be a long wait for it, but it was pulled straight off the top of my queue.

Reading:

• finished HP4 (Triwizard)–Oh, yes, there were some major clues and quite a bit o’ foreshadowing going on in this one! I didn’t find Hermione’s SPEW quite as grating on this reading, but the Hermione-Ron relationship still doesn’t seem like a likely outcome here, even with Krum and all that. (Maybe the fourth time through for me, as I’ve re-read the series each time in anticipation of a new book, and now I’m re-re-reading after having completed the whole thing.)
• starting HP5 (Order of the Phoenix)

Attending:

• “Comedy of Errors” last Thursday in Winedale
• “Measure for Measure” on Wednesday at Central Market
• So not really attending, but I’ll soon be watching Branaugh’s “Hamlet,”which I truly love. I’m so excited that it’s finally on DVD. Maybe we’ll have a compare and contrast marathon of that one and the Ethan Hawke version, which has fabulous age-appropriate casting.

And stretching the notion of a series a bit further: In the series of sneak peeks offered to local film geeks, I saw “Death at a Funeral” last night. A few clichés and far too much spit–truly a gag-inducing quantity of spit, although I would expect most people to recoil more strongly from the other bodily semi-fluid featured–but otherwise quite good for those of us who love Brit-coms. Firefly/”Serenity” fans will find it amusing that Tudyk has an accent at the beginning, but seems to lose it after his character starts hallucinating.

How to stop Flash ads

A lovely discussion about street charity on the NYT Freakonomics blog is strongly recommended. I know what my rabbi says and what the sources say, but in this discussion I’m somewhere between Cuban and Ehrenreich, which is admittedly a large space to be in–probably because I’m somewhere in the middle on options 3 and 4 offered by Brooks. I have given when asked directly for specific help, although I’m cynical enough to view it more as having funded a compelling street art performance than actually helping someone purchase required clothes to start a new job. There’s also practicality to consider:

• The very first time I was on the street in NYC, one of my very first actions was to attempt help someone on the street, which turned out to be a scam. Which isn’t meant to dis NYC; kind locals detected my plight and helped me out of it.
• In my little town, however, we are more often confronted by beggars at stoplights, so I have no difficulty in not responding. I genuinely believe that no one should be impeding traffic and endangering lives that way–even firefighters and cheerleaders raising money for good causes.

But I got there by following a link from