Andrew's Blog (The VOTE! One)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFduIyk3NRA

9:03 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

I’m the girl on the street who can’t stop smiling
Current mood: amorous

My fellow Buddhist youth division members must be so sick of me this week! I chant a lot, and I get chattttttty. I rang in the New Year with daimoku, hoping that Nam Myoho Renge Kyo would fuse to every moment from beginning to end of 2008.

From even before this year began, I could just feel that this year would be a watershed. That so many things about the world, my life, the lives of those I love would change, would be revolutionized.

As I chanted...each moment to each moment... I chanted to not project myself so far into the future. Or, at least, to commit to each moment, and to win in that moment. To be my best. From moment to moment, I chanted for human revolution and clarity, tenacity of purpose.

I've had a few dreams that have lasted what seems like my whole life. I have held a vice-tight grip on these several dreams and jettisoned anyone who told me I couldn't achieve them. But some dreams are dependent on other people.

So I chanted for those people to lift up their hearts and turn them over to dump out every last content for me to see. That way, I would have clarity in the situation. Maybe it's selfish of me to wish that everyone would turn their hearts upside down and spill their contents like I do, but for me, that moment is always the moment where I can move forward. The moment I can strip away all formality, all ceremony, is the moment someone becomes real to me. Become human together.

So I come on strong in everything.

It's not that I'm not timid or scared. I often am.

But the more I am practicing, the more I am living, the more I am doing what is asked of me and what I ask of myself, the more I am knowing that courage is the ultimate factor in victory or defeat in every moment.

The more I am wanting to know everything about you and you and you... because that is the moment when compassion begins.

On New Years, I learned that someone from a terrible past employment situation was a member. For so long, I struggled to understand how I had ended up in this company...how it served my professional mission, my life mission, which are ultimately a part of my mission for Kosen Rufu... and I was distraught for months. I kept fixating on the way I was being treated...because I had allowed certain factors to pull down my life condition. I believed things that people said about me, thereby making them truth.

The instant she walked in the door, I felt the mystic law wink at me...the same way I did many years ago when I needed it, and there in my mailbox was a World Tribune with the headline, "There is nothing wasted in this Buddhism."

Immediately, my heart filled with compassion for her... the way she behaved at work had nothing to do with me, and everything to do with her own suffering. And while I was busy feeling abused and downtrodden, I could have been experiencing empathy together with her...because it wasnt about me. She was suffering too, just like me. It was sad that it took her being a member for me to realize that.

You grow accustomed to things not going how you plan... that's just fine; so often, its better than how you could have planned it. But in 2008, I intend to see in every moment that does not go my way....the why...the alternative...the reason... the best 4th thing (for you writers out there) for my life.

If it's not my dream of today, it's because a better dream is out there.

And I am lit up with myoho these past days...even if I did almost die on Wednesday ;) and this happiness (even when it is sometimes mixed with melancholy or nostalgia) is so deeply rooted, it feels like surely it must be the beginning of that unfettering, unshakable happiness we call Buddhahood.

So I will persist...in everything...in meeting you and asking you to turn it upsidedown...in telling you my every wish for you... in writing songs for you...in convincing you I am as serious as I appear about every single one of my determinations...in loving each and everyone of you...in dream chasing and dream catching...in gratitude and singing on the street...because people say "why do they sing in musicals? People don't sing in real life..." Yes they do. They're singing everywhere. I am. I will persist. In professing the greatness of each of you, of Nam Myoho Renge Kyo, of my mentor, of my SGI community, which I love every more every day.

Even more. More and more. More than ever.

"Nothing stands between us, no barrier separating our hearts. That is how the Soka Gakkai should be." --Daisaku Ikeda.

Currently listening : In Rainbows By Radiohead Release date: 01 January, 2008

3:13 PM - 2 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

fortune from one’s heart
Current mood: jubilant

HAPPY NEW YEAR!! EVERY YEAR, THIS GOSHO GETS BETTER AND BETTER!


I HAVE received a hundred slabs of steamed rice cake and a basket of fruit. New Year's Day marks the first day, the first month, the beginning of the year, and the start of spring.1 A person who celebrates this day will accumulate virtue and be loved by all, just as the moon becomes full gradually, moving from west to east,2 and as the sun shines more brightly, traveling from east to west.
First of all, as to the question of where exactly hell and the Buddha exist, one sutra states that hell exists underground, and another sutra says that the Buddha is in the west. Closer examination, however, reveals that both exist in our five-foot body. This must be true because hell is in the heart of a person who inwardly despises his father and disregards his mother. It is like the lotus seed, which contains both blossom and fruit. In the same way, the Buddha dwells within our hearts. For example, flint has the potential to produce fire, and gems have intrinsic value. We ordinary people can see neither our own eyelashes, which are so close, nor the heavens in the distance. Likewise, we do not see that the Buddha exists in our own hearts.

You may question how it is that the Buddha can reside within us when our bodies, originating from our parents' sperm and blood, are the source of the three poisons and the seat of carnal desires. But repeated consideration assures us of the truth of this matter. The pure lotus flower blooms out of the muddy pond, the fragrant sandalwood grows from the soil, the graceful cherry blossoms come forth from trees, the beautiful Yang Kuei-fei was born of a woman of low station, and the moon rises from behind the mountains to shed light on them.

Misfortune comes from one's mouth and ruins one, but fortune comes from one's heart and makes one worthy of respect.

The sincerity of making offerings to the Lotus Sutra at the beginning of the New Year is like cherry blossoms blooming from trees, a lotus unfolding in a pond, sandalwood leaves unfurling on the Snow Mountains, or the moon beginning to rise.

Currently reading : The Scottish Moralists Release date: 1967

6:35 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

I feel it all
Current mood: blessed

I am so ready for this break coming up! I'm exhausted! I've said this before, but sometimes, it's hard to tell whether life is moving too fast for me to keep up or if I'm moving too fast for life to keep up. Am I tired from running? Or tired from trying to pull everybody else behind me on a big leash? "COME ON! COME ON!"

With everything going on lately, (holiday parties, shopping, work, at least 2 Broadway shows per week for the last 3 weeks) the best place to be has been my bed. Man, I love my room. It's completely the place I consider home anymore.

Christmas is a time when people my age think about what that means...going home. Lately, it seems a lot of people have started to realize that the place they live currently feels more like home than their parents' houses. That is a weird moment. Not just that your parents house doesn't feel like home anymore, but that the place you have made for yourself does.

(Because... as much as any of us loved college, did it every really feel like home? Probably not. Because college is inherently a phase. )

And so I realize that 4th street is the first place I made for myself that feels like home. ....and...to be perfectly honest, I'm not sure any of my parents houses have ever felt like home. At least, not in a very very long time.

The only place...really...that ever felt like home...I'm still trying to decide whether it was a myth or not.

The Old South?

It started out as a real place: My Grandparents' house in Georgia, and became.... something bigger... but less concrete. It was their house in that world, a world where...despite my obvious differences...I felt like I belonged, a place where I had a childhood... the place of Gone with the Wind, a place where people like Scarlett O'Hara came from... a place with romantic trees and beautiful houses and potential of epic literary proportions.

It was there that I learned about family and about God and about falling in love with one person and about God. And where I learned that all of those things are about service. What's best about all of those things, is loving something else more than you love yourself. And knowing the reciprocity of that love from those things.

When my Grandfather died and my Grandmother remarried and sold that house, I wondered what else had died? Been sold for something else? Does Georgia feel the same in a different house? I wondered if it could ever be duplicated? Like that smell of the old house....what was that? Antique furniture, years of recipes: flour, butter, spices, peaches, baked into the walls. The smell of UGA football games, of bourbon, of a little iced tea, a little leather and family linens. It was the smell of Fergusons of Pittmans and Laniers and Davess.

And I realize that it can't be duplicated. Only sewn through. Which I knew long ago, but something about this month makes me have to re-learn it, every year. Some things, true as they may be, are just too hard to learn for good. Some things, I'll just never get through my big, thick skull. Some things cling, like a tight knot at the back of my throat-- when I talk to Ms. Billie about "the old days" about how nothing is the same without Jim Ferguson and I talk to Texy and Erin and Joel on the phone.

I sew them through here into the fabric of home here. What cannot be duplicated has another life...it's genealogy. What I knew as a child will be the ancestor for what we're all making now, just as the Fergusons and Laniers and Pittmans and Davess are my anscestors, they are the ancestors of these new things: The Ferguson (just me so far), the Beakleys, the Caldwells, the Shuldts, the Woffindens, the Harpers, the Floyds, the Schumanns, the Chins, the Campbells, the Stillwells... all sewn through. I pull it all along behind me on a leash, "COME ON, GUYS, COME ON!!" Come with me where I'm going. And I'll go with you.

And to everyone I love out there, go listen to James Taylor, "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas."

Currently listening : James Taylor at Christmas By James Taylor Release date: 10 October, 2006

4:20 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

chase this light with me
Current mood: full

It's not like me not to have blogged for so long. What can I say, except that the line between feeling dried out and utterly saturated is very very thin.

More and more, I am channeling my energy, recycling exhaustion back into energy, but all in a chase of the three things I have chased my whole life... to inspire people with Nam Myoho Renge Kyo, to see my work on a Broadway stage and to encounter the kind of love that the mere idea of it makes us both want to be the best people we can be.

All of these things have been happening in various degrees all my life, but now...now is really the crucial phase.

It is a crucial phase in Buddhism, for sure. We are in the Second Act of Kosen Rufu... so much is about to happen...the world's karma is about to change. I know because my daimoku is guaranteeing it.

As it is guaranteeing every determination I have set out for myself and for those i love.

Each day, I feel it move the earth more, rumbling below the surface. I feel it shake the way things have been, the way the subway shakes the foundation of my building.

A guess a little explanation: I feel like I work with every waking and sleeping moment of my life. It is absolutely paying off...and when I think about where I was one year ago, it seems like a cut to another movie.

For anyone who could somehow not know, I work on Broadway all day and I write musicals too.

A producer I used to work with asked me for my project, which is called VOTE! www.votethemusical.com

From there, the big word seemed to be inertia, or I guess momentum, because inertia suggests a certain powerlessness, but the word is certainly true in the sense that a lot of the great things with this project have seemed to catapult themselves simply by their own weight. Sometimes I felt like I was pushing (indeed, I work until 2 AM, I work all day in my mind on it. I always always working on VOTE!), but mostly, I feel like I made some extremely correct decisions, aided by the wisdom, support, and fearlessness of my father and the weight of the material-- without a DOUBT the weight of my life condition; the weight of my daimoku and prayer-- propelled them in the direction I wanted to go.

I know things are really moving when I feel everything. When everything makes me want to cry-- Legally Blonde even!-- when my skin feels as tender as a peach. And every letting go and pushing forward, every song, every strike and strike's end has made me long for the first moment I could get myself to my room, all seafoam and white and fresh to cry.

With things in my life so poised for triumph, it makes the missing of people sharper. Everyone really. Everyone I've lost and not lost, the ones I can't lose and the ones who just can't be here. I feel them there too and...every once in while, if someone tells the right joke, I can hear them laugh, and it breaks my heart that they aren't there for the perfect moment I'm having.

My mind has always spun, and I have often been prone to spinning out of control with it. But more and more, no matter how little sleep I've gotten, when I can wake myself up, as early as I can, to chant Nam Myoho Renge Kyo, the more I feel the words of Nichiren are true: "summon deep faith that Nam Myoho Renge Kyo IS YOUR LIFE ITSELF."

And I experience boundless joy in the law.

And even when I feel self-conscious, as though I am reaching past my capabilities, knowing that the wise will rejoice, while the foolish will retreat.

By challenging my life, these past few months, I have met some of the greatest people in my life so far...some people who redefined my standards, some people who made me understand why the standard I made was worthy of being the standard in the first place, some people who reminded me that I might NOT be an alien after all, people who SELL it, all the time, in great and sincere ways, people who've helped me sell it. Lots of new people. People with joyous, travelling spirits, people who reminded me of random Nevada pride, and Georgia pride, and taught me about Alaska, and planes-- both real and invented. A new person named Charlie Woffinden was born, and even though new, he was one reminder in a daily stream of reminders how much I love the ones who are still around: my heroes- Erin and Emily and Lauren and Texy and my friends from when I first moved here.

In my chase to understand what people say and what they do-- to understand the hearts of others-- my pursuit of dreams, of family, of changing the world, I am in the Second Act. I am both mentor and disciple all the time. A sponge, sometimes dry as bone with nothing to give that day. But mostly, saturated with all that I feel. So full you could wring me out.

And ready. Ready for what's next. For what I deserve. Ready to work. Ready to meet the next great love . Ready to welcome back the old. Always.

Ready to listen to music and to write it. Ready to sing it and to sing it with you.
Ready to talk about anything with you. Who will win the election, my musical, your boyfriend, the best hair products, love, the Saha World, Buddhahood, and the Human Revolution.

And finally, I want to say this: "When we find something important enough that we are not willing to lose it; when we can say that pursuing or keeping this makes us want to be a better person-- that is the moment when Human Revolution begins."

I know the exact day that happened in my life. July 31, 1999.
But the inertia and momentum of that moment has served as a model for my human revolution in every instance.

While so often I may be like a sponge, my determination? Never. Never dries out. Never saturates.

Earthly desires are enlightenment.

Currently listening : Chase This Light By Jimmy Eat World Release date: 16 October, 2007

3:56 PM - 3 Comments - 4 Kudos - Add Comment

no matter what, I am trying
Current mood: confused

More than several times over the course of my life, and by people who are very close to me (the most recent time being just last Friday), I have been told that because I am how I am, because I am who I am, that I had better be prepared to be alone most of my life.

It's literally the meanest thing I can think of. And the fact that more than one person close to me in my life has felt the need to tell me (or think and not tell me) is.... the most hurtful thing.

My intensity thing... ok.

That's really all I can say about it. Okay. I know. But here's what else I know: I am absolutely committed to being the best person I can, to polishing my life and how I treat people, and I am thinking constantly about the wellbeing of the people in my life. I have worked my whole life to be a better communicator of the strange over-flowing heart I have. I've rattled cages and pissed people off; people have rolled their eyes at me and misunderstood me; they didn't believe me and they thought I was crazy...but all the while, I was still sincerely wishing for the happiness of the people around me. I do almost everything in my weird, Ryann, too-much/not-enough kind of way, but it was always there, it was always real, and I would still do everything I could to help anybody, in any way.

Emily says I am too hard on myself. And that I take too much responsibility other people. Which is probably true. But while I strive to refine myself and be better-- change what doesn't work-- here's what isn't changable about me because it is me, and whether people like it or  not, it is what's best about me. The intensity. Of voice. Of thought. Of opinion. Of love.

Knowing my own intensity of feeling towards people, if someone, anyone were to feel that way about me, I would be bowled over. I AM bowled over, so many days, with gratitude, at the care that people show me.

I still act like a mouse hitting a glass wall whenever I encounter resentment in myself or anybody. I literally have no idea what to do with it. And so I guess I just feel confused...because I know that I could never resent or judge as a person, anyone who really loved me.

And so I got to thinking about the difference between opinions and judgments. And, I guess it's fitting that the difference is nothing more than sincerity and compassion.

Obviously, I'm an opinionated person. I espouse them left and right (although I try to refrain from giving them on subjects I don't know about. It might surprise some of you to learn that there are a good many subjects on which I have no opinion or feel the issue is too complex to begin to formulate one.)

But when I give you my opinion...especially about something pertaining to someone I love... it's a concerned one, not a judgement on anyone as a person. And it comes from the mind set that I am part of the same team that they are on. It not:

Me-------------------------------------------> <-------------------You

it's:

You+Me-------------------------------->

Sometimes I feel like...I'm on your team, why aren't you on mine?

It's kind of amazing to me how often people try to tell me or how many people believe that we don't have serious effects on each other's lives. We absolutely do! There is so much evidence all around us that people we may not even know very well, or people we may not like, or most especially, people who love us, change our lives more than anything!

I think my dad came face to face with this last weekend at dinner, when again, I was cautioned that the way I am is a way to get me judged. And maybe people will always judge me. And maybe I won't be able to help as many people as I want to help, but I'm trying.

And I'll keep trying, whether you want to roll your eyes at my philosophy or not, because I believe in what my dad raised me to believe-- and what I have been able to witness in small and large increments-- that "Even one Nam Myoho Renge Kyo can permeate the entire universe."

"How much greater then is the capacity to move anything when it is chanted with sincerity and determination!" (Faith into Action, page 108).

I can chant to change anything. I chant to be better. I do it every day. But I won't chant to be less passionate, less thinking, less caring. I won't do it. Because while I might be able to get rid of the thing that seems to make so many people irritated by me...it would mean that I also rid myself of the same thing... that which is best in me...the thing that makes me worthy of the great life I have, the thing that lets me sleep at night, the thing that makes me a good friend, and the thing that one day (soon!) will be THE reason why the man I marry will love me my whole life. It's the thing that makes me happy. And it is only hope I'll ever have of changing the world. Roll your eyes all you want, but I'm going to do it. And how on Earth could you blame me for trying?

Currently reading : The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay By Michael Chabon Release date: 25 August, 2001

6:04 AM - 3 Comments - 4 Kudos - Add Comment

see how the true gift never leaves the giver
Current mood: fearless

BIG NEWS!!! I'm going to be a Buddhist God-Mommy again!! Yay for Lauren and Danny and Big Sister Eden! I can't wait to meet the newest Woffinden.

 About a month ago, right after I started on the daimoku campaign I'm on right now, I read an article in my Buddhist newspaper about alms giving. And the 3 different kinds of gifts. It's an article that has stayed with me since then, and has served as a kind of framework for this very life-changing, very monumental, vry hard, yet ultimately very happy and very valuable time in my life.

So the first kind of gift...is the most obvious. It's the gift of alms, or concrete goods. Monetary, birthday presents, little things. I love to give these. Even with a lack of funds, I love to brainstorm gifts for people.

The second kind, in my world, can seem like the most important...but it's actually in the middle. The article calls it the gift of the practice. Specifically, it refers to teaching people Nam Myoho Renge Kyo and the Buddhist teachings. But in a general sense, it's the gift of wisdom, or advice. Always available to give my opinion, most people who know me know that I don't have much trouble with this one either.

But the third....it's not that I have trouble with this...but that I never thought of it. And it shook me up quite a bit when I realized how important it is, and how instrumental it has been in my life.

The gift of fearlessness.

And that really is the best gift you could ever give anyone.

Happiness is ultimately a matter of courage.

No matter what tools or talents you have at your disposal, "a sword is useless in the hands of a coward." But I know how hard it is sometimes to be courageous, especially in the face of what seems like un-recoupable failure. How do you run, head-long into uncertainty, into your karma, which seems insurmountable?

How do you? With the gift of fearlessness.

Because someone said to you: "When You are scared for You, KNOW, really KNOW that I am not. When you are scared for you, know that I will be fearless, for you."

Looking back over my life, I feel flooded by gratitude knowing that someone gave me the gift of fearlessness. Of course, it's my good old Pops.

Thinking back to about this time last year, when all I could see was the corner, a dead end I couldn't get to...when I couldn't sleep because I was so scared I would have to go home and give up my dreams, my dad was there...listening to me, even when I was so angry, and ultimately, never showing ANY FEAR whatsoever in regards to my victory.

A coward can have none of his prayers answered, but one who is fearless can.

So while I may have been too deluded, too parallyzed, too scared to have any of my prayers answered then, my Dad was fearless FOR ME...so his prayers on my behalf were answered and then some.

And what's more, that kind of fearlessness was the comfort and push I needed to challenge my life condition and change it NO MATTER WHAT. And I did. And it made me want to challenge EVERYTHING in my life to be better, to be more sincere, to raise the bar on everything.

It's a full throttle time right now...and a time to think about where I go from here, now that I feel absolutely certain that all my career goals will be fulfilled if I just continue on in faith and hard work.

Again, I turn to family...my everloving quest to figure out what that means to me. Being a part of so many wonderful wonderful families (and ones who are getting bigger... my cheeks are tight, I'm so happy for Lauren) it makes me feel like the luckiest person ever. But also, a bit like an orphan who misses her blood family.

And oh, motherhood. The more of my friends having babies, the more I have to examine and reexamine my own mother, and my deepest fear that I would be HER...or in other words...be a bad mother.

But before, when my friends were having children, I started to sweat...I was upset.... and now, I see that they too have given me a great gift of fearlessness. I've always acquired surrogate mothers here and there, and my best friends (even the ones without actual children) have been like moms to me, and have in the process, taught me about being a mother.

Life just keeps barrelling on, and for the first time, I feel calm in the midst of it, and ready to tackle any new thing that comes my way.

"and the true path was as lost to me as ever
when you cut in front and lit it as you ran.
See how the true gift never leaves the giver:
returned and redelivered"

--Don Paterson, my favorite Scottish poet.

Currently reading : Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel By Jonathan Safran Foer Release date: 04 April, 2006

7:30 AM - 1 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

won't forget, can't regret what I did for love
Current mood: grateful

Some days are the days that prove to you that your hard work has earned you a spot in a place you weren't sure existed: a spot in the land full of people like yourself, people who make you feel like you belong.

Yesterday was certainly one of those days for me. And it was nice to have after two long hard years. I guess I've been having more and more days like that these last few weeks...with the Tonys and now with the Broadway showcase we had in Philadelphia yesterday.

Standing backstage, running around in the Forest Theatre, staring out at the seats from the stage...even before Nikki Renee Daniels sang "I Dreamed a Dream" or Natalie Cortez sang, "What I Did For Love,"...even before I got to meet some of my heroes, Debra Monk and Carolee Carmello... I felt so grateful I was nearly sick to my stomach at the spot I had been able to carve out.

Much like the gosho about how hard it is for a one-eyed turtle to find the right floating log (how rare it is to encounter the mystic law in this life), it is rare for you to find the right place for yourself. But here I stand! The luckiest girl in the world! With people who share my values, my love of the American Theatre, and a boss! And a boss!!! who is a Soka Gakkai member! And my industry... the thing I love the most...joining with the thing that has made the most difference in my life: my Buddhist practice. My industry celebrated that with eight Tonys for a show written entirely by Buddhists!!! It's like someone asked me to write history for the last three weeks...I couldn't have come up with anything better.

Some things echo and reverberate forever, on and on, into the rest of your life: the sound of many people chanting Nam Myoho Renge Kyo in a great hall, the stillness in the room after Raul sang "Being Alive" and Fantasia sang "I'mHere" in Radio City Music Hall during the Tonys...these are the moments that stop my heart still.

And that myoho that is in everything runs a streak through my life, and I know that every goal I have for myself will be outshone by the mystic nature of what will be.

How lucky I feel, so close to Father's Day, to know that I was given the greatest tool I could ever have to change my life by my Dad. To be raised from the beginning to know the method to change my self, change my thoughts, change my life condition.  Nam Myoho Renge Kyo.

Which is why I guess, in order to karmically balance out the world, I am also a total dweeb...so nerdy in fact, that I will go home after a day like yesterday, and play "Being Alive" and "I'm here" and ... too grateful even to sing... just jump around (and they're ballads!) and cry and smile at what I have chosen to do with my life, and am doing.

Currently listening : Company (2006 Broadway Revival Cast) By Stephen Sondheim Release date: 20 February, 2007

4:52 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

But you shed not a single tear for the things that you didn't need
Current mood: hopeful

I've noticed that, often, the advice and wisdom I enjoy the most, is the advice which serves to validate and affirm positive life choices that I'm already making. That's GREAT advice! I think to myself, and feel smug that my shit is so together.

Which is probably why I go back again and again to the parts of What The Bleep Do We Know (on of my favorites) that totally back up my Buddhist practice, while I shy away, or at least, seem unable to really explain well one of the most fasciating points of the whole thing: that we are totally and chemically addicted to our emotions.

Even the good ones. Even positive experiences create an addictive synapse in your brain, and cause a chemical withdrawl when you try to change your behavior.

It's a tumultuous life to lead, being addicted to emotions.

Which is maybe why so many people choose to swap out that addiction for an addiciton to something else.

It's easier to be addicted to alcohol or nicotine or drugs. At the very least, more predictable. At this stage in the game, we are inundated with the outline of what will happen to you if you drink, smoke, or do drugs too much. We know the course it will run.

And in a way, the safety in that course is what you buy when you trade in that other unwieldy addiction.

Numbed out or strung out cancels out the kind of "messed up" you can be off your emotions. And I've never had a hangover half as bad as the chemical withdrawl of a particular emotion.

Maybe that's the reason for my seemingly endless karmic nearness to substance abuse. The continued presence of my mother in the lives of everyone I meet. Maybe, in a way, I'm envious of what seems to be/tricks us into believing is a simple straight forward addiction like nicotine or booze....you crave it, you find it, you get it.

But me...I'm addicted to things that are much harder to nail down. I'm addicted to the past, to what might have been. I'm addicted to the future, to what might be. I'm addicted to lost causes.

All of which has no cure and no real fix...besides maybe art, or daydreaming.

Luckily for me, though, I am also addicted to changing everything I possibly can for the better; addicted to a real and true inner Human Revolution for myself and for those I care about.

And again, luckily for me, for maybe the first time in my whole life, I am also addicted to the present. The cureent moment, more and more, these past few months, finally feels like a real and actual now-- instead of the previews I have to sit through until I get to do what I really want. The really real moments.

I am and always have been addicted to the rigorous and specific plans I laid out for myself. This has been the hardest lesson to get through my stubborn skull.

I have-- begrudgingly-- allowed myself to loosen the GRIP I had on most of these plans over the last few years. But as much as I still whole heartedly work to shape my life and my future, more and more, I see now how ARBITRARY most of these plans are. Ideas I had as an almost kid that I refused to change.

The plans themselves weren't even so great, but Oh, how their familiarity was! This intense, chemical soothing. That's what made returning to them over and over as fulfilling as I can wrap my brain around any drug being.

More and more, I'm realizing how over-rated hopes are.

Not HOPE.... not hope in general.... I am ever hopeful and I don't think I could be jaded if I tried (I think I did try once and failed miserably at it.).

But particular hopes. Plans.

Because while you're wrapped up in the plans you made 5 or 10 years ago, you're missing what's real and all around you.

Hopes are intangible and move nothing until they are backed by something else. Until something makes them, instead, a determination.Which always leads to a reality.

And then, when it really happens, and it is no longer theorhetical but concrete, it will never pull away from you. 

It's there, in the history of your life. You'll have pictures to remind you. And stories.

And you realize, hopefully not too late (not that I'm even sure I believe in 'too late') that what DOES happen will always be better than what could have happened.

Currently listening : Last of the Independents By The Pretenders Release date: 10 May, 1994

3:41 PM - 3 Comments - 4 Kudos - Add Comment

just keep telling me facts and keep making me smile
Current mood: optimistic

More and more, I seem to go back to my dead poet boyfriend, John Keats (who must certainly have been a Buddhist) and his idea of negative capability.

I wrote my senior thesis for Dr. Doody's class on it at Rice and everywhere I go, with each subsequent encounter with every mysterious person I meet, I find it more soothing and more true.

...at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason...

This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

What else could this be but the mystic law?

All my life, my spiritual community has taught me about myoho. And all my life, I have been attracted to the most mystic elements of life... why things happen the way they do, nailing down what happiness is, what love is... and yet, as attracted to the concepts as I am, something OCD in me feels the need to wrap it all up in a neat, understandable package.

I don't consider myself a very mysterious person. I don't know how to edit. I never keep my cards to myself. I give away all my secrets. Or maybe I am a little bit myoho... at the very least, strange. What did Brandon say....? "The most mysterious open book he ever saw."

I used to be disappointed by things that didn't go as I planned or as I wanted or as I thought they were meant to go. (Your fingers learn you when you undo the knots that tie you to your plans.) Especially in the last few years, however,  I'm attempting to gain the ability to accept that not everything can be resolved.

More and more, what scares me the most IS knowing. I always want to be excited by the idea, What will happen next?  As a child, my mom's boyfriend wrote stories about me as a warrior princess. I was a horrible child to read to, because no amount of stories was ever enough, and also, because I just couldn't wait to get to the good part. The older I get, the more history is written... it can sometimes be anti-climactic.
....not so much how the events played out, but that they are already over... and  the meaning of them still feels as illusive and as continually moving as ever.

As complicated as it is trying to explain this stuff life is made of, I realize it's really only the telling of it. The feeling of it all, at the root, is very uncomplicated.

I'm going to write about this stuff until I die, I suppose. But I'll try not to complicate, or explain what can't be explained: "truth, beauty, the holiness of the heart's affections, imagination, love . . ."

I try to go back to the advice I've given others over the years, and follow it for myself: Delve--without compromise or apology-- into my life, my mission, and who I want to be.

I love trying to figure it all out, rearticulate it. But I hope I'm never done. I hope it's always right on the tip of my tongue.

Currently reading : Encountering the Dharma: Daisaku Ikeda, Soka Gakkai, and the Globalization of Buddhist Humanism By Richard Hughes Seager Release date: 16 March, 2006

11:51 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment