Each one of us matters, has a role to play, and makes a difference. Each one of us must take responsibility for our own lives, and above all show respect and love for living things around us, especially each other.
Together we must reestablish our connections with the natural world and with the Spiritual power that is around us. And then we can move triumphantly, joyously, into the final stage of human evolution–spiritual evolution.
~ Jane Goodall, Reason for Hope
Stolen from about 5 different people. Yeah you know, a few words from this person, a few from that… no not really, I'm lying, but it'd be funny if I did…..
(A) First, recommend to me:
1. a movie:
2. a book:
3. a musical artist, song, or album:
(B) I want everyone who reads this to ask me three questions, no more, no less. Ask me anything you want.
(C) Then I want you to go to your journal, copy and paste this allowing your friends to ask you anything
So I was in the bathroom at work today, and crawling on the back of the commode was a large cockroach. As I was voiding, I watched the bugger crawl into the crevasse between the back of the commode and the wall. “Ah ha,” I thought, “now I know where you sleep!” But then the thought occurred to me, “oh shit, now I'll never be able to sit on the commode again without fear of having the dirty bastard start to crawl up my backside.” That could get messy, if you know what I mean.
That is all.
“Living with contradiction, holding together polarities, making room for divergence leads to vitality and enables us to see opposites not as dead ends but as a series of open doors. When we come to know ourselves as gifted and conflicted, we become more tolerant of the differences we encounter in others and can relinquish the illusion that we are the center of a harmonious universe.”
~ Elizabeth J. Canham
I've had a few private inquiries lately as to the meaning behind my screen name, so I thought it wouldn't be a total waste of time to elaborate on it here.
Dhamma is an alternate spelling of Dharma. Dharma has many meanings, but the way I use it in this instance is as follows: “The principle or law that orders the universe.”
Seeker is just what it appears to be, to wit, one who seeks.
So I adopted DhammaSeeker as moniker to remind me, as much as anything, of my commitment and responsibility to look for the truth and beauty in myself and my environment and especially in those I encounter along the path.
This one is too good to pass up:
From: Bewildered Rider
Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2004 10:48:12 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Mandate to the Ass
…
My only request of the Bushes is this:
Please do not put another Bush into an election for president. Ever, ever, ever, again!
Giuliani in 2008!
You know, I still would have like to have seen Howard Dean run for president. I liked him. He was just loony enough to get the job done. Could you imagine him in a meeting with the Grand Toad Chirac?
“Meestair Preseedant. Ve feel that the Americahns are so bourgeious, so filthay, so layzay and airogahnt! You must change!”
“And you must lay down before me and call me God! I am Howard Dean, President! Bitch! Yeeaaarrrrrggg!!!”
Hardy!
Bewildered Rider: “While I still hold fast to my position that we were really given no true “best option”, I am placated by the overwhelming support of the American people for George W. Bush. At the very least, it was a whopping testament to the level of distrust the republic has for a very wealthy man who so cowardly turned his back on fellow veterans and stomped them in the throat throughout the late 60s. It's a bitch when people retain a memory, ain't it, John?”
Hekman: “Bush has thoroughly trounced Kerry. Bush is the first candidate since 1988 to take the majority and the popular vote. He has the biggest popular vote count in the history of the United States.”
W: “Let me put it to you this way: I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it”
Excuse me. Did the hard core republicans see the same election results I did?
Bush's margin of victory could not have been much thinner. I would hardly call that “overwhelming support”, “thoroughly trounced”, or anything near “political capital”. I voted for W, but my vote was in faith that he would clean up the mess that he made and would not screw up anything else for the next four years. If he starts waving the banner of some nonexistent “mandate” for social change (e.g., constitutional amendments against homosexual marriage, overturning Roe v. Wade, or further allowing the encroachment of evangelical Christianity into our school system, then I'll be waving a banner of my own, to wit, the “Get the fuck out of my bedroom, doctor's office, and classroom you ass” banner. Huzzah!
I'm posting the contents of a mail message received from a long-time friend of mine for the literary enjoyment of those with the endurance to read it. There will not be a test at the end.
From: Bewildered Rider
Date: Thu, 4 Nov 2004 18:22:38 -0800 (PST)
Subject: The liberal author and the rethinking of my personal literary deity
WTMHOWA:
What an odd week it has been. I went from a quiet sense of gloom and despair to a renewed faith in humanity with the current election results. While I still hold fast to my position that we were really given no true “best option”, I am placated by the overwhelming support of the American people for George W. Bush. At the very least, it was a whopping testament to the level of distrust the republic has for a very wealthy man who so cowardly turned his back on fellow veterans and stomped them in the throat throughout the late 60s. It's a bitch when people retain a memory, ain't it, John?
The thing that I still ask myself is this: “Why was I so concerned about this election, anyhow?” I am fully aware of the liberal media's bias and borderline slander that riddle this election, giving their best efforts to drag the Bush name through the mud while painting Kerry as the greatest liberal candidate since a waterheaded boy from Arkansas took control of the White House in 1992. I should have known that the polling figures would always be slightly skewed to the left, attempting vainly to sway the 'tweeners into a Kerry vote.
The most refreshing thing about all this? The sudden revelation that almost 70% of voters were actually turned away from a candidate when they were endorsed by a celebrity. I hope that Affleck and Damon and Springsteen alike are very proud of themselves this week. Their efforts turned out to be more malignant than beneficial, though in my eyes the celeb treatment should be no more than a placebo, a non-factor. Damon said he'd give a million dollars to see Kerry get elected. A million? This is the price that a celebrity puts on “the most important election in American history”? He makes something in the ball park of $72 million a year, and he can spare but a cool million? Then again, that's the liberal train of thought…what is good for me is not necessarily good for you…
…
I read Hunter Thompson's last screed on his ESPN.com column, where he predicted a monumental victory for Kerry, going so far as to say that Kerry “…is about the greatest thing since God created you and me” in a conversation with George McGovern. I've known for quite some time that Hunter was a liberal, but his appetite for guns and hard liquor appealed to me during my more inebriated fancies of years gone by. I also knew, with great sorrow, that Hunter is a great writer not because he writes the facts, but because he distorts the facts to make the reality so much more of interesting thing than it really is. I have no doubts that he is, indeed, an outlaw journalist, one who has tagged along with presidential candidates in the 60's, visited the North Vietnamese leadership during the fall of Saigon, and riding with the Hell's Angels before suffering a brutal pummeling at the hands of renegade bikers.
In the following months, however, I realized his fallacies and came to accept the fact that Hunter Thompson, Gonzo, the Fear and Loathing, were all gross re-creations of a hyperactive mind and imaginative flair for exaggeration. Interesting as they may be, they are figments of a man's imagination, nothing but pomp and circumstance for a man who wants to fit in so desperately that he will say and write anything that can put him on the edge of every fringe element of this country. He has appeared in his own movies, and, outside of the Rum Diary, has written works that are said to be fiction but are presented as recollections and truths of a self that does not exist except for in his won mind. He strikes me as no more than a well-written prima donna who cannot rest with the ravenous beast that is his own self-conscious.
What makes him less fantastic to me today is to see that any hack and half-wit with a press credential or three-day-old growth of beard can impersonate so well his tired method of ranting. Half-truths and grandiose blatherings of a leftist author pour from the laptops and network drives of journalists from the press desks of New York, Chicago, Atlanta, and LA. Hell, even the pompous English tossers who call themselves journalists writing for tabloid Brit mags write with the same flare and idiocy that Thompson made so famous.
Thus, my literary deity has been dethroned. Though I may harbor a slight twinge of excitement that I may, in some way, be related to Thompson, I no longer admire the man so much any more. His style and his flavor are yesterday's fashions, running flaccid on a palette that has been piqued by the works of Vonnegut. Though another liberal, Vonnegut speaks his mind, and what little sense can be made of it, he holds all things precious in life and dispenses the most wonderful of advice and observations. “Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt,” he wrote. Somehow, I like that, much better than the recognition of a God that has created nothing better in the past 60 years than John Kerry and George McGovern.
Dr. Thompson, I bid you farewell. You lifted me up from some rough times, but it is now time for me to hitch a ride on a band of bright unwavering light, one that will rise me above the truth and set me free.
Signing off as a teaching machine,
ST
P.S. – I am surprised that, despite the fact that Thompson used so many of great doses of hallucinogenic drugs, he could not see through John Kerry. Hum.
“Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.”
~ Thomas Merton