Home of the fumbler…

Been reading about this all day:

Nobel winner blames cultural decline on “blogging and blugging”

Almost everybody has ripped into her. I am torn between laying into her myself and well, holding it inside. Hmm, that last sentence pretty much encapsulates my views I guess .

Is it fair to expect Nobel prize winners to not be idiots who feel the urge to shoot their mouths off about something they are not remotely familiar with? Look lady, you just won a Nobel for your ability to write. Stick with it – you won a prize and a neat bundle – you did not suddenly become the all-knowing goddess of all things. Pick up the cheque, go home, switch to premiere Darjeeling tea – you can afford it now and write some more books that will probably find their way onto Scribd or Google books and catch the eyes of millions more than the couple of thousand people who have probably read your books now.

And congratulations. To be fair, the rest of the speech was beautiful and inspiring.

True absolute dark terror is having to live in a community, a society, a country or a world where religion or other social norms have devolved to the extent that the helpless are punished for being helpless – as it has in Saudi Arabia.

A country where a rape victim is jailed for 6 months and given 200 lashes because she was alone with a man (man?) who then gang raped her with six of his buddies has given up all pretensions to morality – it has soaked up inhumanity to the extent that justice is no longer a recognizable noun.

What is wrong with these people? Generations have lived under an interpretation of a religion that has been passed through dark prisms repeatedly till all color is gone from any light that this religion once perhaps contained – but GBud, they still call it light!

They didn’t stop there though. They called the wretched soul an adulteress…for getting raped!

The pain this woman must be going through…how will she ever gain peace again, GBud? Will she ever know it’s not her fault, will she ever know that she has to live through this but it *will* end, that her suffering is impermanent, that this is but a moment? If she doesn’t, if nobody speaks this into her ears – her world will kill her and then decry her to death for the crime of murder.

If you are a Dhamma (Dharma) practitioner or even a Vipassana meditation practitioner, the meaning of froglessness will be evident.

When a frog is put
on the center of a plate,
she will jump out of the plate
after just a few seconds.

If you put the frog back again
on the center of the plate,
she will again jump out.

You have so many plans.
There is something you want to become.
Therefore you always want to make a leap,
a leap forward.

It is difficult to keep the frog still
on the center of the plate.
You and I both have Buddha Nature in us.
This is encouraging, but you and I
both have Frog Nature in us.

That is why
the first attainment of the practice–
froglessness is its name.

- Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnamese monk (Zen) and poet.

This coral’s shape echoes the hand
It hollowed. Its
Immediate absence is heavy. As pumice,
As your breast in my cupped palm.

Sea-cold, its nipple rasps like sand,
Its pores, like yours, shone with salt sweat.

Bodies in absence displace their weight,
And your smooth body, like none other,

Creates an exact absence like this stoneSet on a table with a whitening rack

Of souvenirs. It dares my hand
To claim what lovers’ hands have never known:

The nature of the body of another.

Sometimes you read something that you would never be able to write but is exactly what you wish the talent to be able to articulate.