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.

Bear with me on this one. Don’t ask why I need to add a dose of moroseness to this normally happy happy blog ;).

It’s my message in a bottle of bytes - to that one person who warped time for me and then simply unwarned, unwarped it - the mouse to my frog. She might pick it up some day - nothing is lost on the internet just like the ocean.

It was always a song that made me loopy but now, it’s the script of the promise I make to myself -

Go melt back into the night, babe,
Everything inside is made of stone.
There’s nothing in here moving
An’ anyway I’m not alone.
You say you’re looking for someone
Who’ll pick you up each time you fall,
To gather flowers constantly
An’ to come each time you call,
A lover for your life an’ nothing more,
But it ain’t me, babe,
No, no, no, it ain’t me, babe,
It ain’t me you’re lookin’ for, babe.

~Bob Dylan: It Ain’t Me, Babe

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.

What is it about frogs that inspires? And what is it about writing that convolutes my thoughts? And what is it about concentration that I cannot hold on to? Where are the love handles of concentration? I’m groping here.Let’s start from the beginning. What is it about frogs that inspires? Zen masters to Rumi to The Buddha himself have built a world of metaphors around the amphibian that the French relish on their dinner plates. Why do I have to try to be funny? Why is it so important to me?

The Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh uses froglessness as a metaphor for mindfulness (See my previous post)

The first step in anything is to achieve froglessness. Hmm…

Rumi…oh Rumi….this beautiful man knew a thing or two about living Dharma without knowing it. And he seemed to relish frogs more than the French - just not on his plate.

Take his poem Intimacy.

Do you see what I mean? And that’s just a glimpse of a frogful Rumism. There are verses filled with frogs - a frog who is attached to a mouse - and a mouse who is attached to a frog. Sounds familiar?

Rumi, I am your frog. I am your frog who has one leg tied to a rope that binds him to the mouse on the shore. Except the mouse and the frog were more than friends. When I try to dive into my pond, that rope yanks me back when I least expect it. And I expect it all the time. And why do I think of the pond as my pond? Weren’t you in my pond once? And who is this ‘you’? Rumi, I am beginning to write like you - the first person, the second and the third all inhabit my thoughts at the same time - and I jump between them. I jump from you to me to my mouse with the alacrity of Thich Nhat Hanh’s frog.

Whom am I writing for? I read what I just wrote and it would not make sense to anybody but me. But how do I know that? And what is it about writing that convolutes the confident binary charge that was traveling a synapse in my brain just now - a moment ago? Which nerve is it between my brain and my fingers that diverts my thoughts into….my neck perhaps? It has to be the neck because my neck hurts. It hurts more as I get more froggy. And my thoughts get more foggy as I get more froggy.

The mouse told me she misses me like a child misses a blanket. What does that even mean? Life is more than a lyric from a Fergie tune. And why does she want me to know that - after all that she has put me through? Doesn’t she know that the rope she tied so carefully already hurts enough as I try to pull away and as it digs into my fragile frog leg? Do I need more?

You’re still alive she said…is that the question? If so, if so, who answers? Who answers??
—-

Gill Fronsdal says that he discovered that when you begin writing a sentence, you don’t need to know how the sentence is going to end. It’s the most beautiful thing the frog has heard in a while…It makes him feel less of a hack. Make no mistake, he is a hack. He just feels less of one now.
—-
The frog recognizes he doesn’t understand himself anymore - what he is doing, where he is going and where he will end up. He has come full circle - except that he didn’t want to. He started off feeling a nomad and he has ended the circle confirmed a nomad. He had found a home with the mouse and he had built the proverbial castle with her as his home. He believed that home would always be there.

The castle never existed and it’s disappearance pains the frog enough - tinge more than enough actually. But the home is gone too. That sends his leg muscles into a frenzied twitch. He jumps around all day from this pond to the next and sometimes catches a glimpse of what he thinks is his home..was his home. But he doesn’t understand - that hole can’t be his home. He recognizes it but surely he is mistaken. It looks like his home but it is darker, more of a hole than he remembers - it doesn’t look like a frog ever could have lived there. So he jumps around a little more.

Rumi, this frog should have known better than to look for happiness in a mouse hole.

He is getting a little worried as the sun sets…is he going to be doing this tonight …days, months…..years?? Can his legs take it? He wants to go home desperately but the question of whether it ever existed is now nagging at the peripheries of his little brain. Did he imagine it? Wish it into existence? Think frog - the thought of a frog and mouse together is…well, ridiculous. But the mouse…she was so real, her eyes were so real, her soul was so real, her squeaks was ethereal, her short tongue seemed longer somehow…like his own and…she promised to keep home for him. That couldn’t have all been just been him. But then where is home? WHERE IS HOME?

Can frogs cry? Well, your frog apparently is capable of thinking, trusting and memories - so why can’t he cry? It’s a small leap of faith. Hehe…leap…frog…get it?

The frog rests for a while. He is so tired. Sad. He cringes. He is not allowed to be sad. His thoughts wander away from the mouse for a bit and he muses that he is not a toad but he is no prince either. He never believed in that cliche and he still winces at what he is writing. Did he have to bring up the frog and prince reference? I mean…was that absolutely necessary?

Hey frog-man, forget about it..let it be…just keep writing. Didn’t you just say you were ecstatic about what Fronsdal discovered for himself? It was your inner cliche coming out…that’s all - you didn’t see it coming. Let them spew forth, green one…you will run out of them sooner or later and then it will be all elegant previously unimagined metaphors….I promise.

So, back to the frog who is not a toad and not a prince. The frog is a frog. He knows it. He doesn’t want a bigger pond, he doesn’t want the insect population to go up…he certainly doesn’t want to be kissed (cliche alert) by a princess or turn into a prince in a story that conveniently ends exactly when he turns into a prince…nobody ever *ever* goes into how the story ends. Happily ever after my *^^.

He doesn’t understand himself anymore but he knows what he wants. He wants to be content with himself, wants to get himself to see the virtues of forgiving the mouse, wants to understand his longing for her and then give it up…he wants to see the end of his suffering and wants to stop his wanting. He knows his wanting, his

It is evident, the frog sees the path but he is suffering - acutely. Too acutely to stay concentrated on the path.

Suddenly, his leg muscles relax…he almost misses his own thought - there is no home…there is *NO* home. He knows it’s time for froglessness.

His leg muscles begin a slow twitch again. How does a frog become frogless?

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.