Yo Blog...create another link list. I tried to mess around with your template, but don't know what the hell I'm doing and the non-Korean blogs are going to feel left out. Please.
Another Sunday has come and gone, and with it's passing also passes my weekend. I did not go exploring as I thought I might. Well I guess I did, if you count me exploring my apartment. It wasn't extensive exploration, though. Mostly I explored my bed and the television. I also explored this site for a couple hours tonight. If you want to see some unique visions of Japan, while enjoying Masa's funny writing (and funny English) pay a visit!
It was overcast today and somewhat muggy. At least it was in my apartment. I have to crack my front door to get a cross breeze, but today there was none. It makes me a little nervous to have my door open all the time, but it's so uncomfortable in here otherwise. I spent all last summer with it open a few inches when I was home, even if I was sleeping. I only ever had one person walk in, and that was accidental I think, as he made a hasty retreat after I said "HEY!"
I spent the day re-positioning the fan to be aimed at me wherever I was in the apartment, but after cooking dinner, it was 32 degrees Celsius in here, so I finally turned on my brand-spanking-new air-conditioner. It's nice. A wall unit installed right over my bed. Not as cold as I'd like, but I'm not sure I'm using the remote properly. Within an hour or so it managed to bring the temperature down to 27. Meanwhile, the sky finally opened up outside and rained for a short while.
Air conditioner's off, balcony door is opened again. Outside, it smells of rain, even though the pavement's already dry.
My co-worker sometimes asks me if I get homesick, and I tell her "of course!" She has told me a few times how she asked the fellow who was teaching here before me that same question, and he answered her the same as I do, but added that for him, Sunday's are the worst.
I hear that. Sundays remind me of newspapers and coffee, and lunch with my grandmother after she came back from church. Sundays are afternoons in backyards and in gardens, or near the water. And hearty dinners, with friends and family. Evenings spent relaxing and gearing up for the work week ahead. Laughter at the weekends activities. Curling up to watch TV and talk.
Other than a few words spoken to my cat, I have spent the weekend with my silence. It's been productive though. I contemplated this:
The Buddha illustrated this point one day when he was giving a lecture and a Brahmin got up and began insulting him. He raved for while and when he had finished the Buddha said, "If somebody laid out a banquet in front of me, to whom would it belong?
"Obviously it would belong to the person who put it there," replied the Brahmin.
"And if the person offered it to me," continued the Buddha, "and I declined to accept it, whose would it be?"
"Well obviously it would remain the property of the person who put it there."
"Just so," declared the Buddha. "just so."
In our external relationships if people insult us and want to fight with us then that's their banquet, It becomes ours only if we choose to accept and engage it. It is exactly the same with all our thoughts and feelings. They are arising and passing but are problematic only because we pick them up. We make them ours, thus bringing a sense of egocentric possession to a situation that could have remained neutral. Only when the decision is made to appropriate the thought to ego-territory does grasping arise. When we don't do that then the mind relaxes, it is no longer caught up with all the thoughts and feelings and we understand what is meant by freedom. Freedom from thought.
Enough thinking and not-thinking....I'm ready for napping and for sleeping. [;)Jeff]
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