Crossing Nebraska

It had been a workday like many others – not particularly memorable, but pleasant enough in its normality. Spring was just around the corner after what had been a long, dark winter. In fact, it was already warm enough for one to say that spring had arrived – in reality, if not in name. Briefcase in hand I let the door swing wide into our apparently ransacked living room, and from that moment on it seemed that life would not be normal ever again.   The first thought that appeared within the stunned blankness of my mind was that we’d been robbed. Unfortunately, however, it was a thought that couldn’t quite be squared with the reality of that which had been left behind. Why wouldn’t they have taken this? Or that? And then a pattern began to emerge. The walls were bare because her artwork was gone. Things were in disarray because her things had been removed. I went into the bedroom and threw open one of the drawers of the chest still standing where it had always stood; and t...

“Well, this will just make room in your life for someone better to come along.” Those words closed around my heart like a fist. Better? Better than the woman I love? Better than my wife? Yes, I felt deeply hurt, and, yes, I felt more incredibly betrayed than I think I could possibly feel, but a love that’s real is not blown away by such winds of circumstance, is it? What did “better” even mean, anyway? Do we have some mental checklist of criteria, both conscious and unconscious, the satisfactory completion of which signifies love – with more checked boxes corresponding to a “better” love, and “best” corresponding to some theoretically perfect love in which all possible criteria are checked? If that were so then love would merely reside in the mundane realm of convenient transactions: I love you as long as your actions please me. I love you as long as you give me what I desire. I love you as long as you continue to fulfill my needs. If that is the true nature of love, I pondered, then...

Back in my post entitled  Dependent Origination - Past Life and the Twelvefold Chain (Part 3 of 5) , I stated that “if you are inclined to think of ‘past life’ in terms of reincarnation [as opposed to previous moment of existence], you cannot find a more profoundly beautiful description of the process of its unfolding than in The Tibetan Book of the Dead .” My reason for considering it so beautiful is primarily related to my thinking that it is an incredibly just system in that “[the] process results in the individual actually choosing a subsequent birth that is perfectly tuned to the spiritual progress that they have yet to make – a birth that is commensurate with the nature of their attachment, aversion, and delusion.” In other words, there is no harsh and judging God and there is no eternal damnation. There is always an opportunity for redemption depending upon how we conduct ourselves in subsequent lives and what effort we put forth toward purifying our karma. T...

The weather is lousy outside, with sleet coating everything and a foot of snow on the way. That’s what I’ve been hearing on the local news, anyway—the foot of snow, that is. The sleet I can see with my very own eyes. I can hear it, too, peppering the windows when the wind picks up, first from one side of the house, then the other. Like a child home from school on a snow day, I stand at the window surveying the backyard where everything is covered with white or dripping with ice. Absent is the usual activity of squirrels tending to their stashes of nuts, rabbits hopping about tentatively, as if they’ve only so much energy to spare, and starlings flitting en masse from lawn to tree to who knows where. They all seem to have disappeared. The squirrels I know are up there in their leafy nests, huddled together and swaying with the wind. The rabbits are down in their unseen burrows, wonderfully insulated with grass and fur. The starlings are more of a mystery to me, though. Apparently...