Before New Year's Resolutions

End-of-year rush
to bakeries for chocolate chip scones
and Boston cream pie:
hedonism before next year's ascetism.

Inspiring Walk

It's an unseasonably sunny day, with an unseasonably bright blue sky, and a temperature around forty-five degrees. I took a walk to the library. The walk (approximately twenty blocks each way) inspired a total of four little four-and-twenty poems (that's poems that are no more than four lines and twenty words). However, I won't post them here because I'd rather hold onto them and submit them to the fourandtwenty.com or, failing that, another literary journal that takes poetry.

I've been meditating a lot since last Thursday--experiencing an unofficial at-home meditation retreat often interrupted by working or hanging out at In Other Words (the only remaining nonprofit feminist bookstore/community center in the United States), or by attending parties. Tonight, for the first time, I'm going to join a Buddhist sangha, the Portland Friends of the Dhamma, even though I've had bad experiences with two previous sanghas.

A few weeks ago I went up to a Buddhist monastery in White Salmon, Washington and met some members of Friends of the Dhamma, and they have me convinced--or at least hoping--this will be a much more satisfactory sangha. I'm glad I'm back into my formal sitting meditation practice after two years of grad school--no sitting meditation, and no reading Buddhist books for a whole two years. I graduated in the spring but wasn't very disciplined, despite my intention of plunging back into sitting meditation immediately after grad school. I think visiting the monks at White Salmon was an inspiration, a reminder.

"Do not go gentle into that good night"

I'm currently reading the young adult novel Matched by Ally Condie. It's been compared to The Hunger Games, but  I see more similarity in it to Lois Lowry's The Giver. After a couple pages, I began to think I'd like to see a novel set in this world but from a non-white and a non-heterosexual perspective. Outcasts are so intriguing.

Here are links to a couple of poems that are mentioned in Matched:

"Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night" by Dylan Thomas  http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15377

"Crossing the Bar" by Alfred Tennyson http://quotations.about.com/cs/poemlyrics/a/Crossing_Bar.htm

Mortality and Grief

Wading in the Sandy River

and watching the waves gently rock and sparkle in sunset,

I picture the Ganges with dead babies and cows floating past.

On a sand bed centered in the river

I see a large tree branch lying,

from which small branches curve in the same direction,

as though this were half the ribcage

of a dead water buffalo lying on its back.

I remember this week’s news:

My Aunt Barbara lying in her condo for five days,

dead and alone.