Bling in Purgatory

Trying to find the bag of hats and mittens I stored away in the Spring, I found my daughter's lost bike helmet, a book about carnival sideshows and an Easter hat that I put on even though it was too small.

Looking for the binoculars, I found an avocado we'd lost the day before. Somehow it left the kitchen and wound up in the bedroom on my dresser, and consequently the salad on Sunday lacked heft.

Looking for a very small bottle of alluvial gold I panned for in Nova Scotia a decade ago, I found a trove of large garnets and tourmalines dumped into a plastic Chinese takeout container.

Cleaning out my closet, I found these paper maché gold bricks I made on a whim last winter. Very funny. I should always play such jokes on myself. I'll hide some fake bonds from myself the next time I get the chance.

Today I was thinking like a Buddhist. All that I learned from Brooklyn's Matthew Reichers was coming back to me, which meant that I remembered that the cause of my suffering is actually my mind and not the world. He persuades, night after night, that the objects and situations we are so deeply invested in acquiring or avoiding are emptiness we give meaning too. Holy Crap! Sometimes it seems so clear. Then a part of my awareness becomes alert enough to slice my heart out of all the tangled webs of frustration and despair it's gotten mixed up in.

Funny, I thought today I was going to be thinking all Obama all the time, but I also wound up thinking a lot about Matthew, the hard work of the internal science of peace, and the quest for responsibility in the slippery workings of the mind. It was a good thing because in the second part of the day I was in the trenches with some goblins, and I needed to remember that things might not be as they appeared. Why is resentment so seductive, prejudice so unavoidable, and forgiveness so hard?