Mondays are blank canvases. Today I started off slowly and then simply put one foot in front of the other. I went to the grocery to pick up a few things. Storm clouds were ominous and I had to turn on the windshield wipers a few times. It was only later in the day that it poured, dropping limbs from vulnerable trees.

I feel vulnerable myself. Summer idleness prevails and hope seems to be dormant. My teacher did not put any stock at all in hope. He saw so clearly that it is the ego that is involved in wishing and hoping. He wanted us to be always working. Sigh. Unrolling some wax paper off a piece of salt water taffy, I try to be patient with my life.

I watched The Butler on HBO last night. It’s been a long time since I sat and watched a whole movie. And yet that is I how I watched them as a child. Sitting in the theater, eating candy, and enjoying the smell of a theater, pure buttered bliss it was. I have a random memory of my whole family going to a downtown theater. My father had bought a box of candy and at some point we spilled it all over the floor. Groping in the dark, we picked the pieces up and ate them anyway.

I feel that the electronic life is not nearly as redolent as real-time life. And much more addictive. Even when I was visiting Vernon Howard classes back in the eighties, technology was merely a whisper. He could have been a Luddite, eschewing computers for his old typewriter. He had already written his classics anyway.

Truth is not for sale, although books may contain it. I still struggle for reality while under the sedative effect of the media. Yes, the media is almost a pharmaceutical. But so is the internet. We are now an aging population Googling up our diseases and our recipes for dinner. Finding out that nothing is private and everything is mostly unnecessary to read.

What am I doing here? I am supposed to be living life as an alive and awake human being. You can’t Google that, not really.

Love,
Vicki