The middle section of the eightfold path concerns sila (ethics): samma vaca (right speech), samma kammanta (right action), and samma avija (right livelihood). Here are a medley of considerations: Positioning the paths within the path The eightfold path sets off from an acknowledgement of suffering. So too the paths of sila are means towards an eradication of suffering. The logic of the sila is...
Weak and vulnerable. Rivers flowing behind the eyes, and in the chest a sea. And the sea is never full. An undulating surface. Depths and darkness and suffocating enclosure. A place that expands from the inside out, with walls that never move. Desperation and pity and collapsed possibilities. A flimsy coil of smoke rising from its own darkness, reaching and grasping. An abyss reflecting itself...
There will be no monuments to my battles. No records of my trials. No one will see the monsters I went out to meet. No one will remember their size or ferocity. Stepping into fear When I woke up the dragon was already there. I have woken up to so many mornings – days that end only to turn into another, growing into weeks, marking months – with a pain in my chest and a knowledge of...
The mind is a morass of sensations that fling themselves against the canvas, splattering their reception by laws of attraction and rejection. The observer may sit patiently, never being moved only moving, never seen only seeing, never the watcher and never the watched. Or the observer may be cast outside by the tremors and insistence of its subject matter. Forces of delight pull the observer...
The eightfold path is a destination of liberation, a trail to liberation, and an intention to a direction that is to liberation. I have only wet the soles of my feet at the shore of right view, gazing at an ocean whose depths promise suffocation more obviously than freedom. The architecture of right view strains the acrobat inside, casting spotlights on enormous edifices filled with niches to be...
You are welcome to sit by the fire, its flames dance in the rhythm that aches for freedom inside us, and the rumble of the consuming fuel echoes the debt of time that strikes at us in unrelenting syncopation. You are welcome to sit by the fire, I am telling myself a story. It is not my story. Here it begins. When you wake up in the morning, you are you, and there is no doubt. When you lay down to...
A memory. I wake up and the dragon is already there. There are stab wounds in my chest; shards of fractured glass drifting in the circuits of my heart and invading its walls. Today there is a scratch marking my belly. It is deep in some places, and an admixture of acid and a heat that is hot but never warm. I don’t know if I woke the dragon up, but I have known – many times before...
