I’ve only been studying R for a few weeks. It’s my second programming language, and I’m only a beginner at my first – python. R is strangely strange. It looks a bit like java with all its brackets, but then goes and uses “<-” for designating variables, as if the universal “=” wasn’t good enough. In my accumulation of anecdotal evidence, I...
The Buddhists teach that fear is like a slave at a festival who cannot enjoy the celebrations because of immanent obligations, while doubt is like one lost in the desert, wavering back and forth, going nowhere. Change can be frightening for many reasons. Change implies new challenges and facing new unknowns. Change can mean abandoning old challenges and old senses of self. Sometimes the need for...
I have spent a few months engaging myself in a regular study and consideration of Buddhism. My schedule now calls for me to move onto other studies, which makes this a good time to reflect on what I’ve learned, how I’ve learned it, the methods I used, and the advice I would give myself or another interested in a similar venture. My introduction to Buddhism began with an interest in...
I have faced the dragon. I have seen the ocean that drowns. I have seen the fires that consume. I have walked and been suffocated and been burnt. Beneath the waters and the flames I have seen the boulder that crushes. It is a wooden board with sharp corners and rough edges, and a solidity that won’t fail. It is a room that shrinks and shrinks until the prisoner is crouching and caught. It...
Walking through the imaginary forest of possibilities can be overwhelming. I walk to discover, and I walk to create, and I walk to achieve my goals within the boundaries of time. Studying python has been exploration unto itself, and an exploration of exploration. I have surpassed primary levels of comprehension within python (absorbing presumptions and laws of syntax and vocabulary) towards more...
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...
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...
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...
A warmth that expands and demands and drives steam into the mind’s chambers. A hot wind carrying flakes of brittle rust, curling around the chest; abrasive. A tube carrying ease and motion, behind the heart between the lungs, strangled and pinched and squeezed. A driver of power, planning and scheduling confidence and assurance and recurring pride. Schemes and checkmates and victory parades...
The topology of progress is frustrating in the revelations of its unexpected troughs, and heights that transcend themselves into plateaus. The revelation of progress is frustration, proving itself only by the quagmire of unfamiliar stretches, yet (do not fear, for) they hide in their shadows easy slopes of epiphanies spurring euphoria. New lessons earn new vistas promising fresh territories for...