tao1776

My understanding and experience of meditation is to let it be whatever it is; you just remain silent, without any concern, without any judgment, without making any appreciation or condemnation. Soon all the dust will settle, and you will be left behind in your immense glory, in your tremendous beauty, in your peaks of consciousness. ~ Osho 

Marriage is a conspiracy from Tiffany, florists, the diamond industry, and Christian fundamentalists. The only good thing about it is the diamond ring, the wedding gifts and the honeymoon. - Suzanne Finnamore Any man in love with his wife must be so dull that no one else could love him. - Montaigne I haven't spoken of my pending divorce lately. The divorce process is like a lot of things in life: you never fully realize just how painful something is until you experience it for yourself. And when it comes to marriage the opposite is also true: when marriage is good, it is really, really great. When a marriage is bad, it really, really, fucking sucks. You never realize how wonderful marriage can be unless you have experienced it. My spouse has always been a handful. But at times, it was wonderful; like a warm sun after a blistering rain. But if its always raining and you find yourself beginning to live for those brief intermittent breaks of sun through the darkened clo...

The chickens are giving us up to eight eggs a day now. Soon we will be gifted with more than a dozen eggs a day and we will gift others in return. There is nothing better than "fresher than fresh" eggs and eggs that are given to you for free. A gift within a gift. How cool is that!

A recent post over at The Buddhist Blog had me thinking about this post from last year. I thought it an appropriate re-post. Pouring water into the ocean to make it wet... Who  are we really?  What  is really the meaning of Life?  How  can we attain lasting happiness in the face of our seemingly endless troubles? These questions are basic to our lives, and it is from these questions that the practice of Zen has its birth. Zen can be the compassionate scalpel that removes the layers of accrued opinions, beliefs, and frozen expectations that stand between us and true experience. Zen shows us that what we mistakenly call ourselves, our personal identity, is really no more than a mask over our true selves and natures. Beliefs, opinions, prejudices, educational and cultural training, our family backgrounds: All these are merely accidental factors, if you will. They are necessary tools for survival and integration into the larger society, but ...

Remember when we were kids  and thought nothing of acting goofy  and making weird faces? Somewhere along the line we made the fade to being serious;  all silliness locked away to be forgotten, made to be still. Let us dance like dervishes; like the wind through the trees, Let us laugh; giggle and snort at nothing at all. Let's get silly What is wrong just having fun?

We thought it best to bring our flock back to the original number of fifteen and Gaia Girl ventured out to fill our quota. She introduced a pair of Barnevelder to our community of very settled and content girls in the sneaky fashion of putting them on the roost while the girls slept. As Gaia Girl explained, "Sometimes the chickens will just wake the next morning and just say, Hi." We have deduced over time that Pox, an Ameracauna, reigned as number one in the pecking order. Bess was a contender but it appeared that Pox came out on top. The Golden Comets are content to follow while the Barred Rocks often appear as a tribe unto themselves being not followers or leaders: Individuals giving neither protest or support, doing their own thing. This changed radically when the new kids came to town. The largest of the Barred Rocks, a.k.a. Fatty McFatty gave chase. She ran down one of the new kids and pinned her between the coop and a metal feed barrel. She stood upon the Barneveld...

New from the TaoSpring Front Watching the GOP presidential candidates debate is equal to watching a  squirrel water skiing . It's just plain silly and I can't be bothered. The misinformation bantered about regarding Social Security is just another GOP joke. Social Security costs less than 5% of the GDP and is easily fixable if you can factor out the greed and factor in some common sense with a sense of commonwealth. And I'm not saying Socialism here, perhaps a little consideration and fairness. What ever happened to, "All I really need to know I learned in kindergarten?"  Everyone should pay into Social Security and not everyone should receive it. The think tank Third Way  believes that individuals making $200,000 or jointly $400,000, should not receive Social Security, that we should boost benefits for poorer retirees and scale the benefits of those making $150,000 or $250,000 jointly. Fair? I think so.  Will it fly? I doubt it.  Could it? Yes...

Me and Gaia Girl took the Ghia down to valley on Sunday. The Ghia always arrives to waves and points. She (and me) love it! We picked up some incense at the Tibet store and poked a little. Just a little. Seeing that Labor Day weekend was in full swing Northampton was crowded with tourists and college kids. We had to flee. We had made up a picnic lunch with an iced tea for Gaia Girl and a pint of Guinness for me. We picked up a nice sandwich from Whole Foods and added it to the cran-raisin cookies that we picked up at the local farm stand. We made our way over to the Peace Pagoda  to have our lunch. The pond next to the Dry Garden is usually noisy with frogs as they jump for cover whenever anyone approaches. Seemed quiet today. As was much of our ride through the meandering hills and flats and curves that make up the  Connecticut river valley . The river looked the color of a coffee milkshake after Hurricane Irene had her way throughout the North Country. It was a n...

The "Girls" have been exhibiting behaviors indicative of a fast approaching egg laying season. We knew that they would begin laying by early October so we were a little slow in building our nesting boxes. When putting away stock at work I thought that these plastic storage containers would work fine. Drill a drainage hole for easy cleaning, mount and place a 2x4 along the inside bottom behind them; to give them a slight tilt inward. Cut the covers, build a bench to help them get into the nests and presto! We had the incentive we needed when Annie found two eggs in the coop shavings and one broken out in the run. After the nesting boxes were complete Annie placed the fresh eggs into the boxes just to help promote the idea that this is where you lay eggs. On another note.... Fort Seuss, as we like to call the coop that I made using scrap pallets, weathered Irene quite nicely. I do need to extend the roof though. Perhaps build a slant around all four side to allow f...

It has come to my attention that in my five plus years of blogging and my more than 900 blog posts, there exists just shy of 100 drafts : unpublished and incomplete stories, thoughts and random musings. Here are but a few........... I've come to believe that most people do the best that they can do. People are composed of emotion and reactions and are knocked about by what they are attracted to and what they want to avoid. It really is that simple. Some people do seek to climb out of the world of Pavlov's dogs and Skinner's pigeons and look to attach themselves to some discipline, moral code, ideology. This however is still not the way. They identify themselves by the labels that they have attached themselves to. And...yes, I see it in every community. It isn't just the "Christians". I've seen people identify with labels such as, "bi-polar" "computer programmer" "republican"..... Oh, these are just words we use to iden...