Tested and tasted too much

Prayer flags, chortens and novice monks, Sikkim



Okay - I won't do a lot of these (scroll onwards to more snappy posts), but occasionally need to stretch my brain about a bit and throw out squishy-musings; too much time to think and read...

A few years back, I happened on Irish poet, Patrick Kavanagh's Advent.

We have tested and tasted too much, lover -
Through a chink too wide there comes in no wonder.
But here in the Advent-darkened room
Where the dry black bread and the sugarless tea
Of penance will charm back thte luxury
Of a child's soul, we'll return to Doom
The knowledge we stole but could not use.
...

I don't recall being spurred to any water-shed of life-change, but the lines embedded themselves and sometimes come to me when I'm being virtuously anti-materialistic, or chiding myself for not being.

(Or after an especially big night; they echo interior-hangover musings after the night's thrill of witty banter's wears off and you realize little new's been said - or no one remembers if it was.)

It laid fallow until more recent reading on Buddhism (note theme of consecutive posts) - in particular its fascination to Westerners (in Andrew Harvey's A Journey in Ladakh).

Ruminating on a conversation Harvey's had with the Drukchen Rinpoche (religious teacher) in which the Rinpoche notes that some of the "best Buddhists I know are Westereners," Harvey muses:

"Many Westerners have 'tasted every kind of food.' They have exhausted most sensations, most of the possibilities of their culture, most of the possibilities of the affluent world. They are schooled in unillusion.

And to have no illusions is the beginning of Buddhist practice: to no longer believe in any of the fictions of personality or success or desire is the foundation of all true meditation, the beginning of the Path towards Nirvana.

Buddhism will flourish in the West, I believe, because the West is coming of age; it is becoming adult...Do not forget that Buddhism was not in its origins a peasant belief...the Buddha was a Prince and a scholar..."

From A Journey in Ladakh: Encounters with Buddhism.

Tasted, tried, tested too much. Not expecting to cast off worldly possessions any time soon (I have lots, and like them all lots), move upstate not meant to be a hair-shirt gesture of temperance, but will try to keep the whole idea foregrounded.

I was blissful in Maine, squatting on a beach to observe a tide pool. Just need to build in more moments like that.

C (going to take a shower and get my head off this trip)