Friday, January 09, 2009

Ourobouros

In a bored moment at the reference desk, 20 minutes before quitting time, Walhydra decided to play the "Google yourself" game.

One of the more interesting things she found was a link to a post by her old cyber-friend Sara Sutterfield Winn on the now-defunct Pagan Godspell. The post is called "On Perfection, Enlightenment…And Being Grumpy."

Here's a key passage:

If loving-kindness does not posit being some kind of ethereal Perfect being, but rather meeting yourself truly at the authentic point of yourself, then that’s what I want to pursue. If mysticism is a journey wherein the exquisite Beauty of the unconquerable mess of Life is made manifest in a scintillating point of Awareness, then that’s where I want to go.

Hey man, maybe I just don’t want to let go of being grumpy ever again. Or it’s possible that I’m just a lazy non-mystic making excuses for myself. When in doubt I think it’s best to consider what it might look like if all possibilities are true at the same moment. Then I get dizzy and have to sit down and giggle for a while. And then I don’t worry about it and have an orange instead….flushed with green fuse-light, oranges are so remarkably beautiful.
Wow!

This post showed up in the "walhydra" Google search because of the comment Walhydra posted:

July 28, 2007, Walhydra said,

Dearie,

Walhydra’s ambition…well, one of them…is to become the Bodhisattva of Crankiness. She hopes she doesn’t have to give up being imperfect in order to be perfect. Her favorite Zen aphorism is:

“After enlightenment, the laundry.”

In other words, we don’t change at all when/if we become enlightened. We just notice very clearly, precisely, sometimes painfully, how imperfect every thought, feeling, action, movement, etc., is…but also how it doesn’t matter so long as we let go and try again.

Or, at least, that’s her hope.

As she quoted in Walhydra’s Sadness recently:
Renunciation
is not about giving up
the things of the world,
but accepting
that they go away.
I love your raging delight in everything.
What a neat occasion of the snake taking hold of its own tail and rolling.

Walhydra figures she probably should listen to her own advice. DUH!

And she really, really misses Sara's blog.

And so it is.

Bléssed Be