Meditation 89

 

20 August 2020

A CVS card sticks between vine stem and tree trunk; there’s a story there, of loss and partial recovery, but I can’t tell it. In the Buddhist parable, a woman and a man bring their grand-child to a monk, accuse him of being her father. Monk takes child in for years, relinquishes her when the couple returns to apologize for believing the worst of him. It’s just a story. Babies in stories are props, as are monks and grandparents. What we look for is the lesson, not the plot, no matter its sorrows. A child was given up by her mother, taken from her adoptive parents by the birth father, taken back from her father, and then? For the reader, the end of the story is its legal resolution. Your suffering in exchange for my wisdom is considered best, so I can practice equanimity in the face of it. The gun range is for practice, but what of the targets, their torn circles, their oft-pocked skin? When you consider the meaning of “abstraction,” take into account its profits and losses. They’re just stories, like the one I tell of my neighbor who turns into the parking lot to avoid me as I walk toward her, stories with no apparent plot to the one who’s telling it, but clearly to the one who refuses to speak. Or the story about a tweet that made me into a character I hardly recognize, the better to hold me up as a “problem.” It was just a story. I provided my name and URL and walked away. Whatever you do, don't look at the comment stream.