Glimpse of a Hermits Life Redux

*Yes this should be a footnote, but I am a rule breaker so I am putting this up here instead.  Rarely do I pull a blog.  Rarely do I edit.  But when I read this particular blog I saw some egregious mistakes that I had to correct.  I also want to convey just how excited I am by all of the things I have been learning.

 For so very long I have looked down, or at least at eye level.  Water has always been my baptismal font into humanity.  It may remain that way, but I have discovered another way.  I had to look up and beyond anything my eyes could see to feel a connection to the here and now.

 A connection that feels so profound I do not know why everyone isn't drinking my Kool Aid!  The further I go in my research the more I can see a connection between science and faith.
I am far from the first one to see such a connection. Nor am I ready to genuflect to the skies.

 A monk some 400 years ago deeply loved God.  His name was Giordano Bruno.  He was burned at the stake.  Not a pleasant or fast way to die, much less humane.

His crime?  He believed Earth was not the center of the Universe.  His love of science only resolved further his love of God.  They were not separate.  Unless you happened to live in a time where the Catholic Church believed they were the center of the universe.  A side note: It took until 1992 to admit that even Copernicus was correct, however Bruno is still listed as a heretic.

Yes, yes I digress.  It is something that so excites me I want to share it.  And I do not have to share the facts, or what some might find mundane.

I can share all this with a smile.  With an act of kindness, with a wave hello, or a hug.

Maybe in my next blog I will talk about how trees and plants communicate with each other and how we share our DNA.

For now, I will remain (as I was recently deemed) Your beautiful Buddhist Nerd



This has been a particularly unusual summer for me.  I did not walk any train tracks with my friends resulting in finding a dead body and thus the meaning of friendships.

I did not go to the beach and let my feet get sucked further in the sand, resulting in undertow fascination.

I did not step on to a plane, train, or even used my barely running car.  I have not even walked barefoot in the yard, or had a debate on humidity.

For some reason people love to claim they have the most humidity. (Unless you live in New Orleans you are best to keep quiet on the subject of frizzy hair).

My kayak dry docked, fat bathing suit has yet see water.

 So what have I been doing all summer?

My head has been swimming with ideas, creations, and research.

Asking questions I never asked before.   So many questions I feel like a four year old asking "why?" about everything!

The start of the summer was Mathematics.  What a  beautiful a language and  I can only grasp an infinitesimal part of it.

 I can tell you that now when I look at my cat half curled , feet sticking out I see an imaginary Fibonacci Sequence drawn around him.

After some period of time, math lead me to Astro Physics. Seems like a logical jump.

 Each day I am learning something new and different and mesmerizing.  Everything is so amazing I am itching to bore my friends about it all at a dinner party (A dinner party I would a) Not be invited to, and b) Not attend, hermit that I am).

As I have previously written about, I have also been meditating.

I began to meditate to feel connected with the earth and my fellow earthlings.  I meditate to clear my mind, or take a mental vacation.  Each time is different.

I had yet to feel connected to anything but my nostrils until I had a rather profound self discovery.

Meditation is repetition of sound, thought, or breath to get to a place where you can see your thoughts, love them and let them go, or sit with the painful ones, as I have said before.

My meditation has changed.  I close my eyes and immediately I am engulfed in the Universe.  Galaxies, dark matter, neutrinos, antineutrinos, the icy rings of Saturn, black holes, white holes, string theory, and the list goes on.

I am in a parediolia state.  I see things that are there, and are not there at the same time.

It is a place that is both full of light and stygian at the same time.

The more we learn, the more we are able to say we do not know for sure.

It is within this vast space (literally) that I am able to feel connected to my fellow beings.  I feel at one with all of it, with the questions, with the trees, with the feel of earth, and the unknowing and brutal space above.

I do not call it the heavens, because trust me if you had any idea what goes on beyond our white puffy clouds, it is anything but heavenly and serene.  It is bombastic and brutal, and always changing.

That is the good stuff.  The stuff I feel at one with.

Glimpsing the universe or multiverse, how can I not take a moment to smile at the clerk working hard and wish them a great day.

To the other hermits that I connect with, how can I not sit and listen to what interests them?

My summer has been spent asking the big and little questions.

Why are we here?

Where do we come from?

My mother used to say I was planned.  I do not believe her.  All evidence points to she may have wanted another baby, but my father did not.

As to why are we here?  Why not?

The puffy clouds part and the sun shines through making our skin warm, and people smile.  The song "Let the sun shine in..." is much more poetic than, "Let the conduction, radiation and convection shine in."

This summer I have remained a hermit, mainly out of lack of finances.

But I did find a way to travel.  Through space, through thought, and more thought, and back again.

All to connect with myself.

And you.

Did I Do Something Stupid?

The other day I accidentally burned a small hole in the blanket on our bed.  It is not an expensive blanket, or even the one usually kept on our bed.

I will interject here to say please hold off on your advice to me to quit smoking.  And stop smoking in the house, and especially stop smoking in the house and on my bed.  I know it all.

Back to the tiny hole.

I tried to arrange the blanket so the hole was hidden, at the foot of the bed.  No go.  It is too centered due to my bed-making skills of turning down the blanket and the top sheet together.  That adds length which makes the hole fairly well centered.

I was watching TV and my eyes kept going to that hole.  It was taunting me so much I had to go find my small and very unimpressive sewing kit.  I searched every place I could think of and the sewing kit would not reveal itself.

I went back to watching TV.

The hole kept screaming at me.

I stomped out of bed and realized the sewing kit was in my office.  I victoriously stomped back to my room, sat by the hole and opened my kit.

No needles.  Not one.  Not even the ones I keep for my sewing machine.

I put the sewing kit on my dresser and moved the  papers on my bed over the hole.

While watching TV, I imagined the hole and what it would look like when I finally did find a freaking needle.

It will still be there.  A flaw.  A noticeable one.  A tiny little closed up hole.  A small void stitched together.

It wont be perfect.  It will never be perfect again.  No matter how many ways I make the bed I will notice it.  This flaw.

 I had the thought that we were born flawless in a zipped up plastic bag from Target and then slowly we get little flaws that happen along the way.  A scar from a skinned knee, or a surgery.  Invisible scars carved on our insides from life's pains and pleasures.

Proof positive that nothing is perfect.

we all still try to be perfect.

 I meditate, I cleanse crystals in salt water under a full moon, I go to therapy.  I am flawed.

My life is full of tiny little sewn up patches.  Everyone has them.  We just do not always see them.

Sometimes we are compelled to draw attention to our patches.

The house is not clean, and we quickly apologize to our friend who rang the doorbell.

"Sorry, my house is a mess"

You begin to look around and notice the mess when at first all you saw was your friend.

If you have a good enough friend they reply, "Please, I don't give a shit.  Let's have coffee." and you step over whatever unmentionable was previously mentioned.

I have a quilt that  my grandmother made me.  I do not use it anymore.  It is safely tucked away inside a plastic zippered bag that another blanket arrived in.

The quilt is beautiful, and old now, and has a few small holes and tears in it.  It is loved and it is fragile.  Too fragile I have decided.  So it is only brought out as a last resort blanket.  I am always happy to see it and always look for the corner where my grandmother embroidered her name and the date.

Some day we will all be too fragile.  We will all be fraying at the ends, and so stitched together we could be in a Tim Burton movie.  Now we are not.

Now we patch up.

And if we do not have the tools to immediately patch up, well, currently my dog is doing a fine job of covering the offensive hole.

That is good enough for me.

May I Offer You a Cup of Chaos?

Something interesting came up in therapy.  Yes, I go to therapy, get over it.  If you still hold a stigma against  therapy then I suggest you go immediately.

As I said, something came up in therapy, I was talking a bit about my partner and I.  I noted that I do not mind chaos.  Chaos is easy.  With chaos you can pick one thing out of the eye of a chaotic storm and deal with it.

In the mathematical way they can not even truly define chaos to make it chaotic.  Yes if you google it you will see an animated double pendulum.  watching it is hypnotic, but by using two perfect starts (the pendulum), they are already not making it chaotic.  Thee chaos theory claims  each time it starts you will always get a different response.  Yet we know that not to be true, or else why would people waste money on lottery tickets.  eventually the same result will occur.

When I was a teenager my room was always a mess, there was a certain chaos to it, yet I was always able to find what I needed.  So there was no real chaos to it.

In that house of my formative years, there was a chaos of people.  Any time day or night you could find someone to talk to.  Or two or three people that did not even  live in the house sitting together talking.  This was not odd to me.  I would say hello, or not, and go about whatever I was doing.

Just chaotic people floating around in a chaotic house.

Permit me if you will, (Ive always wanted to use that line!) to say there is no chaos.

Oh yes, I said it.  Now I will scream it so you really grasp the blasphemy of mathematics.

THERE IS NO CHAOS!

Wow, that felt good!

The man who invented Chaos Theory even blew his own theory by giving it a nickname.

The Butterfly Effect.

One small action can cause much larger actions  (or reactions) down the road.

Doesn't sound chaotic to me at all.  Sounds logical.

I woke up thinking about my house.  At the moment it is chaotic, I am the only one here, but it is chaotic.  Books need to be put away, cat puke picked up, a serious mop job, laundry and on and on and on.

While thinking about  my house in its chaotic state I came to the understanding that I know nothing.

Sit with me on this for a moment.  I know nothing.

 I do not know how to mop, even if I mop every day.  I do not know how to raise children, yet I raised five, I do not know what I want to be when I grow up, and I am 48.

This thought first startled me.  I mean whoa!  I know nothing?  My brain began to try and immediately dispel the "I Know Nothing Theory".

Brain: You know how to type
Me:  I was taught yes and my fingers move deftly across they keyboard, yet I still cheat and look down once in a while.
Brain: You know how to make coffee.
Me: Laughing, yeah, ask Mer about that one!
Brain: You know how to drive a car
Me; Most of the time I do not recall even driving, so who is driving the car then?
Brain: You know how to love.
Me;  No, I know that I DO love, I also hurt the people I love, my love is full of defect limitations even I am unaware of it at the time I am making them.

 On it went, as I got out of bed and yes did make coffee, and yes remembered at the last second to put the lid on the machine.

Love and communication and being human is full of flaws and chaos.  A perfect form of chaos that can be cleaned up, swept up, made up, put together.

I can take an example of my current chaos and trace it back to the very moment it began.  It may have been weeks, or years ago. I can trace it.

Knowing there is no true chaos, knowing a small action I made at some random point helped to shape who I am now, means I know nothing.

I know, I know, you are currently screaming inside all the things you do know.  About your job, your life, making pancakes.  Is any of it perfect?  If it is not perfect, than you know nothing.

Please do not strive for perfection.  It is unattainable.  Or at least I think so, I do no know so.

I have been working on loving myself, and others without conditions.  I am learning how to love without expecting it in return.  I am learning how to forgive myself, and keep on loving the people I have hurt, myself included.

These are all learning practices.

To practice, not to master or know fully.

Waking up to realize I know nothing, wast amazing!

Think of all the things there are yet to discover but never really know!

Try today to realize you know nothing.

Look at one small action you do, and really see it, be there with that action.  What does your hand feel when you brush your daughter's hair?

What is your mind thinking when you fill your cup of coffee?  Can you hear it splash?

What is getting dressed like?  Are you in a hurry?  Too much of a hurry to take a tiny moment to appreciate the material on your skin?

I think of a day where I have to do mundane things, looking at all of it as a moment in time that wont repeat itself exactly.

There are no small actions.

I will mop, but I will never exactly repeat the action, even if I do it every day.  There will always be a bit of chaos in it.  How remarkable that we humans get to do these tasks and see them as different and chaotic every single time we repeat them?

 How cool is it that we are the ones that know nothing of ourselves or our world that we created?

What an amazing chance to see the world around us.  There is no task too small for us not to take notice of it, feel it, think about it, and even appreciate it!

Try it!  Do not take my word for it.

I know nothing, and that is awesome!