Nirvana

I wish I were like the Buddha. I wish I had reached the transcendent state and felt peaceful, smiling, and liberated from the troubles of our world. I wish I didn’t worry about Donald Trump and our family miscreant, about climate change and our unwillingness to change in response to it. I wish I could forget about the increasing ocean acidity that is going to destroy all sea creatures that live in shells. It would be nice to take good health for granted or at least to accept my inexorable physical decline as the years pile up. This is just a sampler of the things I’d like to change about myself in relation to the world, but you get my drift.

The question is what is to be done? I’ve done my best to make the world better, but failed for the most part. How can I rise above it all? I’ve tried thinking in geological time, especially during the 2012 presidential campaign season. It worked pretty well then, but reading about geology this time around (currently Simon Winchester’s Krakatoa), geology isn’t cutting the mustard.

That’s why I’m looking to the Buddha and taking up meditation in some form. I’m not ready for closing my eyes and intoning “Om” with my index fingers touching my thumbs, but I could lose myself in natural beauty and its evanescence. There’s much to meditate on. Take, for example, this male luna moth that visited me last week.

I could pay a visit to Cousin Kyle and meditate on his native prairie ablaze with black-eyed-Susans.

I could just sit on our patio, studying the moss that grows in the spaces between stones, forgetting about my self and all the things that trouble me while waiting for nirvana.

Copyright 2016 by Shirley Domer