tra la Lorn'

Good evening.

I hope you won't mind if I begin again with a moment from the first teaching the Buddha gave. It keeps thudding home for me. It didn't used to.

The Noble Truth of the Origin of Suffering is this: It is this thirst (craving) which produces re-existence and re-becoming, bound up with passionate greed. It finds fresh delight now here and now there, namely, craving for sense-pleasures; craving for existence and becoming; and craving for self-annihilation.

The word that keeps coming up in this passage means first of all thirst and, figuratively, craving.

Even though I live in the desert and it's high summer and right now I've been too long at the computer, still I'm embarrassed that ending this post I'm dashing off to get a drink of water.

Wouldn't it be demmed embarrassing? — to die angry; to die downhearted; to die stingy; to die whiny; to die arrogant; to die ungrateful; to die worried; to die squabbling; to die despairing; to die superstitious; to die cross;

And then you could have wrathful ḍakinīs, or goblins or whatever you like, dancing in the air around you and singing merrily

Rotten deathday to you
You've built you a zoo
You look like a monkey
You act like one, too

(No offense intended to monkeys. I don't see that they do these things more than we do.)

Be my friend: Kick me in the pants if you see me in any of these states. "Yo, Loren — ready to die?"