01
We all have things we care about and things we care not about. We are set apart and defined by those things. What do you love? What do you abhor? There you are! Even the Dalai Lama has those on his "Don't Like To Be Around/ Don't Like To Do" List. Here is the really important thing about our lists: WE CAN'T DO ANYTHING ABOUT THEM!!! They are automatic, involuntary, uncontrived, spontaneous, organic, instinctive, unconscious... unique to each of us in their variety, intensity, depth, breadth, quality, merit and refinement. We cannot help how we feel. We can only try to control what we do about it. You know your sister-in-law? Or your brother-in-law? Everybody has one. Or more. Sometimes, it is your sister, or your brother. It's weird how it works. Across the board, around the circle, throughout the world. It is one of the things we have in common with everyone-- and could serve us well as a uniting factor in bringing us all together as one. We could hold "Who Do YOU Hate?" block parties and therapy sessions, where we talk about our helplessness and inability to be free of our fundamental orientations and incapacitates. This is the thing: there are things about us we do not control. Our point of view. Our way of thinking. Our preferences and our disinclinations... We have a better chance of making up our mind than we have of changing our mind. Our mind changes all of the time, but not because we will it to be so. What's up with that? What is our ideal of who we want to be? Who says that is ideal? Who thinks it is atrocious? See what I mean? Now, what do we do about it? LIGHTEN UP!!! Recognize how it is and let it be! Keep an eye on it without taking it seriously, or thinking it means something, or believing it gives us the right to treat other people the way we are inclined to treat them! And start cutting slack, across the board, around the circle, throughout the world. The people we hate are just the people we hate. That doesn't say anything about them. It speaks volumes about us! Our sister-in-law, etc., is there to grow us up! If it weren't her, it would be somebody else! There will always be someone to carry our projections and show us who we are by showing us who we don't want to be. Our enemies are our friends in the sense of exposing our own lack of compassion, kindness, latitude and grace, and the ways we need to expand, deepen, enlarge, develop our capacity for being open, caring places inviting everyone to come sit and rest for a while.
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02
Everything is temporary, nothing lasts. Gravity is apparently permanent, but even gravity's time is limited. Expansion and collapse, Kid. Expansion and collapse. If it isn't coming, it's going, or turning around. It's all just a matter of time. But. The rhythm is always there. Change is unchanging. The beat goes on and on... And I find something strangely comforting in that. To be a part of nature's rhythms, riding the tide as it comes and goes and turns around, has a faintly familiar ring to it, like I have been here before, and again before that, and again... I am at home in the coming and going and turning around. And when I go, I'm not going to be going anywhere-- certainly not anywhere I haven't been. It ought to be old hat by now! I'm on a roll, here. We all are! "And when the heaving sea has shaken my raft to pieces, then I will swim!" (Odysseus in the Odyssey). Swimming on and on, and taking nothing with more seriousness than it deserves. Coming and going with the tides of time in harmony with the music of the spheres. Oh, what a ride!
Jim Dollar's Photography and Philosophy 