Author Archives: jimwdollar

The seasons come and go. Our place is to let come what’s coming and to let go what’s going, without attachment or affiliation. Without preference or partnership. No expectation. No agenda. No plans. No opinion. Or, better, perhaps, to love each one for what it is, as one might love their children, without thinking thatContinue reading “July 24-C, 2022”

If you want to feel better on every level stop what you are doing 10 times a day and do nothing but breathe for 5 minutes, or, you could stop 5 times a day and breathe for 10 minutes. Just breathe, and be conscious of your breathing. And pause for a count of 5 betweenContinue reading “July 24-A, 2022”

Everybody wants to be happy. What does wanting know? Without wanting, everybody would be happy like that (Snaps fingers). Wanting is the source of our problems. Suffering is a perspective. It is the result of the way we see things. Sift the perspective, and POOF! goes the problem. The art of perspective shifting is theContinue reading “July 23-C, 2022”

Our primary obligation is to our life. To live it as fully as possible, as well as possible, as long as possible, toward the end of expressing, exhibiting, knowing ourselves as completely as possible. We are here to discover and incarnate who we are in the here/now of our living. Our life is the mediumContinue reading “July 23-B, 2022”

Zen is what happened when Buddhism met Taoism, and the more accurate term would be “Zen-Taoism,” not “Zen-Buddhism,” because Zen is more Taoist than Buddhist. If you are interested, check out “The Tao of Zen” by Ray Grigg, hardback or Kindle at Amazon. With both Taoism and Zen you get the doctrine: “It doesn’t matterContinue reading “July 23-A, 2022”

“The peace of wild things” (Wendell Berry) is found in letting things be what they are, and not incessantly willing things to be different than they are. Life protests its surrender to life, but it recognizes inevitability when it sees it and acquiesces to the circumstances without holding grudges, planning its revenge, or endlessly bemoaningContinue reading “July 22-B, 2022”

Every living thing has some guiding sense of what it is about, about what is its to do. Every living thing lives knowing and doing its business and avoiding/ignoring what is not its business. Every. Living. Thing. And that has been true of human beings for most of our existence. With agriculture and domestication ofContinue reading “July 22-A, 2022”

I say this from time to time because it cannot be heard often enough: It is all useless, hopeless, pointless, futile and absurd, and coming to a very bad end– every living thing dies. And. How we live in the meantime makes all the difference. We have to live as those who do not careContinue reading “July 21-D, 2022”

I am reading Frederich Nietzsche (“The Birth of Tragedy”) and Arthur Schopenhauer (“The World as Will and Representation”) simultaneously, with each alternating as comic relief to the other. Every time I open either, I experience an immediate flashback to the Kevin Kline character Otto in “A Fish Called Wanda,” acknowledge the similarities, and dig in.Continue reading “July 21-C, 2022”