Busy Fool 2

Some things can go outta motion. Caught myself last night trying to be busy just for the sake of being busy, feeling that I had to be doing something. It is like some kinda disease, and all the while there is the sad forlorn hope that somehow you are gonna be able to push back the wheels of fate, make your life into something else, become a superstar overnight. What kinda superstar I really dunno; spiritual, financial? Crazy mixed up things all together no doubt. These kinda things are thoughts I have quite often...So, the tyranny of busyness. Makin' tracks, supposedly makin' tracks to findin' my way, my place on this planet. I run around, dance in circles so to speak, looking for things to do as if they are somehow going to lead me somewhere. It was just like that last night early evening when I got back from work and...then I just dropped it, the busy dance, guess I felt a dark kinda tiredness come over me which made me just wanna sit down and forget all this messing around I continually do, trying to make myself busy. A dark creeping tiredness was what it was, not unpleasant but maybe a warning, a hint to slow down and for once I was able to take the hint my body was giving me.

So I just sat down with a book on the couch and read, lay down on the couch in fact and read a Buddhist book, the Dhammapada, a new translation of a sacred text Buddhist text, an old text that has been kicking round this planet for hundreds of years, thousands now in fact. It has been translated into English many times over the last coupla hundred years since it was unearthed by explorers, Orientalists, colonists, god knows who, and it has recently been translated again. This is the copy I am now reading, this new translation, made by a woman scholar who is also a meditator and I think that really helps, the translation needs to be made by someone who meditates, not an academic who might have a brilliant mind but who knows jack shit about sittin' an' practising...the rise belly, fall belly. The text is lean, trimmed to the bone but it is beautiful and powerful because of that.

Guess if push came to shove I would have to say that is has always bugged me a little bit that I have been into Buddhism and meditation for so many years but never really got to grips with one of the basic classic Buddhist tetxs, got to grips in the sense of reading it from cover to cover, time and time again. Always felt there has been something missing because I have never been able to do that. To find that book that I can just pick up any time and always find something in it to connect with. This time it might be different because I love this translation, the words used are to the point and make sense in a way that you can carry them around in your head, those words on the page, and feel that they have relevance. Nothing worse for me that sitting down, trying to read a sacred book, a religious book, a Buddhist book or whatever you might wanna call it and then after a little while feeling bad because the it is so goddam boring it is as much as you can do to stay awake...ya just ain't making that connection with the words of the page. No, nothing worse than that. You end up walking away from an experience which you had hoped would bring light into your life but which only ends up making things, those life questions, that little bit darker. So, if you are interested the name of the book again is the Dhammapada the translator is Valerie Roebuck, the publisher is Penguin Books, the year of publication is 2010 and the ISBN for the book is 9780140449419.