Now that the dreaded Democrats have taken control of Virginia, from the viewpoint here in Conservative Southside VA, it’s as if the Yankees had just won the war and now southern values will be replaced by foreign values. As if this were the End of Time, the gate has been breached and the barbarians are flooding in. 

Dire predictions are flooding the local Facebook of rising crime and taxes, the removal of guns, and abortion will become birth control. Dead babies will pile up in landfill, discarded life by the ruthless Democrats. The emotional wound of the Civil War seems to be reenacted. This wound has become the collective identity of the South as a people.

A Buddha grows in Blackstone….Sounds like a book doesn’t it. I have always wanted to be unique, a big frog in the pond, well I’m the only Buddhist frog in this pond. Om Mani Padme Hum. The Jewel is in the Lotus. 

But locals don’t understand what I mean here as they think Buddhism is a religion, and any religion other than Christian is felt as a threat to the true religion. But Buddhism is not a religion but a practice, not a noun with a definition but a verb, a way of being aware, of being in the world that moves you from the unconscious to the conscious. 

Like Thomas Merton in a Trappist monastery, my home is my temple, my Zen retreat. I study, meditate, and write my journal discoveries on Facebook, sharing my interior adventure as I go. 

People here like to keep pit bulls in their yards on a chain. When you walk by they rush at you but only to the length of their chain. Barking is their only relief. Facebook is like that when we are chained to our opinions. When I stop by someone’s yard and they rush at me until their chain snaps them back, they always seem to enjoy the relief. 

But I admit I offer myself as a target. Am I a tease? The posted picture is of Bodhidharma, the Buddhist monk from India who brought the original teaching of Zen to China. 

Zen is like a candle in the heart. The world will bark and try to blow it out.

Joseph Campbell always points to this joyful participation in suffering (life is loss) as the essential message of Christ, and the Buddha, for that matter. Life is suffering, there is the cessation of suffering, said the Buddha as his core teaching. 

When all is change, impermanence, which means loss and death, one’s only movement is to embrace it, choose it, but why joyfully and not resentfully? One embraces sorrow joyfully because there is freedom from sorrow when you see there is no way out of it.

If everything were green, you could perceive no green. When everything is change, you can perceive nothing fixed, and if there is nothing fixed, there is no death of the fixed. Only the fixed can die. One must let go of time which fixes everything.

I’m still hung up on Daylight Savings Time. I’m still using my free hour minute by minute, carefully because I know my time is running out. We are always spending too much or too little time, wasting it or saving it. All our mental suffering (and all suffering is mental) comes from our hanging from the clock of time, like Harold Lloyd. 

When I took my 100-year-old other to see Avatar she recalled that the first movie she remembers seeing was Harold Lloyd hanging from a clock. She lived to be 102 because she never hung from the tyranny of time. 

Time is thinking. Ever think of that? Time is past and future, and past and future only exist when we think about it. So time as thought flows out of the Now, or the center of the clock face, as I point out in this talk. You are at the center. You are Time, while at the same time you are the hands of time going in circles around you as Center. When we get older we get this sense that time, our history, our life as a person in time goes around us like a merry-go-round. 

So why did I say “only the fixed die.” When you are in time, chasing time, running from time, saving it, losing it, ignoring it, you are fixed in time. Time fixes you. That’s why we resist time, feel its noose around our neck. We feel fixed. 

But all is impermanent, says the Buddha. We are not IN time. We ARE time. Yet we are still in time to catch a bus. But when we are time, everything changes. Our reference from being fixed to being the unfixed changes. When you are unfixed, you are undefined, the unconditioned, and you feel free. That’s what’s important: to Feel Free. One can think you are free, but thinking is time, so if you think you are free you are not; you just think you are, but you don’t feel it. 

When we feel is the restricting, the enclosure of time. We feel we are in a time capsule. The only way to be free from time is to BE time. And only the Now IS time, so be Now…which means don’t take your thoughts seriously, don’t believe your thoughts. Don’t believe in time. Past and future are just thoughts in your mind. Only the Fixed die or run out of time. 

I’m setting the clocks back now and I”m wondering what I will do with the extra hour. I’ll drink another cup of coffee since by setting the clock back I just erased the one I drank. In fact, I don’t even remember drinking it. I’m writing this down as a record, for when I set the clock back I won’t remember writing this.

There should be Daylight Saving Year, so you could set the year back and start over. Oh, wait,  they did a movie about that: Ground Hog Day. Only it was a day that was set back. How about Daylight Saving Life. Would I want to set my life back and start over? Would it be different? I suppose we would meet and feel Haven’t I met you before? But I did feel that way, kind of. If I were a clock, you wound me up. I seemed to Know you, or maybe it was myself I discovered. Is there not jus One Knowing that gets divided into two faces?

As you see, I writing in my free hour, a do-over, if you will. What set the clock back? Maybe it was the laughter in the jokes. Zen if Buddhism with Jokes. I meditate in the morning when it is dark and the sun rises in the East behind me, so when I opened my eyes my shadow was cast on the wall in front of me. I set my clock back to zero every morning when I meditate.

I feel I’m in a timeless space here at 606 South Main Street, of Peace House as I once named this great old mother of a house. Like the unicorn in the Garden I settle into its circular garden chained to the Tree of Life. I used to run like a dog against the chain until it snapped me back. But now I settle down on Zero and may no mind to the clock running out. That was a primary metaphor in our marriage, even naming our stained glass studio the Glass Unicorn. We, I don’t, make stained glass anymore, but the shop is still there and Tilly makes some gifts. But the house is window full of colored light that busts like a sun explosion when the morning sun hits it, giving a sacred feeling to the old House.

As my boundaries have shrunk like a retreating ripple on the pond, I kind of turn inside out, opening up more inside as I retreat from the outside. Little mundane happenings are great adventures, parables if you will, or the jewels in the Lotus, dewdrops that reveal the universal in the mundane. My life drips one insight after another, and as a submariner (this was a joke about a submarine bath) I catch the drop on the mouth of the faucet and wash my face.

My uncle loved Halloween and he would put his Zombie on the front porch to freak out the kids when it lifted its head. It was in his jokes and humor that he left his wisdom to me. When kids used to come to our South Main Street door, I let the zombie work its magic. The idea was to scare the demons off. But in the last few years, the demons and monsters have stopped coming to my door. I gave my zombie to my son who still has demons and monsters to scare. 

Halloween is a strange holiday or social ritual, I would say, that both keep candy and costumes a booming industry, but is also a favorite for kids and adults to get out of everyday character. 

But like all social rituals, there is a deeper meaning hiding behind the costumes. My Zen point of view sees Halloween metaphorically. The demons and monsters coming to my door are my own negative states of mind. I welcome them. I give my fears some candy. And then they leave. 

The parade of memories, negative and positive, to my door all come home to rest in peace. I give my grievances, my fears and hopes some candy and a welcoming smile. When I welcome my fearsome monsters, they turn into innocent children. 

But the demons and monsters have stopped coming to my door now. They have gone to a more candy abundant neighborhood. My son can lose his head to frighten them away. For me, I just going to watch TV. The monsters no longer come to my door. 

While Halloween is a social holiday, it is an ancient holiday where the ghosts of our past can be welcomed home and rest in peace. But in our consumer culture, the night of the Demons is turned into an orgy on sweets and shopping for costumes. Nevertheless, there is some liberation to be found here from the demons that haunt us. Just give them candy and a smile, and BAM! the monsters turn into innocent children. We are all innocent children afraid of monsters on the bedroom wall.