I have been so excited lately... although my world temporarily came crashing down today, I picked myself up with a couple of psychadelics and some meditation. Tears don't stop... but they never do when you are around this stage.
That doesn't take away from my excitement... even when I have the worst days.
I remember once, in Africa, I was backpacking on my own. I was somewhere in Malawi on an intercity locals bus. I saw a woman in a tea field, picking tea with her baby strapped to her back. I was on a bus and I was scared to death because I was the only white guy on this bus, soon to be traveling through the Tete Corridor during their civil war. My asshole was puckering in ways you could never of imagined, and I was getting the biggest rush from all of it.
This lady in the field, it felt like I was watching her for an hour. On a bus flying by. Her child started crying, so she pulled out one of her tits and flung it OVER her shoulder into the mouth of her crying child. An atomic bomb exploded in my mind.
I realized that she probably could of hung her tits all the way to the ground, unfolded them and used them as a red carpet for royalty. This lady had the flabbiest, stringiest tits I had ever seen in my entire life, and she looked all of, I don't know... maybe 30. Looking at her in my mind and those flabby tits riding on that bus through the blackness of the night in nowhereland Africa... I realized that she probably had the hardest life I had ever imagined, and I promised myself that whenever I was having it rough, I was going to think about the African woman that probably had already born 5 children on the way to 10, works every day to feed her family and BLEEDS from her hands and her feet because she can't afford shoes. She has flabby tits because she can't defend herself against the husband that forces himself on her every night in an alcohol-fueled tirade and she is bidding her time for the drink to take him so much that she is then, finally, stronger physically than her uneducated, unemployable, deplorable shadow of a husband.
My life and my problems are nothing. I think about that when I go through my struggles, as I have today.
And that is where Buddhism takes it's play. I realize this and I am able to take joy in my sorrows, even if I'm crying while I'm smiling. I know that there will always be someone in a better situation, and frankly, one that will always have it much much worse in ways a privileged white man could ever fully understand.
I have no money, but I was able to pull together $30 and bought a macro lens. And I've been having fun crying. But that is the process of where I am. My new love is macro photography, these are my tears. Not really.
