Second of two clips:

Cat chasing camera strap, pt. 2 from keauxgeigh.

Kaohsiung, Taiwan

What should I make of or say about the 25 year spanning dance between me and my cousin? It’s all weird, strange pieces fitting together, unpredictable reactions, outright confession, none of it really uncomfortable, some unease perhaps, nothing inappropriate, lots of figuring out and often independently being on the same page. There has been tension and frustration, denial and revision, too. All of it making some weird sense and resonating in echoes of memories that are not ours.

She gave me another piece of the puzzle of us I’ve been putting together through the years, and I also gave her an important piece of the puzzle she’s been putting together, and it’s the same puzzle. She told me she’s always had a strange, resonant attraction to Japan, in particular the cultural history and Kyoto. She says that when she went there, she felt a very strong connection to the city. How I could not have known this for all these years is beyond me. My own attraction to Japan is well-documented and out in the open, and that we never discussed this same resonant thing in both of us is pretty fucking odd (denial?). For me, the connection I felt is to the landscape. It's just wildly exciting to stand on Japanese soil, breathe in the air, and it's just comfortable and familiar, like I belong(ed) there.

That jigsaw piece completed such a large part of my puzzle that I had to share it with her. She didn't have that part of the puzzle at all, even though I thought I had mentioned it to her years ago. It was basic to my thesis that we had been a couple in a past life and we had a really good relationship. I mean really good. Mm-mm good. Spiritually good. Now I'm fine-tuning my scenario with a locale and thinking it was in Japan. Along with a bunch of other unrelated, amorphous impressions and foo-foo mystical conjuring, it just all makes some weird, perfect sense.

We've been admiring this newly completed section of puzzle for several days, and she's really happy with it; relieved. I haven't struggled with my attraction to her because it's always been easy realizing we are first and foremost cousins now. The attraction is something from something else completely, and what that was happened and is now past. She had a more complicated time with it, as it persisted through her having relationships, me having relationships, she getting married and having kids, and now my pursuing the monastic path. But this theory is making a lot of sense to her, too, and it's helping her feelings a lot.

She's not just my cousin. We're just cousins now. There's nothing weird or creepy about the love and connection between us. Being cousins just defines how we behave towards each other for the rest of the world. I found tucked at the back of a bookshelf here, the copy of Illusions that I got for her when we first started working all the weirdness out. That's probably why I thought she also figured out the past lives/past relationship thing.

And tomorrow I fly to Japan to meet up with Madoka, with whom I also feel a connection that goes beyond our scientific knowledge of the way the world works. Beyond genetics, biology, chemistry, evolution, DNA, and is fully unprovable, subjective, impression-based, imaginary, and who is to tell me it's not just as real?

Cousin Gary (moving portrait) from keauxgeigh.

My cousin Gary now lives in mainland China. He returned to Taiwan when he heard that his grandmother on his mother's side was very sick. I shot this portrait at the airport when he left.

Kaohsiung, Taiwan

To my parents, everything is about finances, and right now I'm a gamble, a risky investment.

I'm not a product. They didn't go to a store and put down some money knowing exactly what they were going to get and what to expect. That was my upbringing. They put in money to raise a child, and a child was raised.

Now they're pumping in money with a hope, but no guarantee that they will get what they hope for. Despite what they told me to my face, they didn't even try to hide it from other people that they don't want me to enter a monastery. Now they're pumping money into completely unrelated schemes that will magically make me not enter a monastery.

I try to make sense of it as I book a flight to Japan, not even thinking about the cost or shopping around. Buy a Japan Rail Pass. Book two nights at a guesthouse in Kyoto; other nights that I'm not staying with Madoka in Tokyo may be in random cities across Japan as I make use of the unlimited travel on the Shinkansen from the Rail Pass.

Spend, spend, spend, all charged to them, and the justification and refusal of guilt comes from reminding myself that this is their investment. They're paying for a chance that something will come up and I won't enter the monastery, and willing roulette ball that I am, I roll and roll, where the wheel stops, nobody knows.

I fully intend to end up back at the monastery. They lose. There's Madoka, but although I think there have always been feelings between us, and I've occasionally thought and wondered about us, we have a history of nothing happening. Nothing short of a dam breaking open would change anything, and the dam on my side is pretty sturdy.

I want to be back at the monastery by the time the monastics return in mid-April. If I stayed in Taiwan into April, I would need to leave the country again to renew my visa again. Also my parents are supposed to be here at the end of March/beginning of April and I wouldn't want to be here at the same time as them. Too weird.

My cousin here in Taiwan is really important to me and my life. She understands certain aspects of me pretty well, and wants to know me as much as anyone is able. She comes awfully close to hitting what this weblog is about, but without an express reason for its manifestation, she wouldn't actually guess it.

She's very supportive of anything I choose to do, but in her heart of hearts, she doesn't see me as a monk. I smile at that because I know what she sees is right, she just doesn't see what I see as the alternative. I may still pursue the monastic path, I may even be good at it, but she will know that something is still just out of alignment in that.

Sometimes I get so tired of this, and mornings are still the hardest thing – when I'm most vulnerable to my emotions. It verges on panic, not wanting to be here but realizing I'm a failure at doing something about it. The feeling fades as I go about my morning routine, and is long gone by the time I start morning sitting.

The odd thing is that the people who mean the most to me, the monastics, and now even Madoka, tell me to listen to my heart; do what's in my heart. They don't know what it means to do what my heart tells me to do.

I get tired of this, I get fed up with this, but that's an emotional response to what I still think of as inevitable. It's not an emotional issue anymore. I see it as my journey now, my investigation having perfected impermanence, non-attachment and non-self. Have I perfected impermanence, non-attachment, and non-self? I don't have to answer that. I won't answer that, it's rhetorical. It's a trick question.

Life is my laboratory, my playground. I don't take it too seriously, but the "fact" or tangibility of the manifestation of reality comes with certain characteristics that make the laboratory experiment difficult; going on the rides at the amusement park a challenge. Those I'm still working on. Hypnotist? Magician? Manipulator of reality? Manipulator of illusions?

I've been playing with my cousin's children a lot lately. Whenever I play with children, I start acting like a child. I'm finding it's not a far stretch.

I hope that constantly going "ew" at natural baby stuff is not bad for their self-esteem.

So today was the day that I was supposed to, by my own theory, thank my mother and show her gratitude. I didn't.

In fact, she insists on continuing to test my practice by offending me with her ignorance about me and my life, and meddling into what she cannot meddle and controlling what she cannot control.

She thinks my life is a rubber band and we're having a tug of war with it. Why do I even bother? I should just let go of it and let it smack her in the face. If she wants it, she can have it. Just don't expect me to live it.

There is a lot I'm grateful for, and every day I consider as many things as possible that I'm grateful for, including the air I have to breathe, the food I have to eat, and the health to breathe, eat, and walk.

And with much thought and certain caveats, I can even say that I'm grateful for existence. But it is without contradiction that I can say that I'm not grateful for the fact of my birth.

I'm done with relationships, but if I were interested in someone, the key to getting involved would be iPods. We'd trade iPods for a day, put them on shuffle play, and if at the end of the day, what we've heard is acceptable to each other, it's a go on the relationship.

Of course, anybody willing to do this in the first place to determine the viability of a relationship is probably automatically OK to be in a relationship with.

At the monastery, I thought about the pointlessness of material life. Now I think about the monastic life and have feelings that it would be pointless, too. The whole enchilada is pointless. Which is, naturally, the point. A point which I knew all along.

Why do I even want to change? Do I even want to change? What am I doing? What am I doing here? It always goes back to that. And to get back to that, thinking of entering a monastery is just a distraction. Entering a monastery is just a distraction. Entering a monastery is just a distraction?

Maybe if I wasn't so self-absorbed about suicide when I quit my job, and if I knew about the extent of my aunt in Japan's plight, I would have been motivated to be more selfless. Who cares that I didn't know then that I would still be around two years later, broke, and about to enter a monastery? 

Maybe I could have pushed up my timetable with the monastery so that I would have had savings that I could have sent to her as part of my liquidation of assets, a requirement for entering a monastery. If I wasn't ready yet, maybe I could have gone to visit her and given her some support. Let her know I haven't forgotten her and appreciated her selflessness so many years ago. 

Maybe. As it is, time has taken its course, and I had no idea what her situation was until my cousin here told me, and now I have nothing to offer. Maybe I'll think of something, if I don't use the "here and now" as an excuse to do nothing. 

My natural individual tendency is towards non-action (including with my own life). Things just happen in my world and I'm really not involved with any of it. A good stance in my own personal philosophy, even a good stance in "pure" Buddhism, but not a good stance in Engaged Buddhism (the monastery's philosophy), sometimes called Humanistic Buddhism, all an outgrowth of Mahayana Buddhism. 

I'm caught between wanting to be more engaged, helping, and being philosophically comfortable doing nothing and lacking self-motivation to move from that position. Buddhism, btw, has nothing to do with anything. I don't know why I insist on constantly getting all religious on yo' ass.

Kaohsiung, Taiwan

I've been here for about a week and I came here without a plan, and that was probably a good thing. Or at least it sounded like a good thing at the time. Now, I should probably start thinking about doing more than hanging out with my cousin and helping her take care of her kids.

Really, I'm perfectly happy doing that. I'm not so much into travelling for touring around, but rather just to go places to chill and vibe with the place. To some, there might not be much point in that, I understand. I mean, fuck you, go to your fucking tourist spots, you wankers! *sigh* why am I even trying? I lost my "edge" a long time ago.

The problem is when extended family is involved and they think I'm bored and start getting antsy about not being good hosts. They don't know I'm happy as a pig in mud sitting in a wireless coffeeshop all afternoon. Or walking around all afternoon, maintaining my "practice".

Right, the practice. And that's another thing. They have no idea what this "practice" is; they are, after all, relatives of my parents. I really would like to find the adoption agency they got me from or get verification that they did, in fact, find me on a rock in Michigan.

It makes me wonder what my "practice" is, what's the point of this when everyone else is in the maelstrom of living life? What practical use am I to my cousin, harried as mothers are raising kids? To my aunt in Japan with whom I stayed for 4 months in 1992, who was doing really well back then but has since gone bankrupt and, I hear, is living in destitute conditions.

My parents mentioned she was "having trouble", but didn't say anything about losing everything, including her building and allowed to live there until she dies only by the kindness of the new owner, that she has plastic covering breaks in her windows and can't afford heat in the Winter.

What practical use is the monastery when it took so long to even have a reaction to the tsunami in the Indian Ocean? It's only in retrospect that I realize how little reaction we had. It took people in the surrounding community calling to donate money for the relief effort for us to realize we didn't have one.

I don't know what the monastery did. If anything, I wasn't in on it. I didn't feel a collective spark that a tragedy had occurred and we had to mobilize to do something. I didn't feel it individually, either, although I will from now on. As a private citizen, I'd feel helpless and detached, but at the monastery I should have been prodding them, "what are we/you doing?".

Instead, my "practice" is sitting in the morning, sitting in the evening, and walking around all day in peaceful mindfulness.

Fuck.

OK, stop being so negative about the parents. Try to stop being so negative about the parents. Even when I focus on the positive, look at the positive, rationalize and justify with the positive, I still feel with the negative. It's a hard habit to break, but I think it's possible.

I even started feeling the negative at my uncle, at whose apartment I'm staying in Taiwan. I won't go into description or explanation because that would be self-reinforcing and justifying the negativity. I want to describe what happened because I think if I describe it, I would show that I'm right. And I'm not. And even if I am, who cares? He's my uncle, and even if we can't communicate, he's great. It's not his fault that he's forced to do my parents' evil bidding in the first place.

Oops.

Right, so I need to work on stopping the negativity by going straight through all the rationalization and description for the negativity and working on it at the source – the negativity itself, the seed of all the rationalization and description. It's self-perpetuating. The negativity that creates negative thoughts which feed the negativity that creates negative thoughts.

If I'm doing it at my uncle, then I know there's something wrong with me. If it's something I think is wrong with me, then I can apply the same solution or attitude towards my parents. It's not about them. It's not the point that they are devious, scheming, conniving, controlling, materialistic, money-grubbing simpletons.

Oops.

Kaohsiung, Taiwan

Ooh, baby, I love it here. I would totally expat in Taiwan, but I bet that's what my parents are banking on. Back to the question of their ploy, right before I left, they mentioned that if I enter a "temple" – they don't know what a monastery is – better that I join one in Taiwan. My internal reaction was a resounding, "wtf!"

They are great parents for practicing non-attachment. I need to focus on their suffering, which they are unaware of, and their ignorance in order to not feel anger, but my natural reaction to them tends towards anger. It's hard separating fact from feeling.

The fact is that they have no bearing on my decisions or my life. They have no awareness or knowledge of it, nor have they made any effort to know it or understand it or anything different than their idea of it.

The feeling is that they are insulting me by implying I don't know what I'm doing or what I want. And maybe I don't, but they do?!! It also ventures on their having no right. If their philosophy on children is a non-participatory one, then they should remain non-participants. Except for that control issue they have.

So they encourage me to join Plum Village by insulting my decision to join Plum Village. In fact, they guarantee it because even if I wanted to do something else, I wouldn't want to give them the satisfaction. Mm, that's not it, either.

Conclusion: laugh them off and continue on my path. Whatever I do has nothing to do with them. My practice isn't that weak even if I try to make it so.

Englewood Cliffs, NJ

if i should stumble
and what if this monastery charade is just another ploy; a sidetrack. what if there is no transformation. what if this is the same thing i've always done. i look down into the well of my psychology and the laugh echoes and echoes and echoes on on on on on.

i don't need to enter the monastery to accomplish the purported reasons for which i'm entering the monastery. everything is already complete. the answers manifest. there is no attaining enlightenment, everything all is enlightenment.

i don't think the path is wrong or deluded. i think the monastery is right, i think they're onto something, but what do i want. maybe i'm not ready for the monastery, maybe i'm way beyond the monastery. maybe i haven't even begun to climb the mountain, maybe i'm on my way back down the mountain, maybe there is no mountain. who knows. who cares. what do i want.

the patterns of my life swirl around me and i might be shamming myself with this idea about the monastery and what it's supposed to do. but do i believe in the core of my being, do i trust myself. how many more times do i let other people test me as to whether i'm a fucking aspirant or not.

next stop: taiwan.

Northern Exposure Quote of the Day:
Chris: The fact that we don't know this man isn't important really, because his experience is our experience, and his fate - up here - is our fate. "Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas", says the preacher. All is vanity. I think that's a pretty good epitaph for all of us. When we're stripped of all our worldly possessions, and all our fame and family and friends, we all face death alone. But it's that solitude in death that's our common bond in life. I know it's ironic, but it's just the way things are. Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas. Only when we understand all is vanity, only then it isn't.
Maurice: Sometimes I have trouble following his train of thought.

Northern Exposure Quote of the Day:
Maggie: What's the matter, Fleischman, you're a doctor, haven't you seen dead bodies before?
Joel: Yea, and I'm still rattled, I don't like people committing suicide. All the ethical considerations aside, it's just plain bad for business.
Maggie: He was doing fine until you told him to think about his future.
Joel: ...I was talking about a walker!

Englewood Cliffs, NJ

God, I've been totally remiss on the Northern Exposure quotes, it's been a long time and there are so many, and it's such a good show. This is probably a good time to mention that the second season has been released on DVD. All my friends have already gone out and bought or rented first and second seasons, or they're planning to. This is because that's a requisite for being my friend. Right, friends? Hm, I'm sure they're out there.

It's still cold. I haven't lived in this kind of bitter cold since 1992. California has thinned my blood and it's a hard acclimation, but in a few days I'll be in Taiwan where I'm told by unreliable sources (parents) that it should be warming up like Springtime quite nicely.

Yup, and since I hadn't been here in Winter for so long, I forgot that my parents aren't such big fans of spending money on heating the house. It's a brisk 62 degrees in my room, which is colder than the rest of the house so I never close the door.

Of course it's below 20 degrees outside, which brings back a vague memory from high school years when, in order to warm up, I'd go stand outside or in the garage for five minutes. Coming back in was just as good as coming into a well-heated room.

In New York:
Walking from 8th Avenue to 12th Avenue (and back) on 42nd street in 20 degree temps, 0 degrees with wind chill = the longest four blocks I've ever walked (in recent memory).

Even worse, the cause was hardly noble: getting a visa to visit the P.R. China, walking past brave Falun Gong protestors against the Chinese government. Any cause worth braving that cold is a noble cause. Or is a cult.

I would not have stood out there like they did for true love.

I would not for Thich Nhat Hanh.

Ordinarily I wouldn't be caught dead going to China, but I've got an unplanned month with an uncle in Taiwan and if he offers to take me to China to visit some cousins (Taiwanese doing business in China), I go. What can you do?

My parents are being very nice. When I told them a while ago that I wanted to enter the monastery, I offered to visit them for some months before doing so, because the monks were leaving for a while. They declined.

Then they came up with this hare-brained idea for me to go to Taiwan before entering. So I'm at their house for two weeks before flying off to Taiwan. Really they're just waiting for me to be out of their house again. Haha, what a fucking idiot I've been all my life!

I'm being distracted these days fitting over 600 CDs into my pocket.

Englewood Cliffs, NJ

At the monastery, I had to bend over backwards to not say that my parents don't care about my decision to enter the monastery. I didn't want to sound whiny or self-pitying or give the impression that I was deluded about my parents' concern for me.

But folks, it's very simple. It's not malicious, it's not neglect or lack of concern for that matter, but it's philosophical. Glossing nothing over, no finessing, my parents really couldn't care less about whether I enter the monastery or not. They don't give a rats ass, and that's OK!

Don't ask me what the philosophy is, you'd have to ask them. I don't understand it, but I accept it. It makes sense with everything else about them I've observed and experienced. They're not sentimental, nor do they have lofty ideas about their roles as parents.

They farted us out and they viewed parenting as a financial obligation. They had to provide for us and do what was reasonably necessary for us to be alright in the world. That's not neglect or lack of concern, it's totally concern; that's their twisted version of parental love, but it's still parental love. I know plenty of parents who are unable to even have a concept of parental love.

But having completed their obligations and more, such as continuing to allow us into their house, whatever we do with our lives is not anything they can really be bothered with.

I'm not saying they're in any way normal, hell no they're not normal. I really think my parents are unique or rare in the world. But then I think I have a unique brand of fucked-upness which could only come from a uniquely twisted upbringing. Yay me.