Bagan Boys

I am pretty sure the boys are chanting Pali with a Burmese accent. They were herding goats after school and I gave them a Buddhist calendar for their pocket from Thailand and they took a break from the goats to come up and show off. I have one more of them play fighting.

I have been busy since my return from Vipassana, where I almost had three days of clear body scanning followed by more deep sankaras coming up. At that time, I felt bright, awake, and very clear, and still feel it now. Yet, if this clarity leaves, naturally ...I will not be surprised. It makes me want to return to serve, and work towards the 20-day requirements.
I still reflect about Bagan, and feel it was a sign of the intercon-nectedness of everyone, when I met the young man there and his family. What unfolded there is pulling towards a desire to short term ordination.
Let life unfold naturally, like nature does. You can't force open a flower.

A Day of Meditation

Finding Clarity

Never to be one to lay down and rest I saw a couple of South Asian films. One was a fun Bollywood film that kept me occupied for nearly 4 hours, even though it was a camp and silly. The one that made its mark was Sankara, a beautiful, slow, Buddhist film from Sri Lanka. It was the kind of slow that one desires when life seems too fast and hectic. It allows you to discover the subtleties of life through a simple story. I find when life moves too fast you feel unable to make clear, thought out and felt decisions. We seem to be much more happy fussing with simple unimportant aspects of life, rather than examining how we think. We can just be lazy, dissatisfied and complain making us feel like we are making decisions. I am trying to quit doing this by being deliberate and changing how I go about seeing problems and difficult decisions. Most importantly I am trying to stop attempting to change others, but instead looking at why I feel like I need to. Looking for that new age of enlightenment about clarity. This will not happen overnight.