Happy New Year Hakaryu!!
It's Monday Jan 03....2005. This may be one of the most personal lucid entries yet. It's gonna jump all over the map and back again.. 2004 ended on a happy note for the first time that I can remember I mourned the loss of an amazing year instead of wanting to kick it's ass on it's way out the door!!!!
Let me tell you about the dream I had as my last for the year. I was walking home from Lisha Kill but it was not an elementary school and home was filled wth people who have pretty much gotten on with their lives without really noticing or acknowledging my absense.. I know I had some signifcant things happening but no one their wanted to hear about them...
I understood people like them had interesting busy lives and was genuinely interested in where they were but they weren't the slightest bit interested in me. This made me sad. So I look down on the ground and there before me is this shiny rock BUT the minute I see it it becomes this poufy red, gold and orange swirled plushy pillow thing...no one else is noticing this but me..then it sprouts ffet hands(no arms or legs just feet and hands) and a head of this happy buddha.
Happy doesn't even describe it. This buddha is laughing with an abandon and joy and warmth that I can feel from the inside out. His laugh is lsweet like chiming bells but loud and long. Then he starts talking to me in a language I do not speak. And the one thing I remember is he wanted me to remember his name the name of my Inner Buddha. Omure. And I did and for curiousity's sake I looked it up.
This part happened after the dream. I found Omure. Omure yama, to be exact. I discovered it is a Japanese Maple tree. It is a slow growing tree taking ten years to reach it's 8 to 12 feet tall height. It has the most fresh green leaves through the sumer and turns from gold to brilliant crimson as winter approaches. It also does not act like a maple tree Once it meets maturity it acts more like a weeping willow it's leaves a cascading curtain of color. Seeing it I thought it looked like a phoenix tree, I intend to have one someday maybe several because they seem positively magical. What a truly amazing thing to be named after....
This led me to look into things more. Looking up laughing buddha I discovered there is a laughing Buddha in Buddhism. His name is Matrieya and is the awaited Buddha...kind of like the way people are waiting for Christ's triumphant return. This led me to information on a sect of Buddhism the sounds more like Alkhemiy than I expected. In teachings by a monk who brought it from China to Japan named Kukai it says there are many buddhas that lead us to the one Buddha. It doesn't matter how you get there, the path is an individual one, so long as you find it your Inner Buddha.
Then I found a story about a laughing buddha and a sorrowful man with many problems. The farmer happens across Buddha on his journey's and Buddha is laughing. The man asks him how he can laugh with so much wrong with this world, why he, himself is worried about many things like losing his farm, the weather's effect on his crops, if his wife truly loves him...etc. Buddha tells him there are 83 problems in life, every human life.
83? The Farmer asks if Buddha can tell him how many he has left. Something to give him some encouragement. Buddha says he is very sorry and he can't help him as the 83 problems are worked through many times in a human life. Human life is suffering.
The Farmer starts to get angry and questions why he's doing it all then if the same problems will always plague him.
Buddha then tells him he could accept the hardest problem of all...the 84th problem and this would once dealt with end the cycle of the other eighty-three. So he tells the Farmer the 84th problem. Learning to live not just a human life but a spiritual one where there is no problem.
As you can see that was a very enlightening dream. One of the best parts though is when I told Hakkai all of this. You know my inner Buddha is a goofy looking plushy Buddha who is named after a Japanese maple tree, etc. He looks over to me and says from the driver's seat.."It makes sense. doesn't it."
That pretty much sums up the year..it was strange, enlightening, challenging, and magical and in the end it all made sense, didn't it?
