The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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An old friend of ours recently wrote to say he was trying to test drive some Buddhism. Be Here Now. Be in the moment. Pay a little attention. What my old man called Wake the Hell Up! …when we were what he referred to as ‘glommy’. My response, typically smartass, was something to the effect, what ELSE you gonna do? We’re paying attention to SOMETHING, even if it’s dopey.

You want to update your Facebook, well, I guess that’s your world. You want to watch Fox News all day, I figure you like being pissed off incessantly. Your choice. What I think is the world, your universe, is pretty much those thoughts in your head all the livelong day. Change your thinking and you change the world. Course, you could still get hit by a meteor coming right out of left field and WHAP! Brand new day. Or not.

We mostly live in a virtual world now. The kids already put down earnest money on the mortgage. Us old farts are working on how to forward e-mail jokes, but the computer’s tractor-beam is reeling us in, slow at first, but even if we never notice, accelerating all the time.

On the South End we still prefer the Old World, the one where we let nature and weather have a say in what turns and twists our day takes, the one where we still throw ourselves into a building project or a repair job or an art project or planting a garden, what I think of as the creative process, but is really just an attempt to do more than just Go with the Flow, maybe actually try to bend the river. God isn’t the only dude who believes in creation, not down here, no disrespect. You ask me — and, as usual, I know you didn’t — a good religion should ask for more than just paying attention.

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