I have been silent for a while because I have been thinking, and now I wish to talk again.
Time is still a frightening thing from which I cannot break free. In looking over my housekeeping journal I am alarmed by how quickly time passes, and how little I note it. I have only to turn two pages back and I see what I wrote two months ago, and I cannot believe I have only been to the store a few times since then. How irregular my life seems!
I began this journal for practical reasons to keep up with chores once I started working, but it has helped define my understanding of what home means to me. I feel I want to serve my home, and I feel a sense of loyalty in keeping it orderly, and great despair when I have failed to do so. I also feel despair when I have unnecessary things, buy something that doesn't fit in well and becomes junk, or fail to decorate attractively. This journal encompasses all of these things. I especially use it to agonize over purchases and where I will store them.
Well, I ought to call this my Starbucks journal since this is almost the only place I write in it. I would like to write more from work but often I feel too bad and my mind has developed the bad habit of falling into unsolveable, agonizing problems in the middle of the night that I have no means of writing down.
Which brings me to one of the books I am reading right now, Beginner's Mind, Zen Mind. It seems to delineate the basis of its religion as nothingness, which I found very irritating as I tried to understand this morning. It helped me understand a little of myself, especially my mind and others' minds, but it does a poor job of describing my soul or its need to pour out its passions, and I fault it boldly for failing to acknowledge that which makes us worthwhile. It is only a partial story. My work in religion is not yet done.
The only parts I really liked were similar to things Jesus said, particularly the Beautitudes. This made me wonder how much Jesus knew about Eastern philosophies, if anything. More than anything I wish I could find a better book about Jesus, or a better commentary on the New Testament. Seeing Jesus' relationship with Zen, I also wondered how where modern Christians get their ideas, because so much of it seems a fabrication, even a contadiction, to what Jesus intended.
I am also working on Clara's Diary, but I don't want to read it at work anymore, because it makes me feel annoyed. My strong feelings of disgust toward it last night are illuminating today. The first problem is that Clara seems thus far to be a total tool of her society, with no higher purpose, no deep passions other than furthering the work of her God among the Japanese. Sigh. She is a product of Western thought and perhaps embodies that which I find most disturbing.
Then there is the man she will marry. There is no record of her courtship, and very little description of him in her book, except to comment how mature and civilized he has become since she last saw him. It seems like the thoughts of a cold, analytical person with no vibrancy of passion. Then it is recorded that six months into her first pregnancy, they marry, and ten years into their marriage, they separate. It seems very ordinary.
Anyway, I guess I was expecting too much. I want to write a similar story, but I discover as I think on it that I find Western and Eastern ideas alike imperfect, irritating and not what I would have chosen.
