Every Journey Begins With "Goodbye" and "Godspeed" (or should I say "Buddhaspeed?"
Parting is such sweet sorrow. But if you're going to be an American to be wed in Japan, this is an inevitable happenstance. My journey begins with salutations and hearty goodbyes. It's close to my birthday, and so it naturally follows everyone wanted to wrap this departure up for me in a nice big bow. I have so many people to recognize and to thank. But I have a large sangha (community), and I had to be careful about my time. I know my sister and everyone at the temple wanted to throw me a big party, but the thing is... ...I believe I've iterated a lot that I have come to enjoy calm and heartfelt conversations. And this bunch did not fall short of that order. If only everyone knew how much they mean to me. Well, you're reading this now, so now you know. But do you? Well, let me give some insight: I spent six years of my young adulthood as an infantryman, and that was when I swore, I would put my life on the line to protect those around me from threats foreign and domestic. Well, that credo extended outward to include all the world. In my haphazard journey as a soldier, I learned to value all life. But this conviction extended as an abstract and amorphous mental conceptualization of the planet Earth. Okay, well, I came to believe that I could not hold anyone close to me anymore. This is because of my strong conviction against bias and partiality. Okay, so all this is to say, I've had the privilege of bringing people closer to me, and I've dispelled the bias of non-bias. The people closest to me deserve the privilege of occupying the inner circle of my concerns. I spend a lot of my meditation sessions in metta bhavana (loving-kindness meditation), and these are the faces that kept surfacing when I dwelled on the "favorable" person in these sessions. Each person here has been a sponsor and teacher to me. I have much more to add, so please stay tuned for the next update to this blog post.
Create Your Own Website With Webador