After a downpour, the air turns heavy again—wet, hot, suffocating. This kind of weather is truly maddening.
Lately I haven’t been reading much, and that leaves me feeling oddly hollow, uneasy in a way I can’t quite shake. Sometimes I even get the sense that this whole world is unreal, that life is just over thirty thousand days and we’re borrowing a body for the duration.
On my way to work, there has been a Red Bull can lying in the middle of the road for months. It was already flattened by cars long ago. Every time I pass it, I notice it has sunk a little deeper into the pavement, turning into a thin sheet of metal. Maybe one day it will fuse with the road completely.
There’s also a bird on the rooftop, chirping away nonstop. What is it busy with every day? Maybe nothing at all—just instinct. Only humans are so foolish as to define everything and assign meaning to everything. Definitions were supposed to help us recognize the world, but in the end we get trapped by them ourselves. That beautiful state of “no reliance on words and letters, a direct pointing to the mind” feels farther and farther away.
The line “If you see all forms as no-forms, then you see the Tathagata” keeps making more sense to me. The bird chirps. Naturally. Without trying to mean anything.
I need to get back to reading regularly. For a long time now, books have been something I pick up only by chance. "Listen to the wind eight hundred times before you know it is the human world"—I think if I read eight hundred books, that would also be the human world.
Too much of my time and energy has gone into work, and I’ve neglected my own growth. I need to rebalance things. I need to fill my head a little, and move my body a little too. This lazy shell needs loosening up, or it will just keep getting greasier, heavier, with a belly and a hunched back, looking for all the world like a little old man. That won’t do. That really won’t do.