Against All Odds

Yesterday I found the end of the rainbow. Turns out that it’s just north of here, near the eastern shore of Otter Lake. Who’d a thought?

Meanwhile on this Labor Day, I’m getting ready for another school year, hopeful that lots of the alienated young people will find us and that we’ll meet them.

Also struck this morning by the news of stock markets dropping worldwide, the likelihood of a deeper recession, and all the fallout that’ll have. So many unemployed. Budget deficits roaring. Poor and dispossessed too poor and dispossessed to buy anything to jump start this economy. Politicians singing the usual songs when something new is clearly needed.

In Minnesota, though, we’re adding a bunch of jobs – jobs that pay an average of $10 an hour.

I’m afraid that Obama will be running on the catchy slogan, “You’d be incrementally worse off without me.”

It’s a hard sell. So get ready for a Perry-Bachman administration. Ye gads! Or we could put our shoulders to the wheel, set aside our cynicism for a bit, and in whatever way we can, work for another outcome.

And maybe James Ford will jump into the race on the U-Bu ticket (that’s the Unitarian Buddhist Party) – see his sermon from yesterday where he speaks my mind about the state of labor, denial, and the American dream. A passionate, political dharma talk.

We might keep Dogen’s words from Thirty-seven ConditionsContributing to Bodhisattva Practice in our hearts through all this:

“You should realize thatattainment is hopping alongness.”

Sometimes we rise together, sometimes we fall together. Attainment is the activity itself, despite our evaluations about how hopeless or hopeful it all is.

After all, somehow our strange genetic line has struggled through the eons, with the survivors often coming from the fringes, those who have learned to eke out an existence in the nooks and crannies that the successful avoid.

“No attainment” doesn’t mean to sit on our asses with a “do-me-dharma” passive, bull-shit attitude. No attainment is to roll up our sleeves and get to work.

Somehow, in spite of ourselves, we still might find a way to manifest the sweet cream of the long river in human society. The completion is the effort.

Take it Iris and John: