Smelly Dharma

     Sleepiness is dharma.
     The guy over there farting is Dharma. Smelly dharma.
     Suffering and joy – nothing but the same stuff sometimes inside out, sometimes outside in.
     Knowing it, intellectually, doesn’t seem to make the suffering go away. Think and think and think and pray and chant and sit and try (I’ve been told that trying is thinking, unless your not thinking in which case your simply doing)  and maybe your changing the texture of the suffering, the shape of it – squeezing it down or wrapping it up or dipping it in something sweet; it doesn’t go away.
     Feeling it deeply, without the words dragging all those big ideas that are tied to all the days you’ve managed to knot together with trip-wire booby-traps tangled  up with every emotion and ham-fisted story we’ve ever dreamed up along the way…
     That’s just suffering, straight up and real. It’s perfect and colorful and if you can hang on long enough to feel it deeply the universe is in there - all the things you know and all the things you don’t know are in there, including joy and happiness and absolutely nothing and absolutely everything.