24 April, 2023.

I can’t even call it meditation now, what I do.  Since Cuillin died the best I can hope for is a moment here and there of calm breathing.  Better to call it twenty minutes given over to grim sadness.  Do I really want anything that meditation can give me?  Do I really want to stop grasping after his memory, after his fur?  Call it non-attachment or detachment, do I really want to attain either in the face of his memory, of his loss?  At the moment, I don’t think I really do.  I just read in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying (Rinpoche) that the two great enemies of enlightenment are the grasping and the grasped.  A brilliant phrase.  But what I want now, and I want nothing else, is to grasp Cuillin’s warm body here and now, present to me now, in this time and in this world.  And if Cuillin is the grasped, then I have to reject a vision that considers him the enemy to my enlightenment.  Yes, my present suffering arises from my ego’s attachments; yes, they make me subject to an endless cycle of loss and misery; yes, I would like to end loss and misery; but no, I do not want to end loss and misery if it means that I end love and caressing and cool morning walks with a happy trotting husky investigating the olfactory joys of his world.  There is an enlightenment that is wholly of this world, and of no other, and I knew it with both my dogs, and both have passed away.  At this moment, I wonder if I will ever meditate (or pretend to) again.