So the error message apparently doesn't mean it didn't post! Sorry about the multiples, people.

Gassho Richard,

Nice post And point taken. I remember years ago when I first started walking on this Buddhist path I woke up one morning with the flu. I had chills, my body ached and my head pounded. It was miserable. I remember being hunkered down under the covers when my husband, who was getting ready to leave for work, told me that it was too bad that I was feeling so awful. I actually told him that it was okay because it made me appreciate a new level of suffering. He muttered something about that being very Buddhist of me. But it's true really. How can we overcome something if we have no idea what it is and how can you have compassion for others in their suffering if you have never been able to identify the suffering in your own life? Sometimes maybe you do need to be starving to death in a snowy cave. The thing about the flu was, as sick and miserable as I felt, I knew it was temporary and that I'd feel better in a couple of days. Because I'd experienced this misery, I was able to appreciate the state of not being miserable and that thought made it better, at least on a mental level, and really the mental level is where suffering begins. I suppose at that moment, lying there sick in bed, I might have been a little bit green.

Most of us will never be enlightened in this lifetime. Probably not the next either. Maybe never. Some of us give a sincere try though. We know what we're suppose to do but as Hogen would have said, we talk the talk.. we just don't walk the walk. For those of us who have trouble walking the walk, I wonder to what extremes we'd have to go before we finally managed to combine the talking and the walking into one fluid motion. I wonder if *I* will have to turn green and come within an inch of dying if that's what it's going to take.

metta
Ann

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