Love what you hate

3 is a magic number. And yesterday, synchronicity struck 3 times. The theme is "accepting that which is not your very favorite."

Numba 1. Watched "I like to kill flies," a documentary on the Greenwich Village restaurateur/cook-philosopher who was immortalized as the 'soup nazi' on Seinfeld, who said, "The first duty of everybody is to realize you are a piece of shit. You are selfish, self-centered, you are not very good." See the scene here.

Numba 2. I fought the weeds, and the weeds won.

My nemesis in the garden is quack grass. I respect it, because it's highly successful, in a Darwinian  sense. But it took over this year, and sometimes the garden has become a torture chamber, if I focus on the fact that there are literally miles of quackgrass taking over nearly every piece of vegetation that I plant.

Yesterday I cackled with glee as I yanked out yard-long pieces of the stuff. Yet even as I attacked it, I was struck by the metaphor of EVIL.The grass will win. I will NEVER pull up every ounce of wickedness in my soul.

The best I can do is to love the grass. Accept it. And yes, try to get rid of it. But not let it control my experience of the garden.

Numba 3. Reading "The Lazy Man's Guide To Enlightenment," a current favorite (the author reads the first chapter in this video), I was struck by this passage:

And many of us insist on thinking of ourselves as only kind, good, and wise: we try to be pendulums that swing only to one side...The remedy for this is to be loving, to experience life without mental resistance...where love is constant and our awareness is open, we will more easily comprehend the miracle of containing contradictions, opposites, and paradoxes.

Basically, love what you hate.