The following is reprinted from an article in elephantjournal.com:
"Light is meaningful only in relation to darkness, and truth presupposes error. It is these mingled opposites which people our life, which make it pungent, intoxicating. We only exist in terms of this conflict, in the zone where black and white clash. ~Louis Aragon
Dukkha is a Pali term that the Buddha used. It roughly corresponds to the English words for real bad stuff including but not limited to: suffering, pain, discontent, sorrow, affliction, social alienation, anxiety, dissatisfaction, discomfort and frustration."
I had some real bad stuff happen this year. Stuff that put my previous low point of "job frustration" completely in perspective. The low point of my year was 1 week in particular. Sunday, October 31st, Halloween night. I was on the couch when a crazy man (literally) broke into my apartment by throwing a heavy shell through my sliding glass door. As bad as that moment was; staring into the eyes of a stranger standing in front of you in the middle of your own living room surrounded by shattered glass, I counted myself lucky. I was lucky to have escaped. I was lucky to be alive. I was lucky the police caught the guy. I was lucky his brand of "crazy" wasn't violent; at least not this time. That week was awful. I was uneasy, unsteady, scared. No place of my own; no way to get around as my car was in the shop. Slowly I accepted my new reality and tried to get the pieces of my life back together. Found a new place, rented a car, ready to move forward. And then that Friday as I stood in line getting my electricity hooked up in the new apartment, the dearest and most wonderful thing in my life, my little dog Bronx ran out into the street and got hit by a car. He must have been feeling discombobulated as well. He was usually so good. Was he trying to find home? was he trying to run after me? I will never know. I just remember blinking wildly and repeating to the friends who had broken the news to me. It's real? That's really true? Really? That's really true? Then I had to bury him. Then I had to finish packing up my old apartment and go about my day and go to work the next day and eat and sleep and do all the ordinary things a person does and continues to do..even in the most extraordinary circumstances. Everything in my life changed that week. The course of my life will now have a big dark line delineating "me" before that week and "me" after that week. I continue to feel the aftershocks but I am also aware that the pain and trauma has broken open a space in me, in my life. For what? I don't know. But like in the quote above, I know that sometime in the future I will be staring into the light that will put this whole experience into perspective and I will smile and dedicate it to Bronxy...
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