Do you believe in Karma? Whenever I get up to my lake house after a school year ends so I can exhale among the stars, my mind often goes to philosophical ideas. It’s hard not to when surrounded by the beauty up there and the quietude. There’s just so much about the universe we don’t understand, CAN’T understand. And why do we have to? There’s so much written about being in the moment, but of course we can’t just BE in the moment, because it’s too fleeting. The next moment has already started before we can be in it and ends before we can take our next breath and so it goes, over and over. But we can be MINDFUL in moments. We can be mindful in what we eat. How we treat ourselves and others. How we speak to ourselves. How we temper judgement. How we pause to think before we speak. I sit on the beach and try to do just that. I look around me, and I see so much beauty, this moment of sun on water that seemed as if I had faked the photograph, the glitter on the water so surreal it looked like a trick of the camera. It’s hard not to pause at moments like that. It’s funny how at that moment I snapped the picture, I was battling with a persistent spider, none too large, I might add, and I know most would squish it…but I didn’t and rarely can. So what? It’s a spider and tiny and who cares, right? But it lives. As do all insects, the mosquito the only one I wage war with. And so, I let it be and marvel at its tenacity and strength as I will a few minutes later with the industrious ants whose homes will soon be destroyed by summer laughter and excitement in dancing feet. I don’t know where or why I’ve grown to treat these infinitesimal creatures as if they’re human. I have a memory of a childhood friend’s mother who taught me about nature, who espoused often: “Spiders are our friends,” and I hear myself echoing that. No one had ever talked to me about those kinds of things before in my household. No one seemed much to care about that. Of course, there will be casualties, but my knee-jerk reaction isn’t to kill them. We need them more than they need us. For we are all connected with pollination and plants and oxygen and the whole lot of it. But I don’t do it out of some great cause or a belief in karma or fear that I might be a spider in my next life. No. And herein lies my question I posed at the beginning. Do you? Do you believe in karma? And does it only apply to humans in your view? I hear so much about karma. That what you do will come back 3x to us, as if that will somehow even the score and give us the motivation to do the “right” thing, to be kind. What a lovely thought to think, that if I just do right, good things are inevitable and even deserved. You can imagine, knowing me, what I think. I think it’s a load of rubbish. I don’t beat down those who believe that. Just as I don’t beat down those who believe in god or gods or whatever they have come to accept as true. But what I don’t like is that it presumes that when BAD things happen to people that it must be deserved. That’s the problem I have with these belief systems. They are so heavily unbalanced that it makes little sense to me. Certainly, the atrocities of the pasts, the Holocaust for example, tells us this simply is not so. And it bothers me. It bothers me a great deal, because people have tried to use those excuses to explain evil, even applying it in that case. And we’re better than that. I don’t care if there’s karma or a god or not. I live a life that feels right in my soul, in my conscience, in the pit of my stomach, my gut, whatever you want to call it. Whether I’m rewarded or not is of little consequence to me. I am not here to say I’m perfect. Please. Who is? But what I do believe is that there is intrinsic good that exists, outside of anything we can possibly understand, just as there is bad, not because of laws, but because it just IS. It has no beginning and it has no end. I feel it. And that’s all I need. I don’t care to understand or have answers to the rest. Instead, I think I’ll just be quiet, and continue to let this moment--head back, mind open, and face to the sun--be enough.
3 Comments
SD
5/31/2018 17:00:48
Well said!
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Joseph Barrett
6/8/2018 15:32:40
So true RB, your lake house sounds divine lazy days of you walking around in shorts and oversized tee shirts. Sitting down by the lake early in the morning a cup of coffee pressed upon your luscious lips and a nice warm croissant tantalizing your tongue. Whoa I need to stop there before I get myself worked up and in trouble!
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6/1/2019 13:56:17
No, I don't believe in karma. Bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people. It's random - the luck of the draw, is what I believe. I, too, wouldn't kill a spider. I wouldn't kill an elephant either - so why should elephants have priority over tiny, helpless creatures.
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