Dorothy’s Not in Kansas Right Now

Written on April 21, 2009 by Tom Stine



Creative Commons License credit: Il Genesio

Okay, in truth, Tom is not in Missouri right now, but it just didn’t have that lovely allusion to one of my favorite movies, the Wizard of Oz. I don’t know about the rest of you, but when I was growing up, one of the television networks (hey, we only had 3) would show the Wizard of Oz once each year, always on a Sunday night. Man, I was GLUED to that TV for the whole thing. I love it, I was mesmerized by it. I mean, how on earth did they get the world to go from black and white to color and then back again? Too wild.

Okay, the Wizard of Oz has nothing to do with the purpose of this post, but so what? Does anything have ANYTHING to do with anything else? Or, put another way, everything has everything to do with everything! Don’t worry, you’ll figure it out later.

So, I’m wrapping up a month in Paris, France, this week. I arrived on March 28, and I leave on Saturday. I fly home from Amsterdam, so this weekend I get to enjoy the wonderful hospitality of the Dutch. But for the past almost four weeks, Paris has been my home.

I LOVE PARIS. I really, really do. Someday, I’m not sure when or how, I will live here part of the year. You see, it’s the language that really gets me. I absolutely love the French language. I can’t get tired of hearing it spoken. I speak it a bit myself, not that well, but I spent the last 3 weeks going to a language school each morning trying to improve my French.

I shared with my newsletter readers that, according to two psychics, I was one of Napoleon’s generals in a past life, so maybe that explains my love of French. Who knows? But here I am.

An obvious question that I’m sure I’ll be asked is, “What did you learn while in Paris?” So, let me provide a few completely spontaneous observations:

*Travel can be very, very good for bringing up any issues you have been trying to ignore or were not aware of. Paris has been excellent in that regard. So, get on a plane and put yourself in a more stressful environment and see what happens. I live in the country of Missouri, so life in Paris is definitely bringing up some good stuff. Who knew it was there? ;-)

*Parisians are obsessed with shoes. If any of you reading this blog live in Paris, you will know immediately what I mean. It is the most incredible thing to see sitting at a café. 2 million people live within the walls of Paris, and there are 1.5 million different pairs of shoes. The rest are Converse hightops.

*You can eat raw hamburger and not die. Now, maybe you can’t in the USA, I get that. But here, even cooked hamburger is mostly raw. As is steak, duck and eggs. You know, I think I actually prefer meat that way. Even though this is my 6th trip to Paris, I still have to adjust to the food. It is amazingly good. I think you can probably live on bread, eggs, salade, raw meat, coffee and wine.

*Walking is good for the spirit and body. I feel better in a pedestrian culture. In the USA, we walk only to get in and out of our cars. You can go an entire day, traveling 50 miles around town, and walk maybe 100 yards. In Paris, 3-5 km is not a big deal. Now, given that you get to walk 3-5 km per day, why in God’s name do Les Parisiens where incredibly uncomfortable shoes? Only me and German and Austrian tourists are wearing hiking shoes (American tourists where New Balance running shoes and flip flops).

*The best ice cream in the world is on Ile Saint-Louis in Paris. Berthillon.

*People are the same wherever you go. I know that, but it is really fun to see it right in front of your eyes. The young French women doing their thing. Different language, same flirtatious behavior. Old couples walking arm in arm. Men doing their macho act to impress women. Rude and not so rude waiters. Friendly store owners. People rushing to get from point A to point B. Life is life. Every where you go.

*And all the while, no matter where or when or under what circumstances, Life is still calling to you. You can hear it in the sound of scooter racing down the street, a child laughing, the clink of two wine glasses. Always calling you. One Life. One.

Be well. Time to hit a café. Namaste.

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Related Posts:

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  4. Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-04-05
  5. Past Lives Ain’t What They Used To Be

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But beauty, real beauty, ends where intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of a face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But then in the Church they don’t think. A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen, and as a natural consequence he always looks absolutely delightful.

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Intelligent practice always deals with just one thing: the fear at the base of human existence, the fear that I am not. And of course I am not, but the last thing I want to know is that.

—Charlotte Joko Beck

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A: Destiny refers only to name and shape. Since you are neither body nor mind, destiny has no control over you. You are completely free. The cup is conditioned by its shape, material, use and so on. But the space within the cup is free. It happens to be in the cup only when viewed in connection with the cup. Otherwise, it is just space. As long as there is a body, you appear to be embodied. Without the body you are not disembodied — you just are.

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Buddhism stands unique in the history of human thought in denying the existence of a Soul, Self or Atman. According to the teachings of the Buddha, the idea of self is an imaginary, false belief which has no corresponding reality, and it produces harmful thoughts of ‘me’ and ‘mine’, selfish desire, craving, attachment, hatred, ill-will, conceit, pride, egoism, and other defilements, impurities and problems. It is the source of all troubles in the world from personal conflicts to wars between nations. In short, to this false view can be traced all the evil in the world.

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The disappearance of this fundamental question [How do I know the state of an enlightened one?], on discovering that it had no answer, was a physiological phenomenon, a sudden ‘explosion’ inside, blasting, as it were, every cell, every nerve and every gland in my body. And with that ‘explosion’, the illusion that there is continuity of thought, that there is a center, an ‘I’ linking up the thoughts, was not there anymore.

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