I, Sentient

******

Buddhism has quite a lot to say about sentient beings and our responsibilities toward them. Which means at the very least, toward each other. Of course, being the argumentative species that we are, we haggle about what “sentient” means, exactly. But whatever species we regard as sentient, we are exhorted to do no harm to them. To not exploit them, to not be cruel to them, to not eat them.

In Buddhist thought there is not nearly so much made of distinctions between man and the “lower” animals. In fact, in some of its traditions, there are no “lower” ones at all. We are equals in our right to be treated with kindness and compassion.

**

When one’s belly is full, the evening is soft and warm, and the after-dinner chairs are comfortable, there is a tendency for the conversation to wander a bit more freely. That is what happened on the evening of the Fourth of July just past when four sentient friends were gathered together and began to discuss the world around them, especially from a political standpoint.

It turns out that it’s not all about us. For instance, we in the West have a very long and strong habit of using up earth’s resources at an exorbitant rate. Often we take those materials from countries where the local inhabitants have had little say in our appropriating their stuff. That era is coming to an end, and a newer era of sharing those resources more equitably is being worked out. This will not happen without dislocation and pain, certainly, and perhaps not without bloodshed. Our species reaches for our guns entirely too quickly.

Eventually we may be better off as we learn to live within our planet’s means, but the choice is being forced upon us, and when that happens our tendency is to behave at first like the two-year old who climbs onto the table and declares “Don’t tell me what to do!”

That approach won’t work this time, I think. We are bumping up hard against realities that we have ignored or pretended did not exist. The bill is coming due.

(Bob Dylan was twenty-one years old when he wrote A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall. How prescient was that?)

******

From The New Yorker

******

I was a deprived child in so many ways. Deprived of things that I would definitely have benefited from but never received, For one thing, no one ever read Goodnight Moon to me. Of course it hadn’t been written yet, but still … .

Not everybody has liked Goodnight Moon, as evidenced by the following quotation from a Wikipedia entry.

From the time of its publication in 1947 and until 1972, the book was “banned” by the New York Public Library due to the then head children’s librarian  Anne Carroll Moore’s hatred of the book. Moore was considered a top taste-maker and arbiter of children’s books not only in the New York Public Library, but for libraries nationwide in the United States, even well past her official retirement.

Wikipedia: Goodnight Moon

My own read on Anne Carroll Moore is that she must have been a colossal sourpuss.

******

From The New Yorker

******

******

Friday Robin and I took our bikes to the Grand Mesa. Since these are not mountain bikes, we limited ourselves to traveling on the roadways.

Our first choice had been to take the 24 mile ride round trip to the Lands End Observatory, but gave up on that after less than a mile. The road was washboarded gravel that was so unpleasant to ride on that we weren’t having any fun at all. With such a violent jarring there was a fear that the fillings of our teeth would loosen and fall out as well as all the screws on our bicycles, so we returned to good old asphalt and did a dozen or so miles up there at 10,280 feet altitude.

I had packed a picnic lunch which we carried in panniers, and when the time came to eat we pulled off into the Spruce Grove Campground, looking for a table.

Which we did find.

But.

In less time than it took to type this sentence we were surrounded by thousands of mosquitoes all humming in anticipation of a sumptuous blood meal at our expense. We paused not for a moment, but mounted up and rode further on until we found a place in the sunshine where the breeze could get at us and blow the insects away. It’s a blessing that these pests are such weak fliers that almost any wind can provide some protection.

(Really, it was thousands of them. They formed a cloud around us.)

Our lunch was a simple one. An apple, an orange bell pepper, and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Neither of us had eaten a PB and J in many years, but that particular day it was was the perfect thing.

******

Doonesbury is pretty good this week. If you’re woke, that is.

******

******

We watched the opera Tosca last night, on Prime. Robin had been curious about it, we had a couple of hours to burn, and so it went. It wasn’t free, but for five bucks is was certainly something different from the run of the mill streamers.

The production was from 2022, done in modern dress, and was easy to follow once we found the key to the subtitles. I will here insert that my Italian is very week, basically consisting of the names of three sausages. The story line … well … it has everything. Lust, murder, torture, suicide – they are all there. And gore, did I mention gore?

The lady is desired by yet another man who wields quite a bit of power, and who wants to spend some serious canoodling time with her. He cares not a whit how that happens, or whether she is interested.

Before you know it there is blood flowing, amputated fingers on the floor, knives flashing, and a firing squad that forgot to use the blanks they were issued. By the end of the story the three leads are all dead, which pretty much wraps things up.

I enjoyed it even though I try to avoid becoming becoming cultured whenever possible. I’ve heard there are other operas, maybe we’ll do this again.

******