Monk Diaries 2: Every Dog has its day, and the saga of my curly fringe

Dear friends lovers sinners and saints

I'd like to start this post with some wise words from Hellen Keller, i quote ''the world is full of suffering, it is also full of overcoming it''.

Before your thoughts go into a flurry of ''omg another melodramtic post on the negativities of life and our futile existence'', i shall just say that this post lacks mention of rainbows, fluffy bunnies and a false ideality but it does hold some light of hope.... if not my blogs would be a total drag =]

We live in a world of suffering, i'd like to think our purpose in life is to find a way to overcome it, through means by which our morals are based upon. Yet prior to my Sarnarth experience i like most others had a very narrow minded view of what suffering really is. I think most of us live in a bubble, we only so the world in relation to ourselves and through are own misguided perspective. During my venture of 09 i went through the typical angsty teenager phase wherease i thought everything in my life sucked, school sucked, parents sucked, guitar sucked blah blah, you get the picture. Well one incident however stupid it may sound changed my view to what suffering really is and sure as hell burst the bubble i lived in.

In Sarnarth all the guys stayed in a totally awesome chinese temple. By awesome i don't mean 7 star facilities with a massive pool golf course and ridiculously hot girls walking around the place, i mean squatting toilets, bugs like everywhere hard ass beds and the wafting smells of rotting garbage and who knows wat else coming from the street. Yep certainly a minimalistic way of living, yet ironically letting go of wordly needs felt all to liberating. Well after just gettin used to my humble livings it rained like all hell. After struggling in an attempt to find the perfect way to describe the rain all i can come up with is that it was like the population of china falling from the sky. Yet as much as id love raining asians rain in india aint as appealling. Days of mud rubbish sewage and animal faeces flowed through the street. Back at the chinese temple there were a family of dogs and in an attempt to get her puppies away from the rain the mother dog(saying bitch sounds too harsh of mouth) carried her puppies in her teeth. Not to our knowledge however was that the mother dog(eh saying mother dog is such a hassle but bitch is so colloquial somebody think of alternate name!) bit down too hard on the puppy leaving a gaping wound in its head and hip. Two days later we woke to the sounds of this puppy screaming in pain. I know dogs to be reseliant creatures even as puppies but here was this puppy shrieking in distress, having no idea what was wrong with it. None of us there had any idea of what to do so we washed it and put medicine over the wound and to our surprise maggots came out of its head.

This was very much a rude awakening to how i viewed life's hardhsips. Prior to seeing the struggle of this puppy i used to think suffering was when my fringe would go all curly instead of bein straight, or a annoying year 7 would buy the last apple pie in the canteen, i can't help but feeling pathetic for such a view of the world.

Yet back to the story of this puppy so after we washed it was a miserable heap. It would shiver in a corner, I came to the conclusion it was going to die a miserable death. So its screams of pain and distress continued for another 2 days, I remember spending long periods of my afternoon trying to calm it down as i watched blood drip from its wounds completely pissed with myself i couldn't do anything else for it. Yet to cut a long story short we eventually got a moth ball and pasted it over the its wounds and instantly like 20 maggots came out. I won't deem the sight with a vivid description other than saying it was mucho grose.

So after that the puppy started steps to recovery and suffice to say witnessing the ordeal of this poor animal made me wake up from a state of disallusion. I realised from puppy(we never gave it an actual name other than puppy)  that suffering is a state of mind, purely a handicap to slow us down in life's seemingly never ending race. If we succumb to the ocean of suffering we live in how can we ever strive foward to see how things truly are, all we can do is down. With that i shall say my goal is to have peace of mind and to see things as they really are, instead of viewing the issue of my fringe being curly instead of straight as suffering i would see it simple as having a curly fringe. Such is a lesson i learnt form puppy and the people of india. Most of the people i encountered lead lives not being assured where their next meal will come from or if they will be able to scrounge a living for the day. Yet they are happy, like don't get me wrong there loud, smell and rude, but more importantly they are happy while they do it. They don't cling to events of the past or thinking ''what if'', pondering what the future may hold they live in the present moment.

I can safely say the people of india and even more so one puppy taught me how to deal with ones adverse challenges, i too hope you can have peace of mind and hope this post burst your bubble!

later days
suhada.xx