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Trinkets of Virtue

So here is a musing on a interview with Ken Kesey for Paris Review. I read it long time ago so no much is left in my memory of it and when I found my little piece in the archives, it sounded ok so I decided to publish it again. I don’t think that many people would have read it before anyway. I wasn’t a part of the Beat generation, neither of its later sprout, the Hippy flower child. On The Road was not yet translated in socialist Bulgaria when I was at school in the late 70s. Fly over the Cuckoo Nest was translated but ‘of course, everybody knew it was written against the Capitalist society’. LSD, mescaline, the Doors, the Byrds and anything of this sort did not even exist in our world – ‘the dust bowl of reality’. My father was arrested for dancing rock&roll on a table and girls with short skirts had stamps put on their hips so they cannot ware them again.Even religion wasn’t there to give some kind of hope to the searching minds.  But both the Beat generation and we, behind t...
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Faith and renunciation are impermanent, so make a resolute promise to exert yourself


དད་པ་ དང་ངེས་འབྱུང་མི་རྟག་པས་དམ་བཅའ་བརྟན་པོ་ལ་བརྩོན།

'Faith and renunciation are impermanent, so make a resolute promise to exert yourself'

Exerting myself is not a distinctive feature of my character. Yesterday, however, while trying (yet again!) to get back to my Tibetan studies, I stumbled at this short sentence from the great 19th century Buddhist master, Patrul Rinpoche and it was a some kind of revelation. As revelations usually go, the thing to be discovered have been right in front of me all the time but I just never payed attention to it.

So, with that revelation in mind, I decided to revive my journal and treat it like a diary. I will write in it whatever comes my way. Inspiration comes and goes but for sure it never materialises unless the person takes the pen and writes the words down. This reminds me of the recent interview of Bob Dylan for Wall Street Journal. He is talking about computers and how they could help with creativity. They can ‘get you over the hump’, he says, ‘but you have to get up early’. 

Of course, the exertion Patrul Rinpoche talks about concerns matters, much more important that writing useless thoughts on paper, but who knows: even small things like that can make a difference for someone. Even if that person is just me.

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