In Pursuit of Mysteries

Podcasts and Buddhism

I need to get a car radio that plays mp3s. The common way that I listen to podcasts is to download them in iTunes (because it is easier that way), burn them to an audio CD (if they are less than 80 minutes) and then listen to them in my car. This is kind of a pain in the ass. Leaving aside how long it takes me to prep, it makes me use a few writable CD’s a week and causes waste. One of my coworkers bought a cheap stereo that simply plays mp3 files from a flash drive. I’m considering doing the same since I have a 2 gig flash drive.

This is the way I listen to James Foster’s Path of the Mahayana podcast every week. (Jim is the Tendai teacher that I am working with as a Tendai practitioner now but he isn’t as stuffy as that would normally sound…). I recommend his podcast to anyone interested in the application of Buddhist practice in life, especially drawing from the Japanese tradition. His podcast consists of his short teaching talks following meditation and liturgical practice every week. They are relatively short and Jim is funnier than he gives himself credit as being.

Another podcast that I listen to is Ken McLeod’s Unfettered Mind series. Ken McLeod was a longterm study of Kalu Rinpoche in the Tibetan tradition. He’s been practicing for over 30 years and teaching for around half of that (I believe). He runs a website with translations and is the author of Wake Up to Your Life, an excellent practical book on Buddhist practice that works to avoid jargon and be immediately relevant to people. Ken has been making a podcast available for a while, which is largely audio drawn from retreats that he runs. I was listening to “GDP 01a: Guru, Deity, Protector (retreat)” this morning and found it to be both engaging and immediately relevant.

In the past, I’ve heard some teachers give a relatively inflexible take on Buddhist tradition and the approaches to it. Both Jim and Ken seem to be comfortable in their respective traditions and able to relate the material to Western students in a way that makes more sense. I find this more approachable than the instances where I’ve been to events or retreats where the lama (who is often very wonderful) has trouble translating concepts in ways which are easily understood by those of us in the West. The fact that there is often a translator involved and the lama lives outside the West day to day does not help either. It is good to see more Western teachers out there freely communicating with people.

Aristotle and Ethics

I’ve spent the last few days reading much of Nichomachean Ethics by Aristotle. I’m reading the portions on ethics right now and will read the portion on politics later today. This is for a paper due on Friday (a short one).

I must say that, to my horror, Aristotle is still the most dry reading I’ve ever encountered. I thought age and experience would cause me to find him much more approachable but I am finding that my horrid undergraduate struggle with his text is still being repeated. This guy makes reading 400 pages of Edmund Burke seem light and fun. It’s very dense stuff compared to Plato, whom I enjoyed.

Wedding Today

I’m off in about half an hour to perform a wedding for some friends of mine. This will be the third wedding that I’ve done and the second that is for an ex of mine, technically.

The interesting thing about the ceremony, other than the fact that I am doing it, is that it is for two women and one man. Legally (paperwork, etc.) only two of them, Drake and Rubylou are getting married. J is a longterm partner to both of them (and has actually been with Drake for much longer) so the marriage, in spirit if not the eyes of the law, is for all three to one another. This makes for an interesting ritual dynamic in the ceremony, itself, since actions are not being done in pairs but in triplets. It is also interesting since, while not recognized by the law, this is a same same, polyamorous marriage and they are certainly treating it as such. The three of them already have two children together so this is more of a recognition of their existing, multiyear relationships, and a legal recognition for two of them (for many reasons).

This is my first wedding since 1998. Back then, I married Lesa to Stephen in a ceremony that Lesa had mostly written based on fairly standard post-Golden Dawn Hermetic symbolism. Since Lesa was (is?) a practitioner of Golden Dawn-derived work, it worked out well for them (Stephen didn’t have a preference). Lesa and I lived together for a couple of years following my first marriage so I was quite touched to be asked to do the ceremony.

Rubylou and I dated (whatever we called it) during the tail end of Lesa’s relationship with me. For those that don’t know, up until my relationship with my current wife, I was pretty active within the polyamorous community so many of the people I dated overlapped with one another as none of the relationships were exclusive. The relationships were generally well defined but not really approachable by conventional labels. When R (my wife) and I got together, we both stopped dating other people very quickly for a variety of reasons and we’ve been together for over five years now and married for a year and a half.

That’s all an aside though. Rubylou and I dated for a while (a year or two) and we’ve been extremely close since before we dated and have maintained that since that time, through a marriage and the birth of her children. I’ve known her for thirteen years or more (since I graduated college). I was extremely honored when she asked me to perform the ceremony about a month ago.

Hopefully, the three of them are happy with the result. I’ll probably post the ceremony later if they say that they don’t mind.