The Buddha Diaries Recommends

To learn more about what is planned as a collaborative site, please check out our just-launched Accidental Dharma: The Gift Wrapped in Shit, presented by The Buddha Diaries. You'll find the site's intention described there, along with several examples of the kind of story that we're looking for. We're hoping to receive your stories to post, if and when you feel moved to send them to us at AccidentalDharma@mac.com. While we can't promise to include everything we receive, we'll post every story that is in harmony with the spirit and intention of the site. The process of writing, as all bloggers know, can serve to shed light on our experience, so we're hoping that this site will prove enlightening to contributors and readers alike.


Also... there's a terrific piece of writing over at Adgita Diaries, which we discovered when we checked in there yesterday. A review of the History Channel's 1968 with Tom Brokaw, it takes the long view of those of us who participated in those times and laments the loss of their promise. Here's a short piece of what MandT have to say, a paragraph that particularly resonates with me:

Brokaw’s ‘suit’ vision of his own youth in the center of a watershed year in contemporary history is profoundly blind as he states in conclusion: “"If there is one enduring lesson for me, it is that we survived as a nation and as a culture.” Not true-- so very not true. 1968 was the year America entered in earnest its entopic decline. The Vietnam War was clearly revealed for what it was---a profiteering corporate militaristic fantasy of long lasting fatal results. The old Democratic Party died with Jack Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, the failure of Lyndon Johnson to hoist The Great Society, and perished in Daley’s thug Chicago amid killings, riots, the ghosts of a murderous Kent State and the future charismatic machinations of the Clintons. The First Amendment became a lethal attraction, the Bush administration----its newly dug grave.

Here's one fellow blogger who concurs with their dissent from Brokaw's conclusion. It is "so very not true," indeed, for the reasons that they eloquently elaborate. I also love their vision of the blogosphere: "The reality community never sleeps, and the Internet has become our Paul Revere."

I do love to read the views of the young and idealistic--represented in MandT's entry by the wonderful song that accompanies it. I also love the voices of those who have managed to maintain the idealism of their youth and temper it with the wisdom and compassion of respectable years! Thanks, MandT, for this good piece.

Over at Nick's Bytes, always a fun trip, there are a couple of interesting memes. I like the one about writing a letter from your now self to yourself as you were when you were 13 years old. Mine would go something like this: "Dear Peter, Don't worry, you'll get out of this alive. Boarding school is hell and everyone knows you're the easiest tease around. Try not to get mad, and feel free to have a good cry once in a while, where the others won't see you. Oh, and that little thing down between your legs. I know it's giving you a lot to worry about right now, but once you get over this 13-year old hump it'll do just fine. You're not the freak you think you are, I promise. Lots of love, Old Peter."

At one plus two read the heartbreaking story of two little girls in dire straights at Christmas time. Though it shouldn't matter, should it, whether it's Christmas or not?