I’m hanging on for dear life to every good development in my life. Starting to care more about my health and my future. Starting to feel a sense of responsibility again. But I’m also under a tremendous amount of stress and may be a little hard to reach while my life goes in positive but challenging directions.
This week I am moving out of my old place. Staying with a friend of a friend until I can find a decent place to rent which will be easier now that I have a work permit.
I’m also starting a new job which demands a lot of my time and energy and I want to focus on not extending myself to burnout, especially early on in my training period when I need to make a good impression so I need to be extra sharp and well rested.
So forgive me if I’m hard to reach. Things are actually going well.
I will have more details once everything is finalized (some of my friends already know) but the bottom line is I got the news I have been waiting for from German immigration today. I just need to meet with them Monday to hammer out the final details.
This has been a difficult process and without loads of help I couldn't have done it. I consider myself very fortunate to have a small but loyal support network.
In the coming days, months, and years I can dream of the life I want to build here in the Rhinelands, but tonight I'm tired and still trying to process this last 18 months of trying to get my feet under me in such an unstable time in history.
I downplayed a lot of the drama, a lot of the fear, and a lot of the near miss crises. It's good to see a way forward at last.
I will be moving back to Leverkusen soon. For a number of reasons (mainly cost of living) Leverkusen is just better for me at this point. Living in downtown Cologne with artists can be exciting but I really look forward to a life with less drama and less overstimulation from city living.
It's official, I've lived in Germany longer than I lived in the UK.
Actually it's been official for a while now. I don't think I spent more than 14 months in the UK all together. I've been here 18 months.
It's weird because my time in the UK felt longer, more significant. Yet I have had more success here, I've been more settled here, I've traveled more (thanks to my Deutschland Ticket) and I've taken many times as many photos here. My body of work from Germany is already the largest and most impressive body of work I've produced to date.Yet I feel unresolved and unsettled here in a way I didn't in the UK. There's a strangeness between myself and my location I didn't have there.
I've written significantly less. I wrote a lot when I was in the UK. Nowadays it seems writing is hard; the relative instability of things takes away my urge to do much fiction writing any more. But I have finished a couple of short stories, I've got working drafts of more stuff, and I've even begun yet another novel: an ergodic fiction piece set in the early 1950s called "The Plague Crosses."
Will I be allowed to remain in Germany? Who can say. I've been trying to get out of the US as long as I had this blog, with an interval from 2005 to 2020 when I had basically given up and tried to make the most of my life in the US. Those 15 years weren't wasted. I got married, I had a lot of amazing experiences, saw some beautiful places, and had a spiritual awakening.
I'm less attached to the idea of staying in Germany per se and more attached to the idea of being able to stay somewhere in the world the rest of my life. When I first moved to the UK in 2003 I did it with plans to get married, settle down, and get a pleasant place in the countryside where I worked full-time as an author. I've been trying to get that all my life; things being as they are I don't know if it's possible any more, as an author or as a photographer.
I came really close to getting settled down in Oregon. I managed to get married so that's one goal, though it ended up nothing like what I was planning for in 2003. It's still good and we've been married since 2017, though truth be told we've been together half my life now. I'm 42 and I've spent 21 years of my life with Kobi now. That's one thing I have going for me.
I hope I am allowed to stay and have the quiet life I always wanted, married and prospering as a creative type. But that dream has been delayed so long, and the progress I made felt like a slog against impossible odds with very little to show for it.
I've come to Buddhism at a bad time. I see a lot of essential truth in it as far as the core doctrine that pretty much all Buddhists agree on. But the state of organization, understanding, and ascetic practice is really suffering and sanghas all over are trying to survive under systems that don't really provide support. Meanwhile Buddhism in an ersatz feel-good package is marketed as a commodity based on vibes only, not on actually living any kind of meaningful change.
There's a belief baked into Buddhism of a "dharma ending age" which, if I'm honest, is based on something essentially true: that sound teaching may vanish from the world until it is rediscovered. But it's invoked with such declinist resignation at times. It comes with a lot of fatalism when many Buddhists talk about it, especially Eastern Buddhists oddly enough. That resignation seeps into the more serious Western sanghas at times. It's pervasive.
Given the overall attitude of resigned despair in the world, it seems to me that we can't call this a "dharma ending age" so confidently unless we endeavor to not only preserve the soundest teachings we know, but also examine our own reasons for thinking this decline is inevitable. Inevitable decline, after all, absolves us from having to preserve something precious and irreplaceable. Perhaps there never was a golden age full of fully realized masters. And I know that sounds unthinkable to some Buddhists but I'm legitimately starting to think our attachment to the narrative of decline is just another klesha.
I cannot take it upon myself, a diminished practitioner at the receiving end of diminished practice upon diminished practice, to be the great white savior of the Dharma. But perhaps I should be more open and vocal about what I see happening because I DO love and treasure the Triple Gem and it's a beautiful thing that has, to my experience, proved right on every major point that mattered. Where it was wrong, there was always a sectarian difference on that point.
I don't expect to convert any of you who aren't already convinced. That's not my job. But I do want to talk openly about my passions and disappointments in my own space as always, and this is absolutely one of them. To me, Buddhism is more than just a commodity and to see it reduced to garden statues made by slave labor, or posters with quotes that are badly out of context or not even Buddha, or luxury meditation retreats on some gorgeous Pacific island really saddens me. To begin to understand something beautiful and joyous is to begin to understand how little this world understands real beauty and joy. And to love something beautiful and joyous is to mourn when it is mistreated, mishandled, mismanaged, and miscommunicated.
I am not one of great understanding. But such understanding as I have, I will share about what it actually means to be a sincere lay practitioner in a world where it's really not a great time to be one.
Imagine a city that's almost 2000 years old, has been destroyed multiple times, and all the layers of that past are visible. That's Cologne.
Imagine a city that has almost as much charm as Paris, but is more affordable to visit. That's Cologne.
Imagine a city that's equal parts Gothic, gritty, and romantic. That's Cologne.
Imagine a city that's tolerant and diverse and safe to be yourself. That's Cologne.
Imagine a gateway to one of the most beautiful stretches of river in the world, the Middle Rhine. That's Cologne.
I imagine I will probably be living in one of the outlying towns soon. But I'm glad I got to try living in the actual city for a bit. It's a little overstimulating for me but I'm happy I got to see this amazing place for what it is.
exhausted
thoughtful