In the Forest of my mind, I sit alone.

And what have we got to yap about today that would be meaningful, insightful and motivating to the rest of the world? If I know what it is beforehand i know it is not really worth writing, it is stale and the world out there has already found out, i am too late someone else has written it and done a better job. But I cannot resist my need to write like everything else in my life it is about addiction; I am addicted to putting my thoughts in writing and not that because it would me vast number of hits from readers who got nothing better to do then read a piece of waste laid out before them but because it helps me personally to watch the inner workings of my own body, mind and spirit,( perhaps i will call it my consciousness). Yeah, that's about he gist of it of why I keep rambling on even if there is no one out there reading anymore. A cliche, but I always loved it, "The heart is a Lonely Hunter," yes and how lonely it can get, one just has to put it to the test as a Sadhu, or a mendicant monk, become a hermit or a vagabond living on the street, you will experience loneliness; being alone-ness, however is a different story.

To know how to be alone and have a good time at it is an art not too many can appreciate much less accomplish. Hence the heart is a lonely hunter when in seeking for a space to be alone, undisturbed, and not bothered by others in any shape or form; like being in your final resting place, that hole in the ground. It is the ultimate in social distancing and unless one is unfortunate enough to die in a mass extinction program of one pandemic or one war of ethnic cleansing, or genocide or simply a victim of collective fumigation by choice, under normal circumstances one buried individually. However even graveyards are running out of space for this purpose and more often than not you will be buried one on top of the other without the permission of the previous tenant, so much for social distancing. Malays in Malaysia who are primarily Muslims will never cremate the dead and Chinese pride themselves in who can afford the largest plot of burial spot in the whole cemetery, cremation is an option for them. The Hindus are more into cremation as one can see in documentaries of the Ghats along the Ganges River in India. Then there are the Christians and they are either made up of Eurasians and Chinese with fancy western names. How do they dispose off their dead? 
"Interest in Self correction lies at the heart of all true learning. It characterizes a community in which individuals learn, not merely to be open to persuasion, but to consider that one's most outspoken opponent, regardless of his racial and ethnic tradition maybe the instrument of new insight leading one to rethink everything hitherto viewed to as 'normal' in one's science. The sight of someone  who see things otherwise is never an incitement to rage or to protective maneuvering, to withdrawal behind bastions of defense...
 It is the conviction of the present writer, that people deeply rooted in the teachings of the Lord Buddha will be in the vanguard in the present emergency of mankind, quietly offering the solvent for emotional and social fixations, and by precepts and example leading members of power structures, social classes, ethnic and racial traditions, status groups, ideologies and creeds, to find their sense of personal worth and affiliation in the new self corrective community that is spreading very rapidly throughout the globe..."
Nolan Pliny Jacobson,
Buddhist Elements in the coming World Civilization.
The Eastern Buddhist - vol;5 No.2 Oct.1972.  
The quotation was taken from my Sketchbook Journal dated 1985 -done in San Francisco.

From the earliest time in history of Buddhism, devotees ,monks and nuns, were aware of nature and its influence on meditation and the solitary life. After observing the ways of a Bull Elephant in the forest, the Buddha commented;

"Herein agreeth Mind with mind,
Of Sage and Elephant,
Whose task are like a plough pole.
Since both alike love forest solitude."