By Ken McLeod
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A personal blog by a graying (mostly Anglo with light African-American roots) gay left leaning liberal progressive married college-educated Buddhist Baha'i BBC/NPR-listening Professor Emeritus now following the Dharma in Minas Gerais, Brasil.
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There’s
no actual happiness to be found in always trying to be someone else at
some future time, because the fact is, you’ll never quite get there. Why
not instead, show up fully, right here, right now?
—Mark Van Buren, “Brief Teachings”
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Nothing
is merely a means to an end, nothing is merely a step on the path to
somewhere else. Every moment, everything, is absolutely foundational in
its own right.
—Barry Magid, “Uselessness”
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PI DAY is a holiday held to celebrate the mathematical constant π (pi). Pi Day is observed on March 14th (3/14), due to π being roughly equal to 3.14. The Pi Minute is also sometimes celebrated on March 14 at 1:59 p.m. If π is truncated to seven decimal places, it becomes 3.1415926, making March 14 at 1:59:26 p.m., Pi Second (or sometimes March 14, 1592 at 6:53:58 a.m.).
The first Pi Day celebration was held at the San Francisco Exploratorium in 1988, with staff and public marching around one of its circular spaces, and then consuming fruit pies; the museum has since added pizza pies to its Pi Day menu.
The founder of Pi Day was Larry Shaw, a now retired physicist at the Exploratorium who still helps out with the celebrations. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology often mails out its acceptance letters to be delivered to prospective students on Pi Day.
Some also celebrate Pi Approximation Day in addition to Pi Day, which can fall on any of several dates:
On Pi Day, 2004, Daniel Tammet calculated and recited 22,514 decimal digits of pi.
Somewhat appropriately, it would seem, Albert Einstein was born on Pi Day, 1879.
From the perspective of Buddhism, staying calm comes from healing our own anger.
—Mindy Newman, “How to Stay Calm in a Raging World”
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Thoughts
are like clouds and can vanish just as clouds naturally disperse into
space... We cannot push the clouds away, but we can allow the clouds
of thought to gradually dissolve until finally all the clouds have
vanished.
—Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche and Tsoknyi Rinpoche, “As the Clouds Vanish”
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JACK KEROUAC, American writer (d. 1969); an American novelist, writer, poet and artist. Along with William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, he is among the best known of the writers (and friends) known as the Beat Generation. Kerouac's work was popular, but received little critical acclaim during his lifetime. Today, he is considered an important and influential writer who inspired others, including Tom Robbins, Lester Bangs, Richard Brautigan and Ken Kesey, and writers of the New Journalism. Kerouac also influenced musicians such as The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Morrissey, Tom Waits, Simon & Garfunkel, Lebris Ulf Lundell and Jim Morrison. Kerouac's best-known books are On The Road, The Dharma Bums, Big Sur and Visions of Cody. Kerouac spent many of the years between 1947 and 1951 on the road, although he often spent extended periods at his mother's home and in the Florida home he purchased for her.
We
are not called upon as Buddhists to deny the world, and certainly not
to escape from it. We are called to live with it, and to make our peace
with all that is.
—Clark Strand, “Worry Beads”
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Buddhism
is a demanding moral practice; it turns over to each person the power
to decide what is right to do in any given moment.
—Sallie Tisdale, “A Life in Her Hands”
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