The Buddha Diaries Travels--and Comes Home...

... to the blogosphere.

I find these days that there are many things that are hard about traveling. Many joys, too, of course. But one of the hard things is leaving, and another is coming home. I come home with the hope of finding a still point, where the traveling stops, somewhere the spirit finds a familiar place to rest and take its ease.

All of which is a part of my experience--the good part. The bad part is finding a mountainous stack of mail to be sorted, bills to be paid, junk mail to be thrown out. It's trying to play catch-up with dozens of neglected emails, getting back to jobs that were left unfinished, tying up the loose ends of the journey, finding a place for all those airline stubs and credit card receipts, the brochures you've picked up along the way and now can't quite bring yourself to discard because they may secrete some important piece of evidence that your memory will surely lose by the time you come to need it. It's finding the house in small but annoying states of disarray, things not there where you're absolutely sure you left them, light bulbs mysteriously blown in your absence and needing replacement, that little pile of termite droppings you had never noticed in the past...

And yes, the neglected tasks you like to think of as your "work." I have fallen far behind in my commitments, and find myself faced with the prospect of scrambling to fulfill the most essential and letting go of those "shoulds" the plague the conscience. While traveling, even though I managed to keep up with the writing of these pages, I neglected my not-quite-daily rounds of other blogs, the community of like-minded scribblers whose efforts are a constant source of surprising information, humanity, and fun.

I dove back into the blogosphere for a while yesterday and surfaced, as usual, with some pearls. Like Primordial Blog, whose subtitle is the delightfully Bushian "Making the World a Little Less Stupider." Nothing less Bushy than this blog, however, which is the brain-child of a reformed "BibleThumper and Young Earth Creationist"--now, thankfully for the rest of us, "a proud member of the reality-based community." Try this entry for a taste of post-religious fervor.

For a more than slightly salacious---but literate! and witty!--take on life, visit the irrepressible Glamourpuss at The Pole Affair. This pole-dancer/trapeze artist does... er, swing! And how's this for an astutely-phrased oedipal insight: "School was a complicated place for me. My father expected me to do better than everybody else, except him. " Puss falls a lot, it seems, but is always ready to bounce back and learn. Her other blog is the surprisingly lyrical Clairvoyance.

And finally, for today, there's The Dragon's Eye, where you'll have fun, as I did, with Kiyotoe, who has a sharp eye for a photograph with a story to tell--and tells his own story to accompany it in a few funny, sometimes poignant, always precise words.

I wouldn't call these exactly Buddhist blogs. But bring a Buddhist mind to them and I think you'll be surprised how much they have to teach.