“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Friday, November 30, 2012

Grief

My friend Sam just died, a few days ago, of causes unknown to me. He was in his twenties.

I think I'm still in shock, because I keep forgetting this has happened.

Sam was my tent mate and room mate on my pilgrimage to Mount Kailash. He wasn't a Buddhist, but he went anyway. He was very athletic, unlike myself. My contribution was to tell him what I knew about minds.

I learnt a lot from him. It's hard to put it into words but his way of being is in me, somehow. He had a superbly straightforward and upright nature. It wasn't just the group of Buddhists who influenced me on that incredibly helpful trip. It was Sam. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have made it around the mountain without his persistent encouragement.

Some people have been pretty beastly to me this week, and it reminds me of the last time a close person died, and I was called a "moron" out of the blue in some online forum. For no particular reason, other than the fact that I was stating a disagreement.

But I'm feeling pretty cranky right now. Please try to be somewhat boundaried with me.

Oh, I guess I finished the final draft of Hyperobjects and sent it in.

2 comments:

Robert Jackson said...

Sorry to hear that Tim. These events are horrible for us all.

Robert Jackson said...

Sorry to hear that Tim. These events hurt us all.