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A Clear Forest Pool

October 18, 2021 by

Adam Piontek

“Try to be mindful, and let things take their natural course. Then your mind will become still in any surrounding, like a clear forest pool. All kinds of wonderful, rare animals will come to drink at the pool, and you will see clearly the nature of all things. You will see many strange and wonderful things come and go, but you will be still. Problems will arise, but you will see through them immediately. This is the happiness of the Buddha.”
Ajahn Chah

I’ve had brief glimpses of this. “Self” as water feels like a good metaphor for the experience of being. “I” am not my thoughts or emotions; “I” am something else (awareness?), which can sometimes feel like a turbulent, cloudy pool, or a rushing river, and that’s not the nature of water, but a function of its conditions at the moment.

Dear Dad

October 3, 2021 by

Adam Piontek

#adultchildren, #camping, #family, #healing, #hiking, #outdoors

I wish I’d been an adult when I was a teenager. You only ever wanted to connect, but I let my mom turn me against you in your disability. She made me an ally in her abuse and I was just a kid, trying to survive my teen years.

I was at times cruel to you. I was, after all, a teenager.

Why I don’t write

September 1, 2021 by

Adam Piontek

Why write something if it won’t be definitive? Why write something if it’s not perfect? If it doesn’t address every point, or everything related to the topic? Or if it makes a good point but gets some other things wrong?

Why write if probably nobody will read it? Why write if even just one person who might read it might think they wasted their time?

Why write if I say something I later disagree with? If I change my mind about something, and my past thoughts are still out there?

Should not the marks I leave behind on the world be without fault?

Should not the product of my life be a pure, perfect expression of truth?

When it Rains

August 5, 2021 by

Adam Piontek

Quoted from this talk on the legend of Aṅgulimāla, from the Wild Heart Meditation Center’s Spring Retreat, the speaker quoting their teacher:

When it rains
Before I can get to the sound of the rain
I have to walk through sounds of war
I have to walk through the screams of young men dying
I have to walk through the visions of tree lines up in napalm
I have to listen to the screams of 17-year-old boys crying, for their fathers, for their girlfriends, for their mothers
Before I can get to a place that is just rain.

Crispy-skin salmon, quinoa pilaf, gingery greens

July 17, 2021 by

Adam Piontek

#cooking, #food, #mealprep, #pandemiceats, #plaguecooking, #recipe

Notes on an amalgamation: a good combo for meal prepping, but to get a good quantity you kind of have to double everything. Quinoa pilaf loosely based on this recipe, minus the extras, greens via Mark Bittman, and crispy-skin salmon with guidance from seriouseats.

Back to WordPress, with a custom theme

July 10, 2021 by

Adam Piontek

#blog, #coding, #development, #fun, #syntaxhighlighting, #tech, #web

Ages ago, in the era of blogs, I used WordPress for a few years, but at the time I was too convinced that programming was too hard for me to properly learn enough web development to really customize things, and eventually I stopped writing as other interests drew my attention.

Here’s the boring story of how I ended up all the way back at WordPress after learning enough programming that nothing really scares me anymore…

Will I Feel the Wind

May 5, 2021 by

Adam Piontek

#aca, #acoa, #awareness, #dharma, #mindfulness, #poetry, #recovery, #spirituality

Long ago, as many teens do, I wrote poetry now and then. And then I learned to hate my poetry, and I stopped. I wonder if I could just be kind to myself and enjoy trying?