Dharma Curious (he/him)

Maybe those, actually. Lemme ask Chatgpt to make sure

AI. There were no cameras back then

Thank you. I was her caregiver for many, many years, and we were closer than I have ever been or likely ever will be with anyone else. Lady was straight up fucking amazing

Ex-fucking-zaxtly. My mom was a lifelong progressive, hippie movement participant, and generally cool as fuck badass mofo, but because of her birth year she got lumped in with the boomer politics jokes. She got it, she knew why they existed and what they were actually lambasting. But it hurt her to see what she thought of as a generation of protest and activism go down as a generation of right wing bullshit. She passed away in April, due to myriad health reasons that pretty all boil down to “near life long poverty” as the root cause.

Ex-fucking-zaxtly. My mom was a lifelong progressive, hippie movement participant, and generally cool as fuck badass mofo, but because of her birth year she got lumped in with the boomer politics jokes. She got it, she knew why they existed and what they were actually lambasting. But it hurt her to see what she thought of as a generation of protest and activism go down as a generation of right wing bullshit. She passed away in April, due to myriad health reasons that pretty all boil down to “near life long poverty” as the root cause.

My preferred version of the “nature of the Scorpion” tale is a little different. It doesn’t really fit here, but I like to post it whenever this story comes up, because I’m autistic, and it brings me joy to share the story.

One day, a Monk was walking alongside a stream when he saw a Scorpion struggling in the water. Knowing that scorpions cannot swim, he knelt down to scoop it out of the water.

Just before setting it down, the Scorpion turned and stung his hand. The Monk withdrew his hand in pain and the Scorpion fell back into the stream.

When the Monk realized this, he scooped his hands down again to save the Scorpion. And just as before, the Scorpion stung his hand and fell back into the stream. This scene repeated itself several times.

A little boy who was playing near the stream asked the Monk, “Excuse me. Why do you keep trying to save the Scorpion — Don’t you know it will just sting you every time you try to rescue it?”

The Monk, picking up a leaf and rescuing the scorpion successfully this time, replied, “Dear boy, just as it is a Scorpion’s nature to sting, and Water’s nature to make things wet, so it is my nature — a Monk’s nature — to save.”

That’s not the exact version I was told originally, but close enough.