Inner

There is so much pain in this worldly life. Some days I feel so overwhelmed. Money, relationships, work, children, driving, cooking, cleaning, commercials, computers, iPhones, politics, crime, injustice, the clock... not enough time, not enough money, not enough peace, not enough humanity in the cold individualism that is this culture.

And I just haven't been very inspired to write lately.

I feel like words have left me lately. Someone asks me a question or involves me in a conversation and my mind goes blank. I just feel like being quiet. It takes too much effort to try to think of things to say sometimes. All my secret aspirations of becoming known as a writer and/or teacher just seem so ridiculous today. I feel way too caught up in my own inner world sometimes and I'm always changing my mind about how involved I really want to be in the outer world.

On and off throughout my life I have had the aspiration of becoming a nun or at least doing some great spiritual thing with my life. When I was in Catholic grade school, I wanted to be a Catholic sister. But then I decided I wanted to get married and have children. I got married without children, got divorced and decided I wanted to join the Peace Corp and never get married again. But instead I decided to get a job and make money. In the corporate world I met a man and decided I still wanted to be married and have children. So I got married and had children. Then I found Buddhism and realized that I would like to be a Buddhist nun. But I already had obligations that I had chosen so I practiced as best I could as a layperson. The changed person I became certainly contributed to the divorce that followed.

So here I am, divorced, with children, living the best lay Buddhist life I know how. Certainly far from living like a monastic. So many worldly demands I must keep up with.

My kids are young - 5 and 7. It's going to be awhile before they grow up and I can run 0ff to the monastery. But would I really want to run off to the monastery even then? Desire for sex and companionship is still much too strong in me now. And when my kids are grown, I suspect that I will still desire that. Even though the world is harsh and seems irrelevant to me sometimes - disenchantment perhaps is a better word to describe how I feel about the world sometimes - I am still strongly pulled by the world and want to experience it. I'm not ready to give up the little pleasures of the world anytime soon. I enjoy my worldly delights.

Still, I couldn't help but well up when I read this story about a 68 year-old woman who was recently ordained as a Buddhist nun. I just figured that once I hit 50 I can forget about getting ordained. How fair is that to live your whole life enjoying worldly pleasures and then head off to the monastery to enjoy a free retirement to contemplate spiritual things to one's heart's content? But maybe it isn't really about fairness. Maybe it is more about ripeness. Some are ripe at age 7, some at 68. Who can judge what is right or not?

Perhaps I am in my longing-to-be-a-nun kick because I feel so world weary lately. A meditation retreat probably would ease this a bit. I'm overdue.

I am not ripe for monastic life. I would rather have a life-long companion. But if I outlive my companion, perhaps I will become ripe then and renounce the world at last.

http://www.tampabay.com/news/religion/article1143430.ece