"I'm a Buddhist.  It will come to me."

I found myself saying this this evening to someone very significant in my life.  We were in exchange re:career and love.  I just didn't understand that we were talking re:my own sense of totality.  My kindness, my fears, limitations that I possibly may put upon myself...

I further replied that I am first generation immigrant.  It wasn't just my grandparents or parents who immigrated here.  I myself have immigrated here from a foreign third world country.  I have seen the poverty.  I have seen children and women beaten by men acceptably.  I know what I'm fighting.  I am very aware of my rage and where it stems from.  I am a man and all I've know most of my life in a male dominated culture is the oppression that men put on themselves, their women and their children either ignorantly or intentionaly.  

May I be saved because even as I am writing this I feel the quickening of my own heart.  I am Buddhist.  It will come to me.  My salvation.  May I be patient, kind, charitable, empathic and able to nurture my own self above all.  

I feel beaten by my own inspiration at times.  I fill quickly with tears.  At times I have it in me to keep them from further filling past the lids of my own eyes.  In the times they fall past, I am not further enraged, I am not further weakened or strengthened at the realization that it is all me that is falling down, falling free...  

Free.

"My heart is as open as the sky."

"Know the peace that wants nothing."

I am human and I relish.