The Buddha’s smile without a smile

I dreamed again. These days, it seems that my brain absorbs a lot of data, and since it is slow to digest, it stirs them up overnight. When I woke up this morning, first of all, the very sad smile of a Buddha that my mind diligently corrected.

So I still dreamed, so I again manipulated reality. And now I only think of this Buddha who understood that you shouldn’t be sad without being hilarious. Neutrality always tastes better because it resists illusions, but still lets the heart speak.

Which brings me to Friday. My friends on the ground floor, and I listened to a report on a Pacific island struggling for survival. On the one hand, there were those old men who stuck to their traditions, which had been proven time and again, but which were also painfully tested, scorned and above all challenged. On the other hand, there were their sons who were determined to make a difference by, for example, installing engines on their boats so that they could fish further away since the fish no longer come close to the coast. It must be said that in a relatively young past, whales used to come to wander around their island and the old people, with their oars and harpoons alone, managed to feed the village. These small people, the lamaholots, live on an ungrateful island (Lamalera), but their tenacity, very human, has firmly anchored them on this land. Their ancestors have long wandered from island to island, and they, for a few generations, had finally found the precarious balance of a people with a simple life.

Now the old people are sad because their harpoons are no longer catching anything, mainly since the inhabitants of the other islands fished brazenly with dynamite, which scared and killed all the fish. But the young people, with their rudimentary engines, remain confident, especially since the blasters have been punished. Fish, on the other hand, no longer have confidence and they have to catch something else: dolphins, rays and other fragile fish.

Nothing can be taken for granted, since the region is also destined to become a protected ecological zone (as we can imagine, it was the people of the North, in their large cities and universities, who decided to do so, furious and worried to see the dolphins thus hunted and the rays decimated, even if the few inhabitants only take what they need from the ocean to feed themselves. It seems that this is already too much for the ecosystem of the place.

That is why, among other things,—I am not yet saying everything about my life—my Buddha has difficulty remaining impassive. My Buddha is pouting, one might say. Reality always seems to prefer demons to good intentions. It is necessary to fight continually, patiently solidify the dam threatened by the too strong spray.

Which brings me to this other report, seen a few weeks ago of a man and his cabin, located on a sandbank and that the sea threatens to engulf at the time of the high tides...

But I’ll stop here. The stories are endless. I seem to see all of them by lifting the corner of my lips a little, by not sulking my pleasure of living and observing.