Hey, looka this!

Someone just sent me this photo for the paper, and it looks very much like what I'm envisioning for my building! Which I really am going to start actually constructing tomorrow, now that the site is cleared and leveled. I'll get to work right after the 7 a.m. (that's SEVEN a.m.) wrap meeting I have to attend tomorrow morning (tomorrow being SATURDAY!) to go over what worked and what didn't for the Independence Day parade and celebration, of (and in) which I am an organizer, volunteer and participant.

I don't write much about this part of my life here because it's a small town and I don't wanna be recognized ... but I do a fair amount of this kind of thing. Organizing old-fashioned parades, picnics, art shows and fundraisers, volunteering for various traditional town events, etc. etc. It makes me feel very DIY, very hands-on, very can-do. Very American.

One of these days I want to write about my take on the whole America thing. My personal kind of patriotism, which mainly consists of a deep love for what I think Bob Dylan called "the old, weird America," back before mass media, when everything was local and homemade and people pretty much did their own thing – not as a reaction against mainstream taste or values, but because it was what they liked and were capable of.

The book I'm reading contains a sentence I read the other day along the lines of, "The genius of Buddhism is its recognition that much of our unhappiness begins with our belief in a fixed personal identity." I'll be coming back to this, too, because identity is one of my huge issues and I feel like I'm just now starting to get a glimmer of a hint of a possibility of finding a comfortable way to sit with that idea – that there is no such thing as a fixed identity, and that that is actually a wonderfully liberating thing to realize. I think somehow this might have been easier to achieve in a world without television, movies, magazines and all other media specifically designed to make you question whether you really are okay just exactly as you are right now.

In case there's any doubt – You are. Perfectly okay, just exactly as you are right now. Look yourself in the eye in the mirror right this minute and say it! And believe it.

It really is okay to love yourself just exactly as you are right now.