Falling into a Mud Puddle in Pisa

Little note: They serve vinegar and oil instead of butter in Italy. Also, straws are rare.

I feel better today. We got up early and took the train to Pisa. The Italian countryside has the same fractal distrubition as Los Angeles.There are cultivated sunflowers everywhere. There are a lot of decrepid places which we passed. Italy seems to be slowly degenerating from a lack of enforced rules.
We arrived after an hour later, to discover the tower was far away. I slipped in a mud puddle and fell. Yes, I got covered in it. Thankfully, there are a lot of taps in Italy, but there was no way to take the dirt off my white skirt which covered it the entire day.
My dad, mom, and I decided to walk to the tower. Pisa is very broken down, it seems, besides a few areas. My aunts and cousin were shopping. We saw the tower and my mom decided to join them. My dad and I bought tickets and saw the inside of the cathedral and battisere, which were beautiful. The architectural style is very different from Rome; less clutured but still involving many paintings. The ceiling was filled with gold flowers. I really want more time with those paintings. When I am an old, grumpy woman I'm going to come back to every major architectural wonder and museum and gaze at each painting for at least fifteen minutes each. The Battisere was simple, though coloums were carved with great skill. The simple altar was solomn brass.
My mom wanted to know why I like the churches so much. Besides the fact that beauty is not determined by religion, this art is created by the masters of the period using the full extent of their craft to celebrate what was most important to them. Religious art is sort of a doorway into the cultural subconcious and a look into how people viewed their idols and icons, another doorway into that mysteriosness of being human. The medieval icons I saw in retrospect seems to be respective of the period; technically proficent and yet flat, though this changed in later periods.
I wonder if taking pictures instead of writing those thousand words is detrimental in some way to eloquency? Anyways.
We though we had lost mom but I found her, the bus passed us by, and we all took a taxi back to the train which was not air conditioned this time and let us roast whenever it stopped. The train goes very fast, faster than Amtrak.
We returned, ate pizza, and my mom, dad, and I saw Il Duemo. The inside is actually fairly simple, with soaring ceilings and pretty windows. The outside is, well, complicated, full of green and white and statues and gold. Gorgeous. We wondered around for a bit on the streets and then came back to the hotel.

I may not be able to post tommorow.

The I in the Me

Dev Patel and Frieda Pinto are dating in real life, which I personally find really awwwwwww. I wish them luck.

I was just attempting to mediate, because, like Yoga, I've only ever heard of the benefits of doings so, and the few times I seriously have attempted to it was a worthwhile experience. The problem is that the burning thought that appears in my mind when doing so is questioning the benefit of letting go of the "I". That "I", the most objective, rational part of myself, has in fact saved me on several occasions, has helped me make the best decisions, and overall has proved indispensable in my life. Maybe the universe can make better decisions for me? I don't know, but in the portion of my life that I spent without that part of myself I felt as though I was drowning in emotions and sensations. Perhaps if I spend more time meditating I can discover the meaning of this. Enlightenment, to me, is a paradox: joining with the universe and the ultimate discovery of the self.

It's sort of saddening that this type of talk is generally attributed to stoners and lost, trendy people nowadays.

I wonder how much of meditation is beneficial because of the thought processes involved, the physical processes involved, and the placebo affect involved.

Musings and Roly-polys

"You are what you think. You are what you do."
-The Dhammapada

I think that people forget the first part of this quote too often in our society. To me, it's very important, and symbolizes something I strive for.

I helped my dad garden today. I caught a blue pill bug and was going to keep it but it expended so much effort getting out of the container I put it in that I let it go. I love pill bugs, in part because I believe they are the only crustaceans to live on land. There is something so cool about them and it's great that they are so common. One day I want an ant farm for pill bugs.
Dirt is good for the body, good for the soul. I sang "Sunshowers" in the shower after being covered in it. Feeding stray cats is good for their kittens. Roses are fractalian shapes that are present in a wide variety of natural objects. Maybe the soul is a fractal, an overarching pattern present in chaos. I should study more now.

Pleasure Reading

"..For hunger is death..."
-Brihad-Aranyaka Upanishad

What an interesting statement. I can imagine an all-consuming nothingness, a hunger reduced to hunger alone. But is this to say that our hunger, our drive, the thing which motivates us to enrich our lives, is in itself a taste of death? I cannot imagine that "hunger" is only being used to describe humanity's longing for food.
It's difficult to put my thoughts on this quote into words.

Thoughts from the Train

Sometimes I wonder whether art and religion are strange bloopers from humanity’s need to generalize. When I pass the sandstone cliffs I sometimes find myself almost seeing faces in them, seeing how beautiful they are and perhaps putting in a carve there, a carve there. I wonder why it took so long for the shapes we find so beautiful in nature to become accepted as art.

Something I Don't Get

People who are perfectly tolerant of other's religions, but then go on a rant about how certain things reasonable inside of a normal human psyche and conception are immoral when they see others doing them.
So, it is not ok for people to practice these things, such as living together, because you don't believe in it solely due to your religion, but you claim to be tolerant?
An eternal question: If you truly believe that your way is the only way to heaven, can you be tolerant, ultimately?
I don't know, never feeling this way myself, and I certainly am not going to judge all devoutly religious people who believe this in my uncertainty. It's just something I wonder about sometimes.