To have OR to hold? That [ought to be] the question

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"Lust awakens the desire to possess; and that awakens the intent to murder."
~ The Old Man, Spring Summer Fall Winter

"What goes through your mind when you see an attractive [person]?"
This question was posed to me last weekend. I saw it coming but was still caught off guard--well I guess I wasn't on guard, which is a good thing, I guess. I wasn't thinking about my asexuality the whole time; and looking around at the group, it seemed inappropriate and, frankly, unnecessary to raise a stink about asexuality and my asexuality. Instead, I talked about attraction.

Positive Metaphors: Asexy, Beautiful Garden

This post started as a secondary meme while I was reading the Shades of Gray post Positive Metaphors: Chandelier Culture in which they discuss the asexual community and lack of positive metaphors for the asexual experience. I agree with just about everything in the post. In fact, I wrote a post at Humble Thy Self about the stereotyping that goes on about differentiation in lifestyle, comparing the queer, or, alternormative movement with the tragedy of the 'confused mulato'.

Metta, duh!

"May all beings be happy!"

Wow, how could I have written about anything besides metta in a buddhist blog concerning relationships between sentient beings? Metta is a difficult word despite its simple essence. Good luck trying to find it in the dictionary because it's probably not in there. This is because metta is a concept in Buddhist language- but generally a word that emerged from Eastern thought- that is difficult to translate into English. The closest translation is hybrid word: lovingkindness. I'll take care not to give a concrete definition of this word as most eastern languages, modern and ancient, for example, Pali and Sanskrit depend on vagueness and open-ended sentence structures.

Erasure II: An History

Buddha had a penis

During first year at university, I had the opportunity to fraternize with a person of religious affiliation not of my own. They aided me with some direct experience. At the time I was practicing Buddhism heavily and, in retrospect, I am glad our union was not a single drunken experience. That would have be doubly troublesome. It was a challenge to [maintain romance] in the relationship and it withered within a few months.

Erasure: No-Self

"Our thoughts are not our own"

Toward the end of high school, I was intent on clearing and distilling my mind. Some very important events led me to the realization that life, mine and that of most of the people in my environment, isn't ours. It was as though reality was spread upon a stilted foundation. My ideas about reality crystallized over the course of the Buddhism unit of my modern world history class instructed by the man with the white beard and ponytail, Mr. B.

Awakening (There was a crack in the consciousness!)

If you want something, others may want it, too.

This is what the old man said. A monk, a recluse and his young boy live life in a river valley surrounded by mountains miles away from the city. As Buddhists--

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Hello everyone. My name is Raymo. I am first-gen Ghanaian-American. And I am an asexual.