Grasping, Craving, Averting Seaweed

Craving:  A powerful desire for something.
Aversion: Opposition or repugnance of mind; fixed dislike.

In the second noble Truth, the Buddha tells us that the root of all suffering is attachment, and said that the fundamental cause of suffering is "the attachment to the desire to have (craving), the attachment to the desire not to have (aversion) and the attachment to ignorant views".

I would like to speak to this second noble Truth but I should probably mention the first, third, and fourth noble Truths.
1.  Y'all gonna suffer.
2.  See Above.
3.  Y'all can stop suffering in 29 easy steps.
4.  Here's how y'all can stop the damn suffering, already.

See how I am as an alcoholic?  Right to the second step.  Screw the first step.  The First Step doesn't apply to me despite the fact that it's the first step.  I'm in a hurry to get this shit done.

I feel like I've gotten past possessing a lot of stuff.  I definitely spend my time and money on experiences today.  Having things is a burden - it costs real money and real mental square feet.  I have a friend who has contracted with his Dumpster Guy to have a large dumpster parked in his front driveway and he's throwing a lot of junk into it, some of it possibly hazardous, and it's attracting attention.  People wonder what you have in your house that you have to put into a dumpster, one with a 1.5 ton limit.  THAT'S a lot of stuff.

I wonder if my church upbringing has spurred my gradual transformation to a stuff-lite world?  You know - the whole idea that this life is a dark and messy bog that one has to slog through to get to a wonderful afterlife and avoid a really, really awful afterlife.  Might be part of it, this idea that what we're doing is simply prep work and consequently isn't that important.

I wonder if my late-in-life interest in Buddhism and other Eastern philosophies has something to do with it, too?  The above quote would suggest that this is so.  Quit grasping.  Quit holding on.  The Buddha says that it's all going to go: all of it, your stuff, your family, your friends, your health, your life.

I don't have to wonder if the Big Migration from the Midwest to California has something to do with it.  I had a big house - three floors and a full basement - and there was stuff everywhere, mountains of stuff, avalanches of stuff, oceans of stuff, much of it outdated or redundant.  We got rid of half of our possessions and still brought twice as much as we needed, so out that stuff went, too, after the expense and effort of packing it up and hauling it 3,000 miles.

Today I'm lean and mean.  Things are used regularly or they're gone.  What does the stuff matter after I'm gone?  Dust in the wind.  Dust to dust.  

People ask: What is in the dust?

Dust in homes, offices, and other human environments contains small amounts of plant pollen, human and animal hairs, textile fibers, paper fibers, minerals from outdoor soil, human skin cells, burnt meteorite particles, and many other materials which may be found in the local environment.

Gross.

I like that "burnt meteorite particles" made the list.  I didn't see that coming.

People also ask: How is dust created?  What is dust made up of?  Dust is made up of a variety of things from blowing dirt, bacteria, pollen, pollutants, molds, animal dander, hair, decomposing insects, fibers, dryer lint, insulation, dust mites and their excrement, and mostly, skin flakes that humans shed.  

I see - not a mention of meteorite particles in this definition but decomposing bugs and - strangely enough - dryer lint.  How big a category can dryer lint be?  

I've drifted a bit here.  I wanted to conclude with the experience of the big fire that raged quite close to our house a couple of years back.  Although we were not in a mandatory evacuation zone we were in a voluntary one, so we thought it wise to put together a Fire Bag of absolutely essential shit in case the wind blew the fire our way.  It was weird walking around the house, huge columns of black smoke billowing into the sky from burning structures half a mile away, and trying to estimate what would be in a trunk's worth of essentials.  Frankly, there wasn't that much that I found interesting.  I know if my pictures and travel trinkets and what not had burnt up I would have been upset but I wasn't upset enough to consider boxing it up.

Here today - gone tomorrow.  Maybe gone later on this afternoon.