Connections

I’ve been having a bit of internet fatigue later, not getting as much pleasure from time online as I used to. But no matter how fatigued, you’ve gotta love the internet when this kind of thing happens:

Over the weekend, I got a mail from Ahjan Amaro, who is a monk at Abayagiri, a Buddhist monastery in California, asking if he could use my “security poetry” which he’d found on Boing-Boing. He needed some no-language poetry to use in a chapter of a novel he’s working on, based on Buddhist legends.

I was very happy for him to use my poem, which I’d made up for fun from Google word verification words. When I wrote back to him, I mentioned that I’d been taught by two people from the Thai forest tradition he comes from, and that they run a hermitage here in South Africa. It turns out that he knows only two people in South Africa, and it’s these two, whom he has known since the ’70s, when they were students of Ajahn Chah, a master of the Thai Forest tradition.

It’s it amazing that my amusement at the random Google word veri’s should result in this kind of connection, almost one year later? I’m tempted to say something like “freaky”, but it’s really not freaky at all, it’s lovely.

Click here to read the first 10 chapters of Ajahn Amaro’s book, and keep your eyes out for chapter 19, where my security poetry will be making a guest appearance.