Zen Buddhists believe in an "awakening". An awakening is when you remove the scales from your eyes and begin to see yourself as your real self. No contrived ideas about who you think you are, or who you think someone else thinks you are, or who you think Phil Jackson thinks you are... just the real you.
I had an awakening about a month ago.
It starts with sourdough bread. And actually, it ends with sourdough bread. My wife had told me of a type of sourdough bread she wanted to make one night. It involved the squeezing of grapes into the dough and letting the dough ferment for a few days before baking. Sounds great, right?
So she made the bread a few days later. This is where the story gets interesting. The next day, I was sitting in my cubicle at work eating a sandwich on this sourdough bread, and I was just saying, "Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm..." as I savored this delicious bread. My boss asked what was so good. So I began to tell him about this bread. This is where it gets more interesting.
I recall my retelling of the bread-making process going something like this:
"To start, she squoze the grapes..."
My boss stopped me there. "Squoze?"
"Yeah. She squoze the grapes..."
My boss stopped me again. "Squoze?"
"Yeah. She squoze the grapes..."
By this point, my boss was laughing. "Squoze? Squoze ain't no real word, y'all."
"Oh yes it is, I've said it since I was a kid. There's no other way to say the past-tense of 'squeeze'. What do you want me to say, 'squeezed'?"
After consulting three dictionary-type websites, the so-called word "squoze" was smitten, or 'smote', to the ground. In a big, bloody heap. And I was left feeling like a... (what is a nice way to say 'redneck'?)
This was my Awakening experience. It was just as amazing and peaceful an experience as I had read about. It was an out-of-body experience. I truly felt as if I was floating in the air, seeing myself from the outside in. As the redneck I really am.
