I have to write and thank Tom (I think) for the recent post in which he suggested that at a certain point in one's evol- ution it was possibly more accurate to think of desires as 'appreciation' than it was to think of them as desires. I got a real taste of that yesterday.
I drove to Sommieres, a bigger town near the one I'm living in, because they have a market on Saturday mornings and there is a cafe there where I love to sit and watch the world go by. After all, I am on record as believing that the sidewalk cafe is the pinnacle of Western civilization, and I just wanted to sit in one and watch the newly-arrived crowd of tourists go by for a while. This is Unc's idea of a good time. :-) Anyway, the population around here essentially doubled yesterday, with most of the French taking the entire month of August off and a great number of them coming down to this area for their vacations. Naturally, at least half of them are women. Even more naturally, a lot of them, being French, are *attractive* women. I am not averse to attractive women. So I was in lecher heaven, just sitting there and watching hundreds -- nay, thousands -- of beautiful women walk by my cafe table in their summer dresses. But after a while it struck me that I really *wasn't* being lecherous. Almost *none* of these women provoked any kind of desire in me. I wasn't watching them out of a sense of lust, or because I wanted to have sex with any of them, or even because I wanted to meet any of them. I was just watching. And *appreciating*. It really wasn't an issue of desire, or of wanting anything from these passing women. I just found myself *appreciating* them, without having to form any judgments about them or "rank" them or think about them much at all. A thin, lithe woman would walk by, and I would appreciate her. A big, fat woman would walk by, and I would appreciate her. The morning turned into just one big Appreciation Fest, me sitting there appreciating the endless variety of creation as creation paraded its creativity past my table. It was really cool. And I don't think it would have been as cool if Tom hadn't mentioned what he did about appreciation the other day. That helped to put the whole experience in focus for me. So thanks... To subscribe, send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Or go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ and click 'Join This Group!' Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
