hey, i know a guy who used to hang out with you a lot years and years back. boy, have i heard some fucked up stories. one about you guys at a party in a house and the cops comin', under-aged kids, guns, fireworks, and destruction.

hoo haw.

So, how about the poll? You're asking about ghosts and spirits? OK. Well, that's complicated territory for me. I grew up with a pretty strong sense of ghosts. It's weird, that might have been the most lasting effect on me of my parents' whole Zen thing, the ghosts. Buddhism is full of ghosts. The Hungry Ghosts, they're called, the spirits of struggle and despair and anger and so forth. I always understood them to be remnants of people who died unhappy, but I think that was a child's simplification of a deeper idea. I think the Hungry Ghosts as a concept are supposed to be more the cumulative grief and sorrow and injury of a people, place, or thing, the aftermath of devastation. These things linger. They linger on in all of us, the generations of anger and resentment and spite and bile. We can feel it even if we've long since forgotten the original crime. Our violence outlives us by a good margin.

(arguing for the angels: but what about our joys? They survive us too -- well yes, right, they do, of course they do -- the joys outlast the pain, that's why we're all as good as we are at living together and mostly not killing each other, it's how we got this far, by learning from the anger and learning how to get beyond it)

But the anger is still there, right? Every day. Every wound of every hand on every face or back or belly through how many years and generations, they survive as scars (or scabs, if they're fresher), and they are part of who we are. Those are the ghosts we live with.

We used to collect food for the Hungry Ghosts, at the beginning of every supper. Everyone had to take a crumb off their plate and put it in a small wooden bowl in the middle of the table. It sat there all through the meal. When we were done eating, someone would take the bowl outside and empty it on the ground. There was a real sense of ritual to this, it felt like we were doing something important, even though we also understood it to be entirely symbolic. The closest I ever got to communion, I guess. I always imagined the Hungry Ghosts gathering around like birds waiting to be fed. In the winter, when it would be dark already after dinner, I'd run out and scatter the food in the snow as fast as possible. The dark always seemed like it was full of ghosts. (yeah, I was scared of the dark for a long time, too)

I've known a lot of people who have had some sense of ghosts. Everyone describes them differently, but they're mostly talking about the same things.