Cryptic My A*^%$!

I'm not finding this cryptic crossword stuff funny. The brain is designed to think in a particular direction. This is not the tendency when doing these types of puzzles. As I stare at the clues with my dyslexic mind's-eye, i find myself tensing and untensing, flailing in a blustery stirring of crazed pretend-words. What is a maenad, damn it?! How am I suppose to know other languages? This word is not allowed in scrabble!

(The Clue was: Mother knocked over Scandinavian--she's a crazy woman!)

So it is with my limits. I set them on my own. I have bound myself to a finite world and refused to stretch my imagination farther than I can bear. How have I become so confined? I was never like this before.

A man once asked his teacher the answer to a simple question:

When will I know if I have reached enlightenment?

His teacher smiled and replied, "When you believe that you have reached enlightenment, then you are farther away than when you began your journey there."

How will I ever know if I can solve these crosswords?

Rampant Desire

Today I sat in water that spilled on my front seat of my car from my water bottle. As I stood at work with no clothes into which to change, begging a young woman to borrow a hair dryer to being an arduous process, I felt frutration at my desire to be clothed in dry pants. As I stood burning up in the restroom with the hot air not doing the job, I invented a new machine in my mind. I realized at that moment, most good inventions come about based on need. However, many more these days are based on want...just pure desire.

In our illusion of separation from God or The Divine Spirit or Krsna or Allah or (Insert Name), we create and recreate desires that are not quite what we are looking for.

A chocolate cookie can be utterly satisfying for a moment, an instant...but just like a newly opened birthday gift, the thrill of anticipation is gone once our eyes and mouth taste the sweetness.

Many prophets throughout the ages tell us to pray for what we desire and it shall come. Few ask us to accept that our desires will never be fulfilled. But who asks us to bask in the anticipation, to revel in our needs and wants? Who asks us to make ourselves rejoice at just the wanting?