Quasi Monk
I hate doing this.
I do live a somewhat monk like existence. My apartment is a very plain, one bedroom model in a slightly grungy, but safe complex, in the Vietnamese section of town, as it happens.
I have no trouble honoring the five precepts because I live a pretty boring life by inclination. In high school, I hung out with the stoners because they were the most interesting group, and I smoked my share of marijuana. Actually, slightly less than my share because I never found it as fascinating as some of my friends and I was too paranoid to get stoned at school as much as they did.
I have more than one story about vomiting in public as the result of having drunk too much alcohol. I hardly drink at all now. I took a bottle of wine to my parents’ house for Christmas, but I took it partly because it had been sitting in my apartment for months, undrunk.
The point of this post, however, is that I also have a monk like income, slightly above the poverty level for Oklahoma, where the cost of living is low, so the poverty level is low.
I am still working on Red State Vihara and have no intention of giving up, but any donation you make will contribute to that project insofar as I’m the one who thought it up, so helping me is helping the project.
