My mother lives in Bali so we only see each other once or twice a year.  She had been in Paris for the last three weeks to visit her only son…  Though I think I’m an adult now, it’s an under-appreciated luxury to have the protective aura of parents around your world.  She left today and I miss her already.

I couldn’t sleep at all last night.  As I looked out the window, the eerie moonlight basked the courtyard in a pale whitish hue.  I I took a picture of what I saw and things fell into place:

A Blue moon is a full moon that is not synchronized with regular Gregorian calendar months.  Most years have twelve full moons which occur approximately every month, but in addition to those twelve full lunar cycles, each calendar year contains an excess of roughly eleven days. The extra days accumulate, so that every two or three years (on average about every 2.7154 years^[1]) there is an extra full moon. The extra moon is called a “blue moon.”  (Wikipedia)

The Killing Moon by Echo & The Bunnymen

In the Abrahamic religions, there is a constant struggle between good and evil.  But paradoxically, the main causes of evil in this world has been human attempts to eradicate evil, or what has been viewed as evil.  In contrast, Buddhism emphasizes enlightenment and ignorance.   One way to summarize the basic Buddhist teaching is that we suffer, and cause others to suffer, because of greed, hatred or delusion (i.e. the Three Roots of Evil).

The hard part is knowing when that level of enlightenment (or knowledge, conscience, maturity) has been reached when one can transform greed into generosity, hatred into kindness, delusion into wisdom.  I conclude therefore that the struggle between good and evil is not an easily graduated one.  You have to forget your personal references to see all the points of references in the world that can help you see universal greed, hatred or delusion.  So I guess, I’ll keep concentrating on myself by paradoxically forgetting about myself…