Peter's gone.A friend of mine, Peter, just died. Admittedly not a close friend, but a friend nonetheless.
Details are vague at the moment, but the gist of it is, he was on a motorcycle trip in Lithuania, travelling to various Buddhist centres there to teach, and he crashed. He leaves behind a wife here in Hamburg, and numerous friends.
We met at KIBI, a Buddhist school in Delhi, in 1998. I arrived and sat down in a room full of strangers. Pete was the only one to talk to me for a while, and soon offered me a bottle of horrible Indian whiskey, which I remember being called "Monkey Piss" (I'm certain that wasn't the actual name, but can't remember what was). When I got up to go out for a smoke, a number of faces soured, but Pete came with me, and bummed a smoke, asking that I not mention it to his girlfriend. The next morning he said he'd had a dream with me in it: we were driving around the US, together with our Lama, on a beautiful day.
Coincidentally I ended up six months later living in Hamburg Germany, Pete's home. We saw each other regularly, he bummed smokes off of me occasionally, and our lives went on, though not often overlapping much. He married the girlfriend, I married mine, we both went through various job challenges, and both spent too much time in front on computers. I can't say I ever really got to know him any better than on that first warm night in Delhi, but it's a shock and a loss that he's gone.
Cliché, but...There were too many posters seen on too many walls in the late 80's. But damn it all,
he was da masta. Sometimes something gets so popular it's just hard to like it any more, but cliché doesn't mean crap. Certainly
sometimes, but not always.
KarmapaHeard of the Karmapa? You know, that young lama who escaped the nasty Chinese to hang out in India with the Dalai Lama in India. Well, there's something the world press
isn't telling you.
