Mountain flower in black-and-white

The idea's just taken off: that every bad thought I'd ever had about other people will be visited upon me at some point in my own life.

Such a fragile, silly construct, I know, but there it is on the front page of my consciousness like a Republican presidential candidate. It just keeps popping up, this idea, out of nowhere.

Not karma exactly, and not not karma. More an inherited Christian crowd-control technique, I suppose, than anything else, with trace amounts of Buddhism.

In any case the idea's so much a part of my consciousness now that the necessity of separating from it, the struggle, that is, to do so, governs a great deal of my individual and social behavior.