Buddha's birthday

I took this photo with a terrible disposable camera, but I still like the weirdness of it.

We celebrated Buddha's birthday today. We burned incense and poured sweet tea on a Buddha statue head and we floated flowers in the sweet tea. I really dislike religious ritual. I don't look on Buddha as a god, but just an astonishingly sensible man, so why am I pouring sweet tea over his 2500+ year old head? Being astonishingly sensible is a rare attribute.
It was good to have a crowd at the zendo and meet new people including some people who came up from Mexico. Then we all went and had lunch at some rowdy local cafe. They put us in the banquet room. After a while a covey of post church Methodists were also herded in. The Methodists were very restrained and polite while the Buddhists tended to exhuberance, except the Mexican people who had good, formal manners. When I say the Methodists were restrained, I am not referring to their dress. I thought dressing up for church died out in 1959, but these Methodists were quite eye catching. One man in particular caught my eye. He looked like a retired junior high principal or a real estate salesman, but he was garbed almost entirely in knock down drag out pure and simple yellow. I seem to remember that his entire suit was yellow, though it may only have been his jacket. His pants might have been beige. His tie was matching yellow. His shirt I think was white. Methodists, of course, do not sit for hours at a time in the full lotus position, so they can wear tight skirts and high heels. Our group at least, seems to find it less distracting from meditation to wear dull colors. We could not compete. Yesterday a Walmart employee mistook me for a man. Said employee had a sort of crest of fat growing, hump-like, from the back of her neck to her butt, but you couldn't mistake her for a man. I went home and looked at myself in the mirror and decided that I needed to make some forlorn attempt at prettying myself up. Look more Methodist perhaps.