Zen & the Art of Wall Mounting a Plasma TV

Tea, practice, GORGEOUS day! I can barely contain myself!

The repalcement TV came today. Jeeze is that thing big. We couldn’t get the size we’d had before Rita blew it up- or I should say we blew it up watching Rita. Isn’t that a hoot? We watched a hurricane that hit us on TV. Pathetic. The size and opulence of these plasmas is embarassing. We don’t’ even watch that much TV. But it looks so cool. How lame am I? So much for Zen, eh? Back to the zafu! Back to the zafu! Speaking of opulence, we started tentatively looking at new homes in the Heights. Jiminy Crickets, could they be building them bigger? Almost 4000 sq feet standard. Gak. Who needs that much room? Not us 2. When it is time, right house will appear for us.

Coaching rocked today. I love Mozart!

Power walk with D at M Park. Delight!

Practice.

Evening…ahhh…

Yesterday's Wondrous Ordinary Day

Another glorious Texas winter day today. I wish this house didn’t have a roof.

Tea, practice, tea, practice, tea, zazen, putsing in the garden, practice, practice, workout. Dave and I both working away at what we do. Awed by the intoxication of the mundane.

For 24 hours I’ve been simmering black beans in the crockpot. In case you didn’t know, black beans take FORVER to cook no matter how long they’ve been soaked. But they are like buttah, now!

“…Buddhism is just the real world, which can open just relying upon the practice. Without practicing Zazen there is no Buddhism. At the same time, however, if there were the practice of Zazen, we can easily open the the World of Buddhism at once, and this is the benevolence of Gautama Buddha. Therefore Master Dogen proclaimed…"This Rule of the Universe is abundantly present in each human being, but if we do not practice it, it does not manifest, and if we do not experience it, it cannot be realized. When we let go, it has already filled the hands; how could it be defined as one or many? When we speak, it fills the mouth; it has no restriction in any direction." - Gudo NISHIJIMA

Possum Spot

I love Sundays
IloveIloveIloveIlovey Sundays
And especially today’s I can’t believe I am up so darn early to see this unusual fog morning
With my love still slumbering quietly away from impatient daybreak cats
And I am visiting the possum spot
The curved white stone ridge of a garden bed

Backing up to the ch-chainy chain-liked (I meant linked) fence we share with Harry & Allan

Filled with I don’t know whatallwhat plants- but for sure crepe a myrtle (that doesn’t bloomy bloom bloom so well in the shade back here) and that really really coolcool sitting on its sideways side big terra cotta pot brimming with begonias
Where we left out last night a he enjoyed it! Red red grapefruit
And he even ate a few grape tomatoes (or just squooshed them with his little possumy feets)
Though I imagine a night Christmas possum

(cuz he wuz the Christmas eve late night we spotted him possum)

Like himself likes the yummy overripenness sweetest sweet sweety-pie fruits we leave for him best
Especially bananas
Those are gone on a foggy morning like today
Peel and all

At the Corner of Fourth and Walnut

Watchful musical
Whooshing - the potter crafts
ever so beautiful imperfect
warbled edges
earth and water
spinning unspinning
holding and emptying
fire

then coolness

from clay to tea

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I’m certainly no philosopher, have no interest in being a conversationalist, nor a debater, and have even less interest in making a point about anything, proving my point, nor defending my stance, but I have been reading so much tripe (and not so much tripe) about enlightenment lately, I just have to say: There is no such thing as enlightenment. There. That is my .02 cents. And if that parrots’ Brad Warner’s words, than so be it. It also happens to be my experience. All the words that are enlisted to explicate enlightenment are of no use. You either have the experience of being in the world lock-stock-and-barrel, or you don’t. And it does take practice to develop awareness, and to not walk around asleep all the time. Justin’s Ordinary Extraordinary blog has a nice entry today: ‘So we end up with a picture of all these creatures walking around an entirely physical universe, but with little subjective bubble-worlds in their heads (or above them or somewhere else or nowhere at all).’

It is utterly ridiculous that the non-dualitic teachings of Buddhism would set up a have-and have-not situation. I suppose there-in lies the lovely paradox and the power of the philosophy: we are all enlightened and yet we are not because we don’t know we are! Hee! Hee!

I’ll let someone else who knows what they are doing express this far, far better. My pal G sent me the excerpt from Thomas Merton, and it about says it all:

"In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. The whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream. Not that I question the reality of my vocation, or of my monastic life: but the conception of "separation from the world" that we have in the monastery too easily presents itself as a complete illusion .... [W]e are in the same world as everybody else, the world of the bomb, the world of race hatred, the world of technology, the world of mass media, big business, revolution, and all the rest .... This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud .... To think that for sixteen or seventeen years I have been taking seriously this pure illusion that is implicit in so much of our monastic thinking .... I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun."

-Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander 1966
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Have discovered the delight of kale. Who woulda thunk?
Navy bean soup all day in the crockpot.
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Oblique Strategy of the week: What to increase? What to reduce? What to maintain?

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Practice. Still taking it easy vocally, but things seem to be generally fine.

Coaching went really great today. No vox problems and some movement fun. Herr R loved the lyrics I showed him for our budding opera idea. Found out Ms RA just bought a house that has a room with fab acoustics large enough for chamber concerts! Hooray!

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Power Walk at M Park w/D. Brisk and dusky- There are some wondrous early spring trees blooming!

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Pale, pale, scarce and palest gradients of azure
Almost purpling deep line of clouds dropping

Her curtain just shy of the city trees
Cottony dreadlocks twirled entwining the very very only only only !

Tiny slenderlings of indigo-ing down
Increments creeping from one barely blueness to the next
And where they break before the leaves, all illuminated light and and and ! White pinkpink peeks and dazzles
Last moments sighing over the day
Sleepy Sun has kept longer hours than I

Shampoo

Tea and reading.
Starting my day with tea (obviously!) & reading...

Beautiful, glorious sunny cool day.
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Zazen
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Practice. More off-voice work and surprisingly fun and productive movement work.
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Having someone else shampoo your hair is another one of life’s most splendid pleasures! Dee-lish!

Reverse Sky

Sky filled luminescent greys
Bruised afternoon moments
Tied together
One instant borne on the next
Each moment breathing open fissures in the day’s clouds-
Today’s clouds
All light and coldness
Wet and creaming across what I cannot see above
Holding Earth in cupped hands
Molding grey clay opaque
Smooth
Careful watchful keeping this little planet from the Sun
All day
And several

I am sure of it

Jets

Are well above the tender hands of my day
Basking and streaming glossy
In exalted cerulean
Aloft high and fast
Sunward

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Zazen

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In an I have to mode of doing. Uninspired, yet in need of watering my practice, so I am keeping a mental list of I have to stuff to be sure it is accomplished today, and that I least maintain a watering level of involvement in my work..

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Silent practicing. Fairly torturous. Trusting that I am, indeed, getting something out of it. Am working on a lot of fun movement things.
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Workout. Ah…

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I feel that I have duly attended to watering and my I have to-ing.

Oblique Strategy: Reverse

That is a total hoot since I, quite literally, have had to slow down and back-up in many many ways over the last week. I can see now why Eno & Shmidt's Oblique Strategies can sometime be used as an oracle. :)

Presence

What needs to be attended to and that which is head-on in front of me is always in the now if I allow myself to be with it and not on the 10,000 other past-future things monkey-jumping through my mind.

Haiku Kitty

Like my cat who jumps
So surely to the window
Intent on the day

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She sees what I cannot
Her being only doing
No hesitating
Eyes commitment
Spring all

rightness

lightness

speed and wisdom

Her striking swiftness unhurries
She is all here
All now
Only Is
Zen Master Kitty

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I realize I’ve lost balance and didn’t know it. I had not taken the time to honor the intensity of the trip up North, and to allow myself to process that experience. In my attempt to, essentially, nullify the whole thing and return to what I think of as my normal life, I’ve over-done everything. And created yet another set of unbalanced circumstance that have manifested physically.

Yesterday

Keeping a daily journal of noticings over these past few weeks has been powerful and transformational. It puts me squarely in front of my day-to-day minutia, and thus, nose to nose with my reactions to the ever-morphing landscape of life. When I read back over a week’s postings, I feel very disconnected emotionally from most of my writing, almost as though I am reading the thoughts and experiences of a stranger. If I do not identify with these emotional fluctuations in hindsight, why, then do I cling so to them when they are happening?

I am surprisingly inspired when reading over this past week’s posts.

2 Intentions for Journaling:

Reflection: Use some weekend time to re-read my posts.

Acceptance: No editing. I have not, since I began a daily practice of recording my noticings, edited any content. What I find important to write down, stays in print, and I don’t allow myself to delete it later because I don’t like it, am shocked by it, think it’s silly, etc.
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A Little listening practice and a very little singing. My voice is still tired. Must take a day or two off. As soon as I got back from that trip I was like a bat out of hell and just sang way too much :( poop. Lost balance.

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Zazen

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Hmmm….it occurs to me that I may actually be burned out. Hmmm…

Another Day

The sound of the stream is his long, broad tongue;
The mountain, his immaculate body.
These evening's eighty-four thousand verses –
How will I tell them tomorrow? – Dogen Zenji

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Geeze. What a funk I am in.
And I had a hair appointment today and couldn’t make it cuz I forgot the car was in the shop and D in Mexico for the day.

Did a lot of practicing, probably too much. Must break. I think taking that long 10 break put me into a feast or famine mode which I must relax and snap out of.

Zazen
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Oblique Strategy:

Always the first steps

Don’t I know it!

Ugh

Morning:
Lovely tea. Baby Cat is soooooo needy. He wants love, love, love, love, love. I woke up at about 5am and could not get back to sleep. That rarely happens, but ugh, this will be a long day.

Revising and organizing my ever-morphing To the Universe letter.

Afternoon:
Zazen

Coaching with Herr R

Evening:
Very tired. Over-sang. Discouraged. Depleted. Feeling weirdly physically unwell.

Bubble bath. Ok, no go on bubble bath, even after I actually cleaned the tub (good gracious!). The tub does not appear to hold water, and I am just too tired to even care, and have refused my dearest’s assistance in the matter. Plans for a run today scrapped. 6pm: pajamas on.

Cinnamon, ginger and honey tea, made from scratch by boiling fresh ginger and a cinnamon stick. Soothing and splendid...

Swing Wide the Door

Morning:
Tea, reading.

Afternoon:
Short Practice & listening practice.

I love how learning a new song is like unlocking a portal to a new Universe, solving a riddle that opens the gate, placing the last piece to a mysterious puzzle- and a new world opens.
First the aperture is only ajar, and I can barely see light peeking through, and as I am able to swing wider the opening, all manner of treasures and delights are at my disposal: all for me to explore, choose among, taste, touch, wear, languish in, hold, let go…

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Zazen

Vox lesson- most excellent!

Run@Memorial Park with new sneaks. Glorious Day.

On a day like today it is so easy to be all Zen-Blissed out. No emotional challenges. No personal trials. Only beautiful blue sky all windy sunny cloudlessness-ah….I am both me and you, and the sky and wind, and running trail and the water fountain, and the doggies there; and I am at the top of the mountain solitude looking down, I am both what is high and what is low and I can see ‘for miles and miles and miles and miles and miles…’

Being this when I most need it, though, I cannot do- yet.

Evening:
Dave@V-ball

Practice

Zazen

Practice

Well, it sure looks like a heavy practice day, but hasn’t felt like it. I did a lot of listening and some more solving-unlocking of yet another new song. But the neighbor upstairs, who is never, never home, has decided to inhabit her abode this evening, and I can’t very well sing under her without surely driving her nuts. I do hope she is not planning to make a habit of actually living in her apartment.

Veggie Stew in the crockpot.

Watering is Enough

Morning:
Cold, sunny, windy, beautiful. Smells like snow. Tea, cleaning. Reading one of my faves: the comic book Zen Speaks: Shouts of Nothingness by Tsai Chih Chung & translated by Brian Bruya

Afternoon:

Zazen

Practice

Oblique Strategy: Water
Good, cuz that is about all I feel capable of doing today: Trust that:

Watering is Enough

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Harry Potter & The Goblet of Fire! IMAX! Yay!

Rainy Day

Morning:
Balmy, gray day…sky pregnant with rain, but not a drop yet. I love the morning light on cloudy storm days.

Feeling a little tired and disheartened.

Though I am not Christian, I was delighted to find an interview with a favorite writer of mine, theologian Matthew Fox, as well as his own 95 Theses he nailed to the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany last May.

Zazen

Afternoon:
Oblique Strategy for today: Change nothing and continue with immaculate consistency

Practice.
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How to artistically and creatively radically invent/re-invent myself? What would that mean? How to operate both within the traditional marketplace of the music industry and yet be radically innovative in my approach to both the creative side of my work as well as the professional aspect of my art?
With blooming skills, how to inventing a niche or myself. What is that niche? Where is it?

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I am noticing how quickly my inner landscape morphs and changes: minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, etc….New awareness of how I identify with my emotional experience and how I am both and neither my emotional life/thoughts…

Deelish La Fendee lunch.

Practice.

Peppermint & licorice tea.

Evening:
D @V-ball. Yoga for me.
Beautiful pitter-pattering rainy nite, windy, balmy, and even a little thundery. Ah….

Reminder: practice pausing.

French translating.

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On an Ordinary Sunday

Morning:
Weird dreams of monks from watching Cadfael last nite.
Pu-erh tea is an acquired taste. I shall try from time to time. Lovely red color. Very earthy…back to Golden Yunnan in Solstice Cat Cup. Ah….delight!

Zazen.

Afternoon:
Run with D @Memorial Park.
White tea. Quiet Sunday.

I still feel fairly run down and like I am in the process of recovering physically, mentally, and emotionally from that grueling trip.

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If I am a little part of the Universe that the Big Universe is employing to experience Itself, than how can I better serve the Universe in Its experience?

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Late lunch miso experiment an success!:

Sweet White Miso Basil Sauce*:
For a small amount of sauce:
Near equal amounts of tahini & sweet white miso (1 large tablespoon each, a little more miso than tahini, I’d say)
Spring water to thin to desired consistency
Couple squirts of lemon juice
Handful of fresh chopped basil
Heat til smooth and melty

Delish on veggies, in wraps, on pasta! Yeah!

*Based on a recipe from the South River Miso Company

Evening:
Hooray! New running shoes!

Quiet eve at home with my Love and kitties, and a delightful glass of La Crema Pino. Earth rocks.

Accepting the Possible

Last Eve:
Returned home last eve. Long, uncomfortable flight. 8 hours from the time we left for the airport until we stepped across our threshold, exhausted.
Veggie dinner at La Fendee and delightful sleep in our own delicious bed.
Kitties a-plenty.

This Morning:
Delightful home, teas, airing out the house on a cool, sunny, glorious Texas winter morning.
Relaxing Saturday. Grateful to be back into our life.

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From R. Fripp Diary:

Begin with the possible & move gradually towards the impossible. If we wish for the impossible to reach back & draw us towards it, we must undertake what is possible for us. So, what is possible?

What is the function of my practice? The question is intended in a very practical way. Not, because this serves my aim as much as, how & why does this practice serve my aim? That is, what is it about the mechanics of this practice that make it more likely that I may achieve my aim?

Life is too short to take on the unnecessary.

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Afternoon:
Cats napping, D at V-ball.
Workout: weights, squats, abs, a little yoga.

Zazen.

Ah….Practice.

Sounded like someone else singing at first, since I haven’t sang in over week. New appreciation for how much control I actually do have in the use of my instrument. It felt a little like riding a bucking bronco initially: indicative of its inherent power. Surpised and pleased. Welcome challenges, always.

It occurs to me that acceptance may germinate from acceptance of each moment. Accepting the greater circumstances of life is not a bite-sized piece. This moment is a bite-sized piece.

Evening:
Delightful Wholefoods shop with D and experiments with sea veggies! New tea purchase: Pu-erh.

Winter stew simmering in crock pot.

Quiet luscious evening with D & kitties. Such relief….

Heaven & Earth

Mid-Morning:
Mum’s surgery went very well yesterday. She is recovering more swiftly than even expected, so all is on track. Relieved. Tired. Stressy. Emotional nite.

Overwhelmingly challenging to face much of this, having gone through too much hospital horror with my own mother. Dave’s Mum is doing fine, and will undoubtedly recover to run us all ragged with her myriad activities and travels. Having watched my own mother whither and die over the short span of 6 months, has carved a deep chasm of grief in my Spirit- one whose rocky folds, precarious ledges, and expansive promontories I have memorized and befriended. Yet, I am never surprised when an unexpected geyser washes over the landscape. Sometimes memories I thought long dissipated spring forth in welcome tears.

I loathe hospitals, doctors, and medical everything. Flight response in high gear. Sleep is transitory.

Heading home on an afternoon flight tomorrow. Joy of Joys! The furries will be waiting all warm and meowy!

Brigham and Women’s is connected to the Boston Children’s Hospital which is what we walk through from our hotel to get to the adult cardiac care area. Despite the original art by famous children’s illustrators hanging in the halls, the fun neon colored lights suspended from the lobby ceiling, big fish tanks, and the fascinating, hilarious and poignant, enormous perpetual motion installation, it is a terribly heart wrenching place. We stepped outside last eve after dinner for some fresh city air, having been stuffed in these buildings all day (did I say how much I hate the stench of hospitals?), and looking up, we noticed a tower in which the windows had been decorated. Checking it out further, we were dismayed to see that the windows had been drawn on from the inside: big hearts, Christmas trees, snowmen and other fun whimsical child scribble…the windows belonged to children’s hospital rooms, and undoubtedly to kids built far more spirited and courageous than I.
Moving and heart-breaking.

The expanse and diversity of human experience is staggering: the Zillion-fold Expression of the Universe is boundless in Its tragedy and exultation.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy…

Starbucks tea tastes like cardboard.

Evening:
Listening practice.

Peppermint

Morning:
Tummy all a-jumble through the nite.

Ok, the #!*-ing water for tea in the lobby smells like coffee, like it was brewed in a coffee pot or kept in a thermos that had been used for coffee. Oh! The Humanity! Must make plans to move to the Continent. Resorted to throwing a tea bag into a bottled water. I feel like a jonesin’ heroin addict.

Off to take Mum to brunch at Café Soleil and then whisking her to Beantown. Café Soleil is actually Café Sano at Living Earth, the baby Wholefoods we found. But we decided Café Soleil is what all the little veggie restaurants ought to be called.

Evening:
Back from Beantwon. Almost 5 hours getting Mum checked it. All is well and on track. VERY tired, stressy. Another headache. At Starbucks for a peppermint tea, a little evening work for D and email.

Let me just say, peppermint tea is yet another one of Life’s wondrous delights. Firstly it is the brewing. Today it is just 2 peppermint tea bags in a steamy Starbuck’s cup. Not the worse, certainly, but if it is brewed from heaps of loose leaf peppermint in boiling spring water and steeped for 15 minutes, it is an ebony, dreamy elixir. Just holding this toasty cup in my hands and inhaling the luscious vapors, not only soothes my stressed and aching forehead, but I breathe in all that is good in the world.

Off to a glass of wine and quiet dinner with D.

Name that Tune

Morning:
Gray. Cold. Tired.
Chai Tea at Starbucks.
Finally a plan: Mum goes in tomorrow with procedure on Wednesday. A relief for everyone, I think. Waiting is always worse than doing, and now the waiting, at least, has a time table. Trip extended.
Sun peeking out. I am feeling colder and colder.

Afternoon:
Tummy all a-jumble. This usually happens when I travel, and I was doing pretty good tummy-wise til today. Another Bad-Idea nap, though it must be needed.

Early Eve:
5pm: pitch like midnite outside. Must find some tea.
Some Radical Ipod Listening Practice and aaaahhhhhhhh: tea. Now I understand why the heavy taxation of tea was the last straw for the Colonists.

In reading Ananzi Boys: the theme of bringing Life forth into Creation with earth, sweat, blood, and Naming:

The Song: The Uni-verse.

It really struck me, this Naming thing. Saying aloud what you want to create gives it Life. Naming the aim. Naming the intention. Before the Naming there may be form, but the Spark of Life comes from speaking aloud, singing Creation into Being. Creation Spirituality has a lovely phrase: that we are Co-Creators with God. I was and am often afraid to say aloud what I want....and that, too, that is changing.

Cultivating Fearlessness

Evening:
Peppermint tea with Mum and her beau Larry. Such bright spirits they are!

Zazen before bed.

Sunday All Over the World

Morning:
I like Sundays. It is my favorite day of the week. Usually. Today: Dreary. Cold. Snow Dusting. Depressed. Tired. Homesick. Morning tea postponed: hotel hot water downstairs in thermos smells like coffee. No go. Dave working,
The ghosts that haunt this area, and all the way to Boston, are thick as thieves.
Tea at Starbucks.

Afternoon:
Sun is out. Downing Rescue Remedy like water.

'Soft flexible mind is the way'
My mind is obviously neither soft, nor flexible…

I am unskilled at applying the principles from my practice to my day to day life:

What is available right now?
Where is the edge?
What is too much?
What is too little?
How much energy do I need?
What are alternate approaches?
How small is a bite-sized piece?
Determine what is a bite-sized piece.
Take bite-sized pieces.

What needs the focus of my energy?

What needs weeding?
What needs watering?
How much can I handle?
Take frequent breaks.

Feeling selfish makes all my work seem transparent, insincere, and like a sham. Ironic that I think some things ought to be easy, and that things ought to change quickly. Nothing changes quickly. Lives do not often have avalanches, at least not ones that have not been building for years, occurring only by surprise due to unawareness. Has it been snowing? Wow! I hadn’t noticed! Circumstances, feelings, actions, reactions, habits- all morph, grow, change, and evolve over time. No quick fixes. No instant gratification. Slow, methodical, smart work yield Big Change. Just like the Universe. Since I am the Universe and It is me- us…all of us, why might I think I’d be organized any differently than a glacier, a forest, an ocean?

Radical listening practice.

Zazen.

More radical listening practice.

Reading down by the fire. Always delightfully surprised at Neil Gaiman’s genius. Am in love with Anansi Boys. Scarily applicable to my life. Isn’t that what makes art good?

More radical listening practice.

Evening:
Dinner (ate too many French fries! Ugh!) and delightful visit with Mum.

You Gotta Serve Somebody…

Last Nite:
Ah…relief…hotel bed and roomy shower. Pea discovered under mattress at Mum’s- I am revealed as a real live Princess! And they didn’t believe me! :o. Hi-speed internet for D's work- welcome respite for him from spending the day at Starbucks.

So, how and/or who do I serve? If where you are going is how you get there, you are already where you are going. My how stuff was going just peachy until faced with an actually, real-life, honest-to-goodness emotional challenge. Isn’t that always the case? Easy to find peace all alone at the top of the mountain, but engage in the world and that is where the practice comes alive. I’m not doin’ so good on the fellow man front right now. Apparently, I still suck at that.

An exhausted Zazen before bed.

Today, Morning:
Delicious sleep. Tea. Sunny cold day. Still waiting on surgery date for Mum- will not know until Monday, likely to be scheduled late Jan-Early Feb. She is doing well physically, is unadmittedly stressed about the immanent procedure, but in freakishly high spirits as usual. She is a remarkable woman.

Feeling less like a struggling fish caught in a net and more like a surfer: found a very cool, small holistic market with veggie café (table service, even!). Resistance is futile. Struggle and rejection yields nothing but more of the same. Find the wave and ride it. Recognizing the unfamiliar wave is the challenge. I was riding a nice long fabulous wave at home that had become quite familiar territory. Flying up here, I paddled out and caught another, and became misguided that I was applying the same surfing principles, when I was repeatedly falling off the board.

Zazen.

Afternoon:
Nap. I never take naps. Today I did. Groggy reminder of why I never take naps.

It Is What it Is

Morning:
Tea at Starbucks. Radical listening practice. Persistent headache. Cold and gray, little snow. Unrestful sleep. Princess and the pea bed: I can feel every spring poking up through the mattress and am certain there is an old, dried up, shriveled green pea under there somewhere and it feels like a boulder. No private time is driving me nuts. Feeling stifled and suffocated. Hours trickle by.

Inspired by Robert Fripp recording session I am watching….he is playing in blues and greens and for dark timbres, he adds some brown :) I like that.

Later Morning:
Still at Starbucks. Radical iPod listening practice continues. Dave working devilishly.

So self involved to think my little life experiences, thoughts, pains, loves, hates, minutia, etc are of such an individual and special nature that no one else has experienced them, that they are outside the realm of human everyday experience, singular to me. It’s laughable when I write that…What I feel is what I feel and that is that. How to not label good and bad? How to suspend judgment when faced with my emotional life, especially when I am in emotional turmoil? I am feeling selfish and resentful, I am not acting that way. So why the self flagellation? Why judge and attempt to censor how I feel or think? It is only the continual stream of morphing and changing thoughts and feelings floating across an ever-changing landscape. Whatever sense of control that is developed is from allowing what is to be, not, methinks, by suppression…

Thursday, January 05, 2006
Hell
Late Afternoon:
It’s freakin 4:10pm at is as dark as midnite in the bumfuck Northern state.
Little sleep on rock hard bed. Tea bag tea (good heavens) in microwaved water (egad) steeped in my Starbucks thermos. At least it was organic tea for cryin’ out loud.

Well, I’m in my own little Concentric Ring of Hell, probably unknown even to Dante: The X-Family-Step-Family Nightmare Ring. Definitely located below The Virtuous Pagans’ ring. I always thought that’d be a nice place to live. X-Family is a more fitting nomer than Step Family because it is more realistic of the actually circumstance. Step Family connotes some sort of normalcy that is supposed to exist- of course that is just an imaginary condition created by our culture and its inability to recognize that when things change they Change- they do not remain in some nostalgic fantasy state. X-Family, I think is actually too weighty: giving the impression that there was much of a family there to begin with and it sounds kinda cool and edgy, like X-Games or Gen-X (moi).

Its always a fucking crisis when I come here. If one doesn’t exist, it is promptly created upon my/our arrival. No point in going on about any of this, it just pisses me off and makes me feel invisible. You know what your mother used to say about if you’ve got nothing good to say….it’s worse: I have only bad things to say. Temporary alcoholism is a delightful solution to the stress- for me that means a glass of wine each evening.

I feel like all of my personal work is down the tubes because I hate being here so much. Selflessness isn’t one of my virtues- it’s not even a personality characteristic. This is simply a trip that gets in the way of the life I imagine(?) I’ve created for myself which exists a good 2000 miles from where I am physically sitting right now.

Lovely talk with Mum…that is the only glimmer of light here. We had tea and chatted about a woman’s right to choose, the nature of the Universe and Being, and the Christian Right missing the whole darn message they are supposed to espouse.

In any case, this is a Journal of Isness. And my Isness today is that this totally sucks. I am on a forced practice sabbatical which I am hating,- but I am trying to take my own advise of never underestimating the power of a break (this break is too long goshdarnit!).

I don’t really accept anything that exists up here, at all. Why does acceptance feel like defeat and resignation? Is that what acceptance is? I don’t know what the fuck acceptance is. I am accepting that this totally sucks and I hate this and I wanna go home and back to my life and my cats and singing and practice and Solstice Cat Cup and kitties and Backyard Possum.

This too shall pass.

Later Evening:
Everytime D kisses me I get butterflies….still.



Wednesday, January 04, 2006
Cat in Yard Make Good Meditation Partner

Ok, you have to say that with a B Movie Japanese accent.

Morning:
Tea in Solstice Cat Cup…listening to my very cool, enormous collection of newly cataloged MP3’s- how much does this rock? Yet more evidence that drudgery pays!

Zazen. I am not my thoughts.

Through repetition the magic is forced to rise

Morning:

This is happening in my life. Big time. I’m feeling like in order to get the Universe to hold up Its end of the bargain, the amount of energy I have to put into my life is, well, intense. Then again, the Universe is an intense thing and an intense place, and clearly not designed for slackers. It won’t ask anything of you that It wouldn’t be prepared to do itself.

Simplicity and Repetition. Repeat. Simplicity and Repetition.

Ok, I know I had this quote posted already, but golly I like it. And, well, posting it again, is simplicity and repetition, is it not? I also made another cool inspiring little bit of art for my desktop with Fripp aphorisms and a Graeme Base pic. Too cool.

The Solstice Possum visited us again last night and partook of the very ripe tomatoes we left out for him! Yeah!

Late Morning/Afternoon:

Practice.

I’ve noticed that if I become emotionally involved in the execution/performance of a piece, it all goes to hell in a handbasket. As soon as I feel that adrenaline rushing, tummy tickling, ‘oh, I am so into this’, I am headed toward trouble fo' sure. Ego jumps out into Look at Me: I’m Acting Mode. Getting in the way. Much about keeping the lid on the intense, low simmer, keeping the power of laser-beam focus, being the battleship.

Afternoon:

Off to coaching with Herr R today and a swing by TALA to pick up info on forming an arts nonprofit. Preparations continue for NE. More CD cataloging.

Coaching rocked. Sang my ass off.

Very tired and rundown feeling. Ugh. Skipping the run for vit C’s, echinacea and zinc suckies. Armed with the neti pot.

Evening:

Packing, laundry, etc. Ick. Too much zinc, methinks- tummy not so good.

Late Zazen, which was more like sitting in a Zazen posture with Baby Cat circling and yowling until I’d pet him. Well, that was Zen today. The Universe wanted to express itself as someone sitting with a cat yowling at them. That someone happened to me moi. Life is good.

Isness

Morning:
Tea in my favorite cup. Impending trip to NE making me fairly continually nauseous. Dread settling in.

Beautiful day.

Glorious!

Sunny, breezy. Intoxicating. The kinda day the Universe makes to shout, ‘All things are possible!’

Tea and cookies with Neil at Empire.

Random Oblique Strategy for today:

Only part, not the whole.

Ah! Always I need this reminder!

Afternoon:
Energizing vox lesson.

Run with Dave…still low energy. Ugh. Tired. Feeling run down. White tea with Ipod music transfer drudgery. Saw a really funny thing today that I think sums up life pretty succinctly: a woman driving a convertible Porche Boxster with the passenger seat filled with toilet paper. That about says it all, folks. We’re all in the same boat here, people.

Evening:
Zazen and practicing. More organizing of what has turned into an entire overhaul of my music library. All CD’s (which were compeltley disorganized in many different places) are getting ripped onto the new enormous hard drive and organized in iTunes for at home and iPod fun. From drudgery to delight!

All is Quiet on New Year’s Day

Morning:
Tea and morning prattling. Zazen.

Afternoon:
A walk through the Houston arboretum. Pine forested. Incredible serpentine, sinister vines. Fallow in winter. Warm day, breezes and sun. Quiet trails. Viney arbors. Noisy trains and highways sometimes very near, sometimes a little farther off. Dry creek beds. Bayou...

Faery woods

Back home and the un-decorating of the Solstice tree. We planted him in the back yard: Auspicious Cypress for the coming year and beyond!

Evening:

Dreary but necessary computer maintenance, backups etc.

Another several visits from Backyard Possum!