--in just an instant, dukkha--dissatisfaction--arises, and even as I note its arising I wonder how long I'll be stuck with it.
This morning I made a rice salad for supper with the sangha later. The recipe in the cookbook included capers, and I'd decided a couple of days ago to make a grain salad with capers, something to contrast with the orzo and apricot salad I made for Thursday's sangha lunch. Yes, I knew the tomatoes had to be skinned and seeded, that the olives had to be pitted and chopped, that the basil and onions had to be chopped, the capers drained, rinsed and drained again. But I didn't calculate how long that was going to take.
The answer: Too long. Because I still had to flood some of the gardens with water and make lunch and eat and rest and bathe and dress. And it didn't look like there was going to be enough time to rest. Which ruined everything.
I laughed at myself. A day of such leisure and beauty and I'm having a fit of pique. Then I jumped in the pool (in this heat can a woman with a pool ever justify a fit of pique?), and did some stretches to open up my back and completed my chores and ate lunch (sardines, sliced tomato, whole grain toast) and here I am with time to blog. And somewhere in there the fit faded, the pique petered out, or mostly it did. I can still feel remnants of it, tucked into a couple of pockets in my belly, my hip. I hope I wear them well, a couple of fine details in the garment of my humanity, my fallibility, like pin tucks or pleats. What the well-dressed practitoner wears to the rest of her life.
Post Script: The price of pique. Exhaustion.
Must be a constant state of irritation over the little things and over-extension I experience -- must be what accounts for inexplicable exhaustion. Thank you for helping me think about it from that perspective.
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