Practice Period [PP]

1. Sitting at home. Intention: to sit daily. Actualization: not daily, but with greater frequency than previous to the PP. Less likely to think, "Hmm, this would be a good time to sit," and then blow it off; more likely to actually do it. More attentive to the desire to sit. Aware that sometimes even the thought of sitting brings me to a place of equilibrium. Except when it doesn't.

2. Sitting at the Zendo. Intention: to spend some part of every Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday at the Zendo. Actualization: have spent some part of every Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday at the znedo. This Sunday I'm not going to make it. A little touch of wab-sabi, like the two times I recently wrote a single blog entry for two days or the calculated error in a Persian or Navajo rug. Actually sitting at the zendo is simply sitting at the Zendo. But I've spent many hours at the dining room table working alongside sangha members sewing, and in the downstairs kitchen preparing and sharing meals, from which I get this sense of all of us making something together, maybe making more of the us, at least for now, a momentum building as we move together toward Shuso Hossen (8/8) and Jukai (8/14). Once, Susan Ji-on asked me about my outbreath, where it ended. I said that though the exhalation ended (in an inhalation), the extension of the outbreath went out and out and out--it didn't end. This growing intimacy among sangha members is an extension of all of our outbreaths, and it goes far beyond us, connecting us to all beings.

3. The Blog. A daily enterprise--you can see how I've fared on that account. The idea for it came out of dokusan with Jane. I don't really remember how our conversation went. I do remember that as soon as I thought of it I knew it was right. I like it. I don't think I could it up indefinitely, not on a daily basis. But I like how, having charged myself with having to think about everyday events in the context of practice, I am more mindful throughout the day. Pleasurable too is starting with something, intuitively I'd say, with no sense of how it's going to come around to the life of a Zen practitoner, and writing into the surprise of the Dharma. It seems right that, looking back, I don't necessarily appreciate best the entries I liked best when I wrote them. It's not unlike living with my friend Elise's three landscapes, hung on the largest wall in this house, how my relationship to them changes over time, month to month, year to year. A wonderful expression of perception as impermanence. Over the days and now weeks, I've gotten a little less inhibited about talking about myself (which is both the good and the bad news). More trusting of myself, and consequently of my readers.

Hey, that's you!