lordkalkin

So, rather than come home from the game yesterday, we stayed at Jessie's. Normally, I don't like doing that because I have a good bit of work that needs doing over the weekend, so I like getting home, maybe doing a little bit of reading, and at least getting some sleep so I can wake up on Sundays and hit the sometimes proverbial, sometimes actual books. So, as you may have guessed, we spent the night in Hammond due to an issue, and in this case, the issue was of Flat Tire Monthly. Lost air too late to get a new tire immediately, and the damage was too great to use a cheap solution, so spend the night and wait for Wal-Mart (*shudder*) to open it was. We did get to see all of Death to Smoochy, which is a film worth watching, and Derrick, who had missed the game, ended up coming over to participate in a long, late-night conversation, which I enjoyed. Tara, Derrick, Doug, and I all talked until dawn, then, with about three hours of sleep under my belt, I got a new tire, and we drove back to civilization, or what passed for it on this primitive planet.

I think that my continued practice of za-zen has further refined my ability to focus. When we got back, after a shower, some food, and my daily routine, I didn't have much trouble knocking out the most urgent chunk of reading, with a good bit of note-taking, and it's still early enough to get some more done. In general, my daily meditation for the past year has been very helpful, but pushing past this last slump in one practice rather than changing the practice has been especially helpful. At the moment, I'm not too opposed to grokking a great deal of Zen, since I've sat on the dialectical fence between Buddhism and Taoism for a while, and Zen is the synthesis to that thesis-antithesis dyad. I don't think I'll settle here permanently, still, because I have some sympathies for Taoism in my magickal practices which Zen does not embrace. For the moment, which is all we really have anyway, I'm working on a Zen path to consciousness-transformation.