Monk Work:

One of the disadvantages of working online is that it is short on the meditative qualities that distinguish other kinds of labor. Best for me was letterpress printing, hand-feeding paper into an antique cast iron press--a sort of nine-hundred pound prayer wheel. Unlike the conventional spiritual aid, if you lose your meditative focus at the press, your hand will resemble a ping-pong paddle made of meat--a somewhat Darwinian prayer wheel, I guess. I was privileged to watch the Venerable Tenzin Yignyen on his previous visit to St. Lawrence as he and fellow monks spent two weeks constucting a Kalachakra Mind sand mandala. The work itself was sufficiently astonishing. But doubly so when you realize that the raw material is not colored sand, but lumps of semi-precious stone, which are ground into sand with hand tools that deposit a few grains at a time onto the design. Talk about baking from scratch! And when the work is complete--they sweep it away with brushes for disposal. So goes all human labor, meditative or otherwise.