A Little West Brain Thinking:

Sorry to be late this week; I've been on California time, attending my annual web guru potlatch in San Francisco. Nice place to take a few extra days to recover from "Death by Powerpoint," the unofficial theme of all modern conferences, it seems. Terry and I took in the Muir Woods on Monday. What a comfort, in one's fifties, to walk among beings that are more than a thousand years old. They're a little shaggy, fire-scarred and crack-limbed--but so are we. And we visited Golden Gate Park and the Haight a few decades later than originally planned, but the 200-year-old bronze Buddha in the Japanese Tea Garden hadn't budged an inch. City Lights is still full of great books, the Stinking Rose still serves chicken roasted with forty cloves of garlic, and Chinatown's designer still exhibits a marked preference for red and gold. And of course the godstruck, the addled and the addicted still carry their many hungers through the blessedly mild streets, bumming bucks, butts, and burgers, talking to the air, and providing a much-needed route to salvation for the affluence-afflicted.

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.

A Foretaste:

Are days such as today, that seem to be borrowed from spring, subtracted from summer, like a school that has had too many snow days? Worth it even so, to put the parka back in closet for once, and walk without space suit upon the land. If it weren't for the occasional January thaw, the North Country suicide rate would soon reach Scandinavian proportions. And that warm wind blowing through the dark, indistinguishable from the April evening where you lie awake listening to the storm windows rattle, waiting to hear the moment when the ice cuts loose on the river with a long rolling roar. Pity about tomorrow, and the snow-locked months to come--but today...