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This past weekend was busy and eventful but not productive, at least not as far as getting work done.
Friday night I ran into C for the first time in a long time. It was nice to catch up with her. In the middle of all that I got a call that P was returning from Oregon and was going to be staying with us. Then I had the first of two brew pub visits with DK.
Saturday I took J to see "Heartbreakers" and caught up with DK to see "The Legend of Rita" which I enjoyed in spite of its downer ending and the news that the U.C. Theatre will be closing its doors this week. Then it was time for another beer with DK to drown my sorrows.
Sunday I made it over to the City and saw "Billy Liar" at the fabulous Castro Theatre, then barely made it home in time to watch the Oscars with the family.
Today...meetings and work...and maybe a couple of movies in the evening!!! Or not.
26 March 2001
"Make your will one! Don't listen with your ears, listen with your mind. No, don't listen with your mind, but listen with your spirit. Listening stops with the ears, the mind stops with recognition, but spirit is empty and waits on all things. The Tao gathers in emptiness alone. Emptiness is the fasting of the mind." - Chuang Tzu
Wednesday night I had another productive session with T, partly a continuation from the previous week. Deep in our time together I suddenly found myself in the middle of a visualisation experience, imagining reaching inside myself and pulling out a small golden ball of sadness. I held it in the palm of one hand, the size of a baseball, rolled it around with my fingers. It felt light, almost weightless. How is it that that which weighs us down has no substance when touched?
"But if you suddenly recognise that there is no self and penetrate deeply into the emptiness of material things, subject and object will both be obliterated. What then will remain to be realised? It is as if a particle of dust were thrown into a fiercely howling wind or a light boat were to flow with a swift current." - Yung Ming Yen Shou
And that old feeling of constructive discomfort popped up again. What is it to be not at ease with being present with another - is it because we then must be truly present with ourselves?
"...Like a fish being swept along with the current of a river I am unaware of what gives me life..." - Stephen Batchelor
23 March 2001
Chuang Tzu: A
Philosophical Analysis
Selected translations
Quotations from Chuang Tzu
23 March 2001
Having had the recent experience of setting up an Airport network in our office, I've developed an interest in doing more with wireless technology.
An article from this week's Chronicle.
The Bay Area Wireless User Group, BAWUG.
A San Francisco based wireless network.
23 March 2001
"In Murder Cases, Being Gay Can Seal a Defendant's Fate": Richard Goldstein's cover story from the current Village Voice.
17 March 2001
After six weeks (or more) I finally motivated myself to do my five plus mile walk into town. Now if I just had a little digital camera to capture the view of the Golden Gate as I near the Arlington.
Listening to the Byrds' this morning, I couldn't help thinking about B:
"The only pain I feel is all this time between You and me, you and me."
More great lyrics from the Byrds:
"I know that door that shuts
just before
You get to the dream"
17 March 2001
I was running a low-level fever of anxiety for several days leading up to my therapy appointment this past Wednesday. New place. New time. A little unfinished business. However, the session was very rewarding and I believe I came away with some insight into areas I want to push at further.
Although I've been okay with the work I've done to date in therapy - I really like my therapist! - this was the first time with her that I experienced this level of constructive discomfort.
Then again, a cautionary note from my current reading of Stephen Batchelor's "The Faith to Doubt":
"...For we will be tempted, once the immediate experience has faded, to place an image of it before us and then strive to recapture it. Once this happens...we confidently proceed under the illusion that the unpredictable will from now on conform to our well-founded expectations..."
Am I attentive if I can not be there in the moment?
16 March 2001
My friend Drew has been recently playing around with Greymatter a blogging tool that requires Perl. Bill Jennings also uses Greymatter. There's a connection here. What is it?
14 March 2001
Best place to sit the mind after a Muni ride.
14 March 2001
I have a little anxiety about my therapy session tonight. A new place. A new time. And I'll have to revisit the conversation about regrets and age.
14 March 2001
"When you can't speak, it's there; when you don't speak it's not there. When you can't discuss it, it's there; when you don't discuss it, it's not there...You tell me, what is it when you're not discussing it?...What else is it?" - Ta Hui
13 March 2001
Places to sit the mind in Berkeley:
Then there is this poet's voice:
"The Old Masters: how well they
understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just
walking dully along..." - W.H.Auden
And then another's:
"I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning." - Stevie Smith
These poems have always haunted me. Why? What is it?
13 March 2001
Today the grand-daughter is eleven and five twelfths years old. When she was younger we used to celebrate her fractional birthdays at Pirro's in downtown Berkeley, a funky, time-worn, welcoming pizza place that is, alas, several years gone. Happy fractional birth-day JLS!
13 March 2001
I get the "Daily Dharma" delivered in my "daily" email. This came today:
from: Sylvia Boorstein, Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, Vol. II, #1.
"Some people practice throughout their entire lives just by paying attention to breathing. Everything that is true about anything is true about breath: it's impermanent; it arises and it passes away. Yet if you didn't breathe, you would become uncomfortable; so then you would take in a big inhalation and feel comfortable again. But if you hold onto the breath, it's no longer comfortable, so you have to breathe out again. All the time shifting, shifting. Uncomfortableness is continually arising. We see that everything keeps changing."
12 March 2001
At Saturday's Queer Dharma event the afternoon group I attended addressed the subject of how we deal, or not, with the "rush" of life, the oft frenetic pace of urban living. The discussion was valuable as much for what people in our group expressed as for what went unexpressed. Several in the group singled out cell phones as an example of technology unfavourably impacting the pace of our lives. One person talked about "multi-tasking" and living in a spiritual community where it was difficult to say "no" to requests for assistance with other people's projects because saying no seemed to work against the affirmation of community.
This led to several thoughts of my own. As a "human", not a "machine", what does it mean to "multi-task". Surely it implies more than chewing gum and tap-dancing at the same time. I usually find that when I try to accomplish several things at once - for example, search on the computer and carry on a conversation with a co-worker, that my attention is so bifurcated that I do neither well. It also occurred to me that a great deal of anxiety about technology, whether computer, television or cell phone, might be actually an extension of our feelings of difficulty in saying no, turning off the computer, the television, the cell phone, of somehow not being connected to the very rush of life from which we wish to withdraw.
12 March 2001
"The way of the Buddha is a living response to a living question. Yet whenever it has become institutionalised its vital response has become a well-formulated answer".
"That we are here at all is utterly uncanny yet remarkably ordinary....How easy it is to lose ourselves in fascination with the uncanny and forget the ordinariness of it all!"
The above quotes are from Stephen Batchelor's "The Faith To Doubt: Glimpses of Buddhist Uncertainty" which I was inspired to seek out after reading bits on Alamut and which I'm currently reading during the times I'm not reading "Shockwave Rider".
12 March 2001
Went on a field trip with the grands today, taking BART and bus to San Jose and back where we explored the Association for Computing Machinery's free exposition at the San Jose Convention Center. I had informative conversations with several of the researchers about the social impact of technology and the possible applicability of some "cutting edge" research to assisting homeless folk in finding the best possible resources to meet their needs.
11 March 2001
Last night I was pleased to be able to go out to dinner and a movie with the family and a close friend. In the busyness of the world it is too often hard to make the space available for those that you care about, love.
I feel the same way about today's activities, with my friend Drew and I attending the Queer Dharma event over at Fort Mason Center. I'd been to one before, just about the same time last year. I had almost forgotten (there's another ill effect of all that busyness) the incredible power of being together as a spirit-minded community of lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, transgender, gender-questioning people. I met some wonderful people today, including several from the comparatively large contingent from the Berkeley-based Lesbian Buddhist Sangha and I reacquainted myself with some of the nice folk I'd met previously.
In addition to sitting meditation, chanting, and socialising, the day's activities included breaking into small discussion groups and I found the discussions and companionship during those times especially rewarding. But as for the sitting meditation. Ouch! I need to get a meditation cushion.
10 March 2001
This past Monday my therapist and I got into a conversation about age. She asked me if I had any regrets and I answered in the negative. However...on a second and third thought...yes I do. Welll...just one. As long as I can remember I've wished that I'd been born a girl. I know that must seem shocking to those who know me...but, there you go. Hmmmm...I'm not looking forward to coming clean with my therapist...though I suppose I must...it has a hint of the confessional about it, although that's something of what therapy's about...right?
7 March 2001
I also shared one of my favourite quotes with my therapist: "The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there." I reference this because of the acknowledgement at the beginning of John Brunner's "The Shockwave Rider" which begins:
"People like me who are concerned to portray in fictional terms aspects of that foreign country, the future, whither we are all willy-nilly being deported, do not make our guesses in a vacuum."
Despite having a number of his books, I bashfully admit to having read zero all the way through. So steeled by a appreciation of his works written shortly after his death, I purchased yet another copy of "...Rider" and plunged in.
Not very far into it I came across this passage:
"If it achieved nothing else, a Dephi certificate did convey the subconscious impression: I matter after all, because it says right here that hundreds of people have worried about my troubles!"
I read this line right before reading the headlines on today's Wall Street Journal one of which reads "If No One Has Linked You to a Prayer Chain, Count Your Blessings, People With Problems Can Find Their Names and Woes Aired On Well-Meaning Web Sites".
The future moves on, with or without us.
7 March 2001
Saturday night, rainy, nasty weather. The grands and I made it through the Godfather movies at the fabulous U.C. Theatre. It was great to see such a good turnout on such an out-of-sort night. The young grand was a trooper, though she grew restless at the end. Little to wonder, we started our adventure at 5 p.m. and ended at midnight.
I love the line from Godfather II, "Michael, we're bigger than U. S. Steel". An aside: Years ago, I ran into a former deputy of Art Agnos (when he was the mayor of San Francisco). He told me he was reading the best book written about politics in America. Its title: "The Godfather". You gotta love a movie with dialogue like "...but Michael...presidents and senators don't kill people."
5 March 2001
I've lapsed in my movie going in the past month. Most recently. the grand-daughter and I made it to see "Monkeybone" a somewhat chaotic comedy starring Brendan Fraser and Bridgit Fonda. It had some inspired moments as might be expected from the director of "Nightmare Before Christmas", but in too many places it fell apart, rather like the cadaver character losing body parts at the end. Last night we saw "The Mexican" which was an amusing romantic comedy - of sorts - with much mugging by Julia Roberts and Brad Pitt. I did enjoy James Gandolfini's slightly askew hit man character.
Today, quickly getting over my disappontment that the local Fine Arts Cinema did not have an early matinee showing of "The Taking of Pelham One Two Three", the grand and I ventured out to see "See Spot Run" which aimed much lower than "Monkeybone" but scored more consistently. Tonight, we're taking the grandmother out for a filmic repast of "Godfather I" and "Godfather II", two of the high points of post 1970 American movies.
Tomorrow night I'm hoping to take in Oshima's "Taboo" with a friend.
3 March 2001
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