i liked furnace mountain, but there was an obligation to sit at every session with the group and i would have rather meditated on my own

Dear Sangha,

We need a better turn out on Sundays for our practice to flourish, two hours once a week is not excessive but essential for a commitment.

Consider your commitment to the practice and the Sangha.

For members who have taken vows at the center, if you cannot spend two hours on Sunday practicing with the Sangha you should undo your vows.

Roshi


me:

this is a message from my local zen center, i would consider them a byproduct of meiji zen.. i'd show up but the head teacher doesn't have too much to offer me and it skeeves me out how unhealthy he is

also doing meditation at home is much better, the fact that i can move around when i want to, lay down, sit, or walk around makes a big difference

when i go to zen centers to sit my whole body just starts to hurt

they recently moved out from their storefront zen center location and are now doing only talks at one of the member's house, yeah i don't need any extra bullshit in my brain









vitamin e really gets the blood flow going









i have to realize that i'm not a breeder





leaving troubles behind,

i listen to the wind




leaving trouble behind,
i listen to the wind









"I hope I am not giving away professional secrets if I say that a novelist's chief desire is to be as unconscious as possible. He has to induce in himself a state of perpetual lethargy. He wants life to proceed with the utmost quiet and regularity. 

He wants to see the same faces, to read the same books, to do the same things day after day, month after month, while he is writing, so that nothing may break the illusion in which he is living--so that nothing may disturb or disquiet the mysterious nosings about, feelings round, darts, dashes and sudden discoveries of that very shy and illusive spirit, the imagination."

 - virginia woolf







i deliver to this older couple once in a while, they're probably around the same age but the man is sharp and the woman not so much, a definite example of women's brains going much earlier due to hormones









one time a couple of my friends and i were sneaking onto a private trail late at night, we heard a car approaching and dove into some bushes, the car passed and we continued on

about two and a half hours later im in my car dropping everyone off and turn my car lights on for something, and I find six ticks crawling all over, luckily it was winter and my skin was covered

lyme was possibly inches away






actually i remember telling myself that one of the reasons i was leaving college was to focus on my health







andrew:
it's an ill wind that blows no good  !

it's a good wind that blows no ill  !




while at college i decided to step on a scale, i weighed in at 200lbs, very heavy for my 5,6 height

for a long time i was overweight, i'd say since i was at least 7 or 8, my parents fed me crap and a lot of it, so many potatoes !

anyway i had enough of my health and decided i needed to do something about it, i went to the gym to lift weights and ate healthier at the school cafeteria

of course the cafeteria food at college wasn't so great, but i ended up losing somewhere around 20lbs, around this time i became a vegetarian on and off

during the next year i lost another 10, and then when it was winter time i put on another 20lbs

within the past year and a half i've lost 50lbs from eating less and healthier, and now following the compendium i feel and look better than most of my later teenage years, and it's only been one year of loosely following the diet

that leaves me at about 140lbs, lowest i've been since middle school

so yeah good shit !








john clare, torn apart by his wife and six kids ? caused enough insanity to be sent to an asylum, he believed his past lives were shakespeare and lord byron

A nice cool day

Frost enveloping the trees

A gentle breeze

Clouds cover the sky

poem by jon







"[From The Precautions:] The religious must practice the following instructions if he [she] wishes to 

attain in a short time holy recollection and spiritual silence, nakedness, and poverty, where one 

enjoys the peaceful comfort of the Holy Spirit, reaches union with God, is freed of all the obstacles 

incurred from the creatures of this world, defended against the wiles and deceits of the devil, and 

liberated from one’s own self…. Have an equal love for and an equal forgetfulness of all persons…. 

Humble yourself in word and in deed, rejoicing in the good of others as if it were your own, 

desiring that they be given precedence over you in all things…. Try to practice this more with 

those 

who least attract you. If you do not train yourself in this way, you will not attain real charity nor 

make any progress in it. Prefer to be taught by all than desire to teach even the least of all. "

st. john of the cross






me:
a girl was telling me 'i'm a catch'

andrew:

"it wasn't jesus that was the "fishers" of men but women !"

"men are fish to to be caught and eaten for women !"

an enlightened mystic, on my blog , say what !








my grandfather almost starved as a child when he was left way out in pasture, when they found him he was so starved he couldn't move on his own

for the rest of his life he had trouble eating certain things and had problems with ulcers






teresa of avila got two hours of meditation time a day, but i want to be more like st john of the cross, who probably got way more







i could be a butcher, something about dead animals doesn't bother me too much







noticing flaws is something i should improve








the lengths the human race goes for something unrecoverable

at my mother's funeral i had to leave, i couldn't stand all of these people coming in, just looking to fill in their day for the most part, it made me sick and i didn't want to explain to one more person "how i was"

my friends and i went to get some coffee and that was better than being at the funeral home

after the funeral a friend and i went back to my house and i moved the bench over and we just stared at the sky

i was reading about emily dickinson on her wikipedia and apparently at her mother's funeral she stayed in her room with the door slightly open, probably getting praying by herself or who knows, but seriously that is what it's about, the loss of someone is only for you to deal with and no ones 'sympathies' can help too much 

yeah i don't know why lorainne didn't reply to my comment on her blog, i thought i was pretty kind and even curious about her going to her zen center






this one time when i was around 16 i went to belmont race track, one of the most legendary horse racing tracks, and i brought this thing with me called a tv-b-gone, it could either turn off or on almost any tv by going through hundreds of IR codes

so here i am at this track and it's some big horse racing day and i gather up all my friends and we go inside to where all the real gamblers are to turn off all the tvs in the place, the real gamblers were inside so they could get to the paying booth as quick as possible

there must've been something like 1000 tvs in the place and i managed to turn off at least 1/3 of them
i found it so funny, all these guys would be watching the race and bam the tv goes off, of course i'd stand there looking like i didn't know what was going on

these guys would get so angry and after about two hours of turning off tvs some guy yells "what the fuck is going on here !" storming off, it was at about this point i realized i could die if someone caught me turning them off

i still have the remote but for what ever reason i haven't used it since, maybe because people like tv too much

if you do the work your life reflects it