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I continue to notice little changes that I attribute to my meditation practice. Good ones. My current practice revolves around mindfulness, the attempt to just be aware of and notice thoughts as they happen. When you get into semantics, this is usually considered at least a notch or two down from concentration, where you intend to more absolutely control what goes on in your head. Mindfulness doesn’t attempt to do anything other than return the focus of the mind back to what’s going on in the present, right here, right now, and for a chronic overthinker for myself it’s a really liberating process. It’s a little weird – Zen masters like Nishijima and even Brad Warner have written anti-mindfulness rants, so there’s something about the notion that’s anti-Buddhist to some Buddhists. But my favorite guides to mindfulness are from different sects and it would be difficult to describe zazen without introducing some element of mindfulness, so your karma-mileage may vary. In any event, the word “mindful” has become loaded in a Zen context, and I’m just a guy trying some things out to see what works. Continue reading

Over Christmas, we watched 4 dogs for a friend. (And her parakeet.) I have 4 dogs already. That makes 8 dogs. That’s a whole lot of dogs. The Danish person and the little girl are sort of givens in this house, and they weren’t unusually difficult over the holidays. Probably. I had 4 extra dogs and a bird around here, so I might not have noticed anyway.

I was a little scared of it, but my house is big enough and we’ve got decent, walled-off space outside for them to play, and the neighbors on both sides have dogs that bark at least as much as ours, so as long as things were reasonably under control – which they were – it wasn’t going to generate any controversy. The 4 extra dogs were in pairs, 2 little mini-dogs (Bijou and Marley), sort of Wiener-dog mixes, and 2 maxi-dogs (Shush and Tiger) that were bigger than any that live with us, hovering around 100 pounds. Continue reading

I’m not a nightmare-haver. I’m not an ecstatic flying-with-dolphins dream haver. Most of the time I have dreams, they’re usually angst of some sort. I’ll have a dream where I’m back in college and miss the deadline for dropping classes and have to catch up in some class I never intended to take. Or endless long beurocratic lines somewhere, each of which proves incorrect. Or realizing I have left for a meeting or class, so I’m going to be 10 minutes late no matter what I do. Nothing terrifying, just not pleasant. I even went through a period where I dreamed I was awake all night. I’d wake up exhausted, and it took me a while to catch on. Continue reading

It’s been a quiet afternoon, in that my wife and daughter have been out, but it’s been pouring torrents and thundering. We need the rain, so I actually enjoy “monsoon season,” as the locals call it. I had the bright idea that I should block off the back little garden area so the dogs wouldn’t go back there, it becomes a total mud pit with just a little rain and the dogs track it all over the house. I looked out my bedroom window, and sure enough, Sheba and Loki were just walking around eating grass and/or laying in the bog.  Continue reading

I was trying to sleep last night, it was a rare windless night, so every little sound in and out of the house set off my tribe of dogs. We have a guest, so that could mean someone in another room flipping a light switch or closing a door. It was garbage night, so it could also mean a neighbor wheeling out their week’s haul for the next morning’s pickup. Or it could be inexplicable whistling noises followed by coyote howls, as the case may be. The heat wasn’t anything that was genuinely stifling, but without the normal breeze to push some of the cooler night air through the house, it was definitely warmer than we were used to and it made it just that much harder to sleep. Continue reading

Once a week, I try to take my dogs out for The Big Walk. The circumtances change based on the season and the weather and the window of time I have to put into it, sometimes it’s hiking trails, sometimes it’s just neighborhood stuff. I’ve recently started exploring the system of greenbelts right around me and it’s a great combination of being new enough to feel like we’re getting away, undeveloped enough that there are cactus flowers and weird plants and rocks, and it’s close enough that we don’t have to build in any commute time. It’s been a great way to maximize our Big Walking. Continue reading