practice begins

Following on yesterday's zen pendant, here is another just listed on etsy. Reading Katagiri Roshi's Each Moment Is the Universe- Zen and the Way of Being Time is truly mind expanding. It has influenced my life, my art, my understanding of time and my outlook in a positive manner.

Otherwise I spent today running around in circles from one errand to the next, fairly faint with non-acclimation to the new heat of summer. I cannot believe we had no air conditioning in our car for the first nine years of our life together, and always with a younger Lucy dog in tow. Many, many times we packed her in ten pound bags of ice, stuck under her cloth dog bed, for the four hour journey in our old truck, to visit my parents. She was nice and relatively cool, but we sweltered and sweated, cursing the heat, the summer, the car, the months til fall. At least I did under my breath. She's too old for that now, and so are we, so I am every day thankful for our safer and blissfully cooler modern cars.

After fixing fish and brussel sprouts (our favorite!) for dinner, the rest of the evening has been in front of the computer putting things online for sale and also creating a pendant for a custom order. Michael, banished to the bedroom due to the bum living room t.v., spent his time unknowingly entertaining me with his colorful language, grunts, shouts and boos for his Pittsburgh Penguins hockey game, of which the Penguins lost. A thrilling finish, he said, but a loss nonetheless. Now he's painting and I'm ready to start work for a bit on another project. I'm still struggling with my problem of having my fingers dipped into too many pots to keep up with all my ongoing and varied projects. It's the Gemini nature to be all over the place so I have an excuse. But it would be nice if my mind would stop racing so and just be....... calm. This is why I read zen books, although it's difficult for me to practice what I so love to read.