I’ve started a new blog over at http://woodenzen.blogspot.com/. It is an experiment. My intent currently is to post about Zen, to make them short, personal, intimate, sort of like a bubble floating on top of a stream. Here we go… so join me if you dare!

Thanks to my twitter friend Patti Digh, I came across Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah and a couple sweet covers. Here are the relevant youtube links. Each about 6 minutes long.

I’ve come to see this as a sweet and sexy love song. Honest and intimate in a way that I aspire to. Thank you Jikan.

“Hallelujah” Leonard Cohen

Journal entry for today.
http://www.tompeters.com/entries.php?note=006635.php

Tom Peters on “The Single Most Important Thing” turns out to be two. Meditation and 4 item to-do list EVERY MORNING! Got the first part down, now on to the second.

Note to Will, start a 4 item todo list and put it in front of you each day. Things to include are important work commitments, blogging, relationship stuff, woodworking goals, technology, life work. Things to exclude, time wasters, shopping lists, frivolous Internet distractions, appointments, etc. Seems like two lists are called for. The 4 item “Single Most Important Thing” list and a combo appointment/shopping/errand list. Mixing these two list has been my method and now I see that may be my problem with consistency. If the list doesn’t have important things on it or too many items from the appointment/shopping/errand category, the list losses its power.

Even just the process of setting the todo list and setting the priorities will be skillful. As Tom Peters says, what is left off of the list list is just as important as what is included. That helps in understanding the importance of culling dead, negative and unhelpful activities from the list. Onward!

Wordle image of Shodoka 

Sad news. Feb. 2, 2009 Chan Master Sheng-Yen passed from this life. I never met him yet was deeply touched by his teaching. Last year I spent many weeks with good friends, looking at the Chan text called “Shodoka” or variously “Song of Freedom” or “Song of Enlightenment”. Master Sheng-yen’s commentary in his book “The Sword of Freedom” illuminated the text clearly. Below is his “death poem”.

without busy affairs, I grow old
empty within, i have both laughter and tears
originally, there was no I,
therefore, both life and death can be cast aside.

Wreath 2009

I recently joined a new community of Linux enthusiasts who are devoted to the simple, the fast, the elegant and the #!. What is the #! you ask? Well #! (pronounced crunchbang), is a Linux distribution that is in second, third or forth public interation. Developed by a young guy named Philip in order to scratch an itch, then quitely shared around, it is a derivative of Ubuntu Linux with an Openbox window manager.

What I really want to say is that this is a cool community. As an example of the coolness, I shared on the Crunchbang forums that I was a ebook fan and had discovered that evince (a document viewer available in #!) will remember what page I’m reading from session to session. So reading a 350 page PDF is no problem. I can pick up where I left off.

I had and idea to add the ‘ebook reader’ to the menu of crunchbang. I had seen a sample somewhere else on the forum where a grad student had his thesis paper in the menu so that they could quickly get to editing each of the components. This would be a sort of manual process of editing the menu every time I started a new ebook. Not really a problem.

This is cool in and of itself but an interesting thing happened when I post this information to the forum. Philip took the idea and developed it into an elegant piped menu. A piped menu is something unique in Openbox that allows the menu to be dynamically created. Currently the piped menu reads a specified directory and creates a menu of all the PDF’s in it and ties them to envince. This process of me having the idea and Philip contributing the code was just a few hours. I’m in Idaho and he in the UK. Here is a link to the discussion, code and the obligatory screen shot.  

http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/topic/525/ebook-reading/

Snake River Canyon

Water Music        
by Robert Creeley

The words are a beautiful music.
The words bounce like in water.

Water music,
loud in the clearing

off the boats,
birds, leaves.

They look for a place
to sit and eat–

no meaning,
no point.

To be moved by simple thing is the greatest blessing. To have good health is the greatest blessing. To share life’s journey with the ones you love, is the greatest blessing.

Cutting Boards and Wooden Spoons

There is a lot to be thankful for. Here is a short list.

• My sweetheart’s companionship
• Boykan the wonder dog
• A warm (in many ways) home
• Work that is interesting, challenging and contributes
• Health and well being
• A rich spiritual life
• The time to work with wood
• Living in a technological age
• Woods to walk in
• Friends to meet with

These quotes came from “How to Cook Your Life : Dogen’s classic Instructions  for the Zen Cook with commentary by Kosho Ucyiyama Roshi”. They really bowled me over.

In Zen, “…we learn to live out completely that Self that settles upon itself… When I usethe term Self, I am not referring to some fixed entity; the Self is life and life is functioning. Functioning means activity which works toward the world in which the Self lives. When I talk of a “Self settling upon itself,” do not interpret this to mean a withdrawing and escaping from society. On the contrary, this expression means that your life manifests itself as life. It is a Self that works to settle or bring composure to everything you encounter in our life. ”

“Merely to study Buddhist thought and philosophy through books, or to do zazen only to become entranced by satori as some rapturous and esoteric state of mind without actually putting our bodies to work in our day-to-day lives as taught in (Tenzo Kyokun), leaves grave doubts as to whether we have any idea at all of live out the what it means to truly buddhadharma.”

Dungeon

     
He whom I enclose with my name is weeping in this dungeon.
I am ever busy building this wall all around; and as this wall goes up into
the sky day by day I lose sight of my true being in its dark shadow.

I take pride in this great wall, and I plaster it with dust and sand
lest a least hole should be left in this name;
and for all the care I take I lose sight of my true being.

Rabindranath Tagore

Serendipitously, flow or the notion of being lost in ones passion has brought two wonderful tidbits into view. The first is a short 18min video of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Feb 2004 talk at TED. View it if you have any interest in creativity and how to develop it. Csikszentmihalyi is an author and researcher that pioneered the work that lead to our current understand of creativity, fulfillment and coined the term “flow” to discribe the experience of immersion one has when lost in ones passion. Csikszentmihalyi states the it takes about ten years of study, practice or immersion in a field before flow is possible. I see it a little different. Little practice equals little flow, great practice equals great flow. Maybe ten years is magic maybe not. We’ll see. I’m developing a new skill of carving wooden spoons. Some how I got it in my head that I’ll have to make 400 before I’ll get any good. Yet already I’ve created some wonderful spoons and I’m only on 23. (21, 22 & 23 are being worked on at the same time.)

The second tidbit is via “The Writers Bag”, a blog on writing from which I continue to learn from a lot. Cool stuff indeed.

The Hindu sage named Patanjali wrote this in his Yoga Sutras ::

“When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all your thoughts break their bonds. Your mind transcends limitations. Your consciousness expands in every direction, and you find yourself in a new, great and wonderful world. Dormant forces, faculties and talents become alive, and you discover yourself to be a greater person by far than what you ever dreamed yourself to be.”