Two Things

36"x36"  From This Shore

I am thinking about 2 things. Not at the same time because that would cause my pea brain to explode and pea green would be a hideous colour on the walls...  But I digress into my ideas about colour theory and home decor.

 I've been mulling over the idea of "familiarity" after hearing a comment by a favourite teacher of mine, Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche. He answered a question about why we find it so hard to keep up a meditation practice by saying: "We are more familiar with our pain, our blockages, our darkness than with our bliss and warmth. We are trying to become more familiar with these qualities by going inside to our inner refuge. But what are you more familiar with your breakfast or your morning practice?  If you don't have your breakfast you will miss it because you know the immediate effect of your breakfast but you're not sure of the immediate effect of your practice so you go where there is no doubt.  If you trust your practice as much as you trust your breakfast your life will begin to change for the better." 

How many people have you heard say, "I can't meditate".  Maybe you have even said it yourself?  It seems simple and obvious really, that we are drawn to the familiar.  And yet we don't see how it blocks us from doing or being the things that we aspire to, those things that we have "intention" toward but somehow don't get to.  When we talk about familiarity we are really addressing the pull of habit in a slightly different way.  But somehow it seems more doable if I think to myself that I am increasing my familiarity with something, rather than feel that I am pushing against or trying to break a habit.  Perhaps it is just about language, but then language is a powerful thing.

I've also been looking at the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) difference between "thinking" and paying "attention".  This seems central to meditation and any awareness practice.  I am often startled to see that when I think I have been "aware" of something, I am actually just thinking about it.   Jan Frazier describes the difference  so clearly in her book, "The Freedom of Being" : "One of the great discoveries in the life of spiritual inquiry is the difference between attention and thought.... Attention is encounter, without any charge to it. It simply looks. There is a feeling of stillness... Attending is simply being with, acknowledging the presence of something.. There's no resistance, no mental activity, no reactivity... Thinking involves processing, applying prior learning, projecting ahead. There's a tendency to label, analyze, imagine and rehash... Thinking about something is more likely to stir anxiety, excitement, obsessiveness, unlike attending which is more calm."

36"x36" Ode to Jimmy Wright

And don't get me wrong I am not tossing out thinking with the bath water, it serves a perfectly good function (the bath water), in it's place.  But the fact is we would suffer less and lead lives of much more sanity if much of the time we simply attended or were aware of things.  Ideas and solutions could bubble up out of this spacious place of awareness, instead of the dog's breakfast that comes from chewing the bone of our familiar thoughts, especially when something troubles us (says she to herself).

I am all about the words this week. A friend has me listening to some Stephen Batchelor talks that he wants to talk about and I liked Batchelor's translation of delusion, the last of the 3 poisons that Buddhism refers to (greed, hate and delusion). Instead of delusion, Batchelor talks about bewilderment.  I certainly observe my own bewilderment often enough. I can cosy up to bewilderment. I reserve delusion for others :)

So there it is. I have spent part of my week pondering words and part purging old photographs in an effort to clear away some of the things in my home that I never use or even look at. Last week it was clearing away the snowbanks on the old paper trail.  It feels like a little ritual of "as on the outside, so is the inside". It must be Spring.  And of course there is always time to paint.  Hibernation seems to be lifting. I am rising earlier.  I feel more energetic to actually "do" things, rather than simply nestle into the lair.

Wishing you some good words of your own to explore, some glimpses of Spring and perhaps the inclination to clean a drawer or two in either your inner or outer homes, or both.

A Shrieking Gibbering Madhouse On Wheels

11"x14" mixed media on panel Your Heart From Space

On Sunday I had the great pleasure of doing a one day retreat with Buddhist teacher Howie Cohn from San Francisco (which he jokingly called Bagdhdad North, as he described doing walking meditation on Market St.).  We spent the day exploring "awareness". We sat. We walked.  And we noticed how we went about this. We noticed the stories we tell ourselves about what we do. "I'm bored. I'm tired. I can't do this.  My neck hurts.  Am I doing this right? Yada yada yada. We all have our own little 100 act plays that we never tire of running.

Sometimes if you look hard enough you get the feeling that you're entirely made up of stories, with some rather convincing footnotes. Mostly we don't notice our stories because they are so insidious but if we open to them we can notice how they colour our day and our lives.  Is that grey or hints of blue I see on your horizon?  Our stories can energize and encourage us or suck the life out of us before we even get out of bed.  They can make us sick, they can trap us in inertia. So it's interesting to just become aware of that hidden ticker tape that runs through our heads.

After lunch I was tired and so my concentration waned. Instead of just noticing what it was like (ah, this is what it's like to be tired, that would be awareness) I threw down a little story. "I didn't sleep very well last night. I'm so tired. I'm not getting anything out of this now. It's hot in here. My meditation was so clear and bright this morning. This afternoon is a waste." And when I went out to walk I went for a rehash  until I realized, "you know you have a choice.  You can carry on down the rabbit hole, Alice or you could stop right here and rouse some energy,"which I did.  I also realized this was not a foreign  movie in my world.  I often travel with my own personal rabbit hole, regardless of the situation.  In practicing awareness, not only do we get to breath and walk and notice how blue the sky is, but we get to see our habitual cloud patterns and land forms. Pema Chodron calls them propensities. And Howie reminded us, that this is the first step in the direction of freedom; seeing what we get up to.  Mostly we just get up to it, period, the end.  And mostly we don't like to look, because, well, because it's not all that pretty.

 Howie tossed out this quote to remind us about what goes on in the story mill of our minds: “Somewhere in this process you will come face-to-face with the sudden and shocking realization that you are completely crazy. Your mind is a shrieking gibbering madhouse on wheels barreling pell-mell down the hill utterly out of control and hopeless. No problem. You are not crazier than you were yesterday. It has always been this way and you just never noticed. You are also no crazier than everybody else around you. The only real difference is that you have confronted the situation they have not."― Bhante Henepola Gunaratana

8"x10" oil & cold wax "Quarry Beach"

He reminded us that  how we see things is not necessarily how they are.  So little of what we experience is sensed directly.  Our perception is filtered through the tea strainer of memory and ideas. "Your mother is not the same as your ideas about your mother."  Does that seem obvious?  Maybe, but we don't often act as if this is true. It reminds me of how I bumble about in my communications with others, how I take my point of view for granted and how this can make me impatient and insensitive.

And at the end of the day when we all agreed on the value of awareness like it was some giant and tasty apple pie, someone asked "why is it so hard to practice then?" Howie offered suggestions that might be helpful including the importance of a like minded community of practitioners which he emphasized with this little tidbit:  "When you see geese flying along in “V” formation, you might consider what science has discovered as to why they fly that way. As each bird flaps its wings, it creates an uplift for the bird immediately following. By flying in “V” formation, the whole flock adds at least 71 percent greater flying range than if each bird flew on its own. 

When a goose falls out of formation, it suddenly feels the drag and resistance of trying to go it alone — and quickly gets back into formation to take advantage of the lifting power of the bird in front. .

When the head goose gets tired, it rotates back in the wing and another goose flies point. Geese honk from behind to encourage those up front to keep up their speed.

When a goose gets sick or is wounded by gunshot, and falls out of formation, two other geese fall out with that goose and follow it down to lend help and protection. They stay with the fallen goose until it is able to fly or until it dies, and only then do they launch out on their own, or with another formation to catch up with their group.


Can you hear me honking at you?  Whatever you answered, you're right.

A Malpractice Suit

Here's the beginning of my Japanese style garden

"We can make the light of mindfulness a searchlight for encroaching evil that we imagine dwells within us; this is what the habit-mind often does.  Or we can make this mindfulness the light of lovingkindness, gentle and hospitable.  Experience can be known and met warmly.  Dwelling in the glow of relaxed, loving acceptance, the chill is warmed, the strain unwrenched, the grasping released." -  from Insight Dialogue by Gregory Kramer

When I read this the other night it reminded me of something I've been doing a lot of lately.  "Mindfulness", just being aware of what is, has been getting tangled up with judgment.  Now judgment being a strong contender in the ring, it tends to go quite a few rounds and bashes me upside the head good many times before I stop wobbling around. So instead of dispassionately seeing what my mind habitually gets up to, I have been holding what I observe, against myself.  "Oh, there's fear, (not again, I'm so tired of this) and there's timidity (I need to stop being like that.) and the commentary continues.  Instead of using practice to grow wisdom, my practice can easily become just another measuring stick that I hold up for myself.  "Officer, arrest that woman for malpractice."

A little close up ( you need a break from all that reading)

The mind is a crafty conniver.  It can rework anything into it's favourite flavour, even if the flavour is nasty, and chewy and bitter.  The Dalai Lama was surprised to hear that Westerners often feel "not good enough".  And apparently we will use just about anything, including our Dharma practice, to fulfill this prophecy.  But noticing what we're up to is the point at which we kick judgment out of the ring on a technicality.  He was never invited to this event in the first place.  Maybe we don't actually kick him out, he just slinks away like a monster in a nightmare, when we turn to look at him.

And so this is  where my practice has been lately.  It's a strange little macrame hanger that I've been using to tighten the noose.

Here's me wondering if I should have bought a houseboat instead

And the antidote is to lighten up a little, to back off on the intensity, to relax the body and remember that the point of practice is not to "fix" anything.  The point of practice is to learn how to just be, to grow in wisdom and compassion and kindness and that starts with our inner life.  Maybe we need to ask ourselves first, "am I kinder to myself than I was 5 years ago, more compassionate, less angry?  Because if we can't offer that to ourselves, chances are we can't offer it to anyone else.  "Self, are you listening?"  "I knew you were."

The Stuff of Happiness

Here's a page out of my sketch book (made from recycled paper). I've been sitting in the evening by the fire (am I using up non-renewable resources?) and playing in my sketch book.  This Buddha is done in a grey conte crayon. Is conte crayon stuff, is it toxic, how and where is it produced?  Do you see where I'm going with this?  I know, I need to offer a few more clues, no not Colonel Mustard in the Library with the candlestick type clues.

This afternoon we went to hear Annie Leonard (from The Story of Stuff) speak.  I'm thinking about what she has to say from a spiritual and more specifically a  Buddhist perspective.

Stuff.... Big topic.  And Leonard never takes a holier than thou, guilt inducing stance.  She staunchly says she is not anti- stuff.  In fact she comments how a lot of environmentalists shoot themselves in the foot (my words, not hers, but ouch, it still hurts) by pointing pinkies and making people feel guilty for using the wrong light bulbs or forgetting to turn the water off when we brush our teeth.  Did you ever learn anything in this way?  Did guilt ever make you a better person??  So in a way, Leonard is a lot like a Buddhist.  No proselytizing.  She aims to motivate, inspire and empower.

But back to stuff.  Does stuff make us happy?  From a Buddhist perspective, hitching your happiness to the wagon of outer things, of any ilk, takes us down the road of disappointment or the boulevard of suffering at some point.  Leonard talked about how the happiness quotient in the US and, by extension, we will presume the western world, has gone down since the 1950's.  We have a record amount of stuff available to us, a mind tangling array of goods, and yet we are less happy.  Logic would tally that equation and tell us that stuff doesn't make us happy.

Studies, Annie tells us, report that the experience of meaningful community is what makes humans happy, not stuff.  Yet we have, at the urging of corporate and media influence, become consumers first, members of community second.  And here in lies the angst of the modern world, we are hamsters in the corporate ferris wheel.  We often define the solution to environmental issues in terms of buying "different" stuff, get that green light bulb, that organic t-shirt, green gratification.  Not so, says Leonard.  In fact changing our buying habits may lull us into the complacent sleep of thinking we have taken environmental action.  Things really need to change from the top down, Leonard tells us.  She calls things like recycling the bottom end of the chain (is that out-house environmentalism we're practicing?), not that things like recycling are not important.  But they won't ever fully solve the problem, the one that has us using 1 1/2 planets when we only have one.

She frames the problem like this.  We are hurting the planet.  We are hurting each other.  And we aren't having any fun doing it.  And the good news is, there is a way to do things differently.  Sounded a little bit like an environmentalists version of the 4 noble truths.  1. There is suffering, that would be in the hurting.  The way we are using up natural resources and producing toxins hurts all sentient and non sentient beings.  The sad news flash that you won't find on Fox news is that the corporate appetite for increased economic growth and profits over human health and well being is impacting this planet in a big way.  For most of us this is not news.  We're just not sure what to do about it.

Interestingly Leonard points out we're not having any fun wrecking the planet.  Our general experience as modern humans is one of less happiness, more hours of work, less leisure time, more stress and less community engagement.  And what do we do when we're feeling less happy?  According to Leonard we watch TV (Americans on average watch 5 hrs a day, so Canucks we probably do too) and then we buy stuff because the ads on TV tell us stuff will make us happy or at least improve our lives.  In my mind this corresponds to the 2nd noble truth, attachment is the cause of suffering.  We're attached to the belief in stuff as a solution to our unhappiness and we're attached to the temporary pleasure we get from having new stuff.  Pleasure is the short story and not a substitute for happiness, which is a deeper sense of well being.  We are lured by the temporary hit we get from the endless cycle of new stuff (eek, we're stuff junkies).

The third noble truth (there is a way to the end of suffering) is tied in to Leonard's comment that we're not having any fun and we can do something about it (maybe we might have fun in the process).  The 4th noble truth offers the path to the end of suffering (the 8 fold path in our Buddhist list of lists).  This is the call to action in "the story of stuff's" version of the 4 noble truths.  Leonard's premise is that we need to take action at the beginning of the cycle of stuff (it's kind of like draining the ditch, instead of spraying the mosquitoes).  We need to design stuff that does not become obsolete, stuff that isn't toxic.  We need to use stuff in ways that don't chew up our non renewable resources and spit them out in a toxic heap.  And this takes grass roots action by educated, motivated and concerned citizens.  We need to work the top end of the cycle to make real change.  We need to get into those engaged community huddles and figure out how to do this.

So check out Leonard's site and another site called The Good Guide that rates consumer goods.  It is all about being aware (a good Buddhist starting point) and taking right action.  We do these things Leonard points out because "they are the right thing to do".  Leonard spoke as a fund raiser for Raffi's Centre For Child Honoring, that's another topic all of it's own.

Meeting My Special Person

Do you have a "special" person in your life? One that my friend the Zen monk calls "your great teacher". Not too long ago I spent some time with my "special" person. My joke was he shows me how good my practice isn't.

And it's always interesting for me. Sometimes I prepare myself and I "do okay" in my assessment. No blood is spilled, no unkind words are uttered, no looks to make anyone wither are flashed, no feelings of irritation ooze from my pores polluting the general atmosphere.

This time I did "okay" for a while but as the days of our togetherness passed my patience began to wither. I did what I could. I took time alone, I busied myself. But there came a point where unkindness oozed from my pores. I said a couple of impatient things and generally behaved in ways that did not contribute to the energy field in a helpful way, you might say.

I was left with a karmic hangover. Pass the spiritual aspirin. So while I lamented a little over it, in the end my examination of the process was in an effort to see what I might do differently next time I get together with my special person or meet someone who else who possesses the special qualities that seem to push my buttons.

What my postmortem revealed was that when I finally "caved" there was a definite lapse in awareness. Someone was continually poking at me (at least that's how it felt to me) and instead of seeing it as a flashing red light to take another breath and be extra vigilant about my response, I saw a red flag and responded in an old habitual way, a little silent anger.

I also realized I was doing the best I could and that I felt bad because I had "expectations" of how I should manage the situation. The upside of remorse however is that we get to examine our actions and consider our options for future behaviour.

I realized that my next meeting with my "special" person is an opportunity to do intense awareness practice. I am almost looking forward to it. How do you work with your special person?

Turning Our Ears Around & Getting Cling Free

I am doing two things these days. Eek it's Dharma multi tasking! To start with I have turned my ears around. I know, you'd like to see a picture but I'm afraid you're just going to have to take my word for it.

I have turned them around to facilitate listening to that sense of inner knowing. Okay, the gig's up. It's just a metaphorical turning of the ear. I am talking about listening to the body and the heart.

I am taking an energy healing course and last week saw an energy healer. Now if you think this is all crazy, new age stuff, you'd be..., well let's say that would be your belief. Let's get out the spiritual anti-static dryer sheet and all get cling free. If I were being product specific, I might say let's get some spiritual bounce going here.

As I study the energy of the body I am being reminded how much "information" and wisdom is inside of us, stored in the body in ways we don't know and don't address. The head is one way of knowing. And let me add, there is nothing wrong with what the noggin knows, it is just different from what the heart and the body know. And I am learning more about sensing this inner wisdom, about listening and trusting.

And that brings me to the second part of the equation. I am learning to trust, to trust what happens, to know that it makes sense in some larger version of the world, that it is wider than my small, personal vision. As my friend the Buddhist monk said this morning when we chatted, "something greater is at work here." This is the wonderful, sumptuous, mystery of life. Sometimes we feel exasperated by it, but if we can just appreciate the mystery, there is something quite delicious about the unseen, the unknown. It offers us surprise, amazement and gratitude as rewards. When we allow, interesting synchronistic events move into our line of vision.

So what is up on my Dharma radar is all about listening to the inner wisdom and having faith in what happens. In a way the faith is about acceptance. Byron Katie, in a book I'm reading called "A Thousand Names For Joy" talks about not arguing with what is. It doesn't mean we don't take appropriate action when necessary but we don't cling to "how we think things should be".

And of course in all this there is the good ol' Dharma practice of awareness. To listen to the body and the heart takes practice. You need to be quiet and attentive. So in the spirit of my current Dharma passion, I will be quiet now.

"We See The World As We Are"

"We see the world not as it is but as we are" Someone made this comment at the second day long of our intro to Vipassana/ Insight meditation workshop. This is something that rings so true for me these days and something I am paying a lot of attention to.

How could it be otherwise? Even scientists will tell you that there is no such thing as objectivity. Every researcher influences the outcome of her research. Even by the very questions we ask, we influence the results, the information we uncover. And of course this speaks to the unfathomable connection between everything, large or small. A big tenet of Buddhism is, "we are all connected". Someone said, and I love this way of expressing it, something to the effect, "tug on one small thing in this world and you will find everything is attached", kind of like the cosmic thread in our universal picnic cloth.

But I digress. I think I love this comment about "seeing things as we are" because it reminds me that if I change how I think, I can change how I see the world. This is another tenet of Buddhism, "we can change". We can become more compassionate, more relaxed, more friendly to ourselves and others. There is such a huge field for us to play in here. We are not our thoughts, not even a collection of them. The mind is simply a sense organ, sensing thought in the same way your nose detects scents. Where do our thoughts come from? Good question. All 72,000 if them that we are supposed to have in a day.

By working with our minds we can nourish new ways of seeing the world. When people talk about fate or karma, this is where the very fixed view falls apart. We create karma, we come here with certain karmic residue, but by our actions, by our intention we can work with our lives. We are not victims, we are co-creators of our world (no rose coloured glasses here kids, I am not getting all new agey on you).

So I am loving my new Vipassana training which is helping me focus on, well focusing, bringing intention and a fresh presence to my meditation, to the minute details of my life. I love the metta practice which I have never done before. It is like eating this wonderfully nourishing and sweetly, delicious meal. Wish yourself well, wish others well. Does this sound hokey, or silly or like some overlay? Try it. Try repeating. May I be relaxed and content. May I be open and spacious. May I be healthy and strong. This is a re-educating of the mind that says, "man this day sucks" and lists all the things that didn't work out.

It's easy to see the relation between what we put in our mouths and how our body feels but how about what we fill our minds with. If you're like me it's easy to get hung up in a litany of small grumbles, about the weather or the neighbour or the driver who cut us off, or the friend whose neglected us, the family member who irritates us. It takes intention for most of us to see the world differently but I tell you it is worth every bit of effort. The sweetness of the day awaits you. Unwrap it and pop it into the lips of your awareness.

Art Appetizers By Frederick Franck

I have been inspired by my friend merci 33 over at her blog to squint and peer forward into the dark corners of my studio. She has invited willing artists to envision where they might want to go with their work. It made me realize I needed to throw things into the art/life blender and whiz them up a bit, to stir.things up at a deeper level and to increase some technical skills. You've heard about the first class, the one I took with Mr. Collage, Nick Bantock.

The second class was with the gentle and talented, island painter, Stefanie Denz. She had such a gentle way of coaxing the best out of each of us in the class, of recognizing our style and playing to that. And she spoke in the wonderful language of someone who lives and breathes art. An eraser became a tool of wisdom. And she waxed eloquently about not talking down to our viewers by showing them everything. "We are painting for the people who want to look, who want to see. We want to make it interesting and exciting for them." We were immersed in her quiet world of enormous art books and a vocabulary of colour, shape and space.

If we'd had cigarettes and absinthe we might have imagined we were part of some heady turn of the century Paris art salon. But this being Salt Spring I munched on salad with hemp seeds and smoked tofu and sipped herbal tea which I was in danger of dipping my paint brush into. The hours skitted by like a single breath and the brush of an eye lash.

In the end there was a single thread that tied both workshops together. It was about "awareness". For the slightly brooding Bantock we were connecting with something deeply intuitive and we needed to focus on that inner sense. In class #2 I realized how subtle and unflinching our attention must be to be true to any subject we want to draw or paint, how what our mind imagines we see, is often very different from what we find when we look at an object and truly see it. Stefanie offered some wonderful reminders about our art, that apply to life: "Viewers will believe anything if it is done with intention and awareness."

The tentative line, the fuzzy edges, the absently created background; all the places where we are unsure of, that wetry to skim over and hope will be okay, the viewer sees them all. Perhaps he/she doesn't know why, but work that contains places where we express our unsureness or laziness contribute to an unsatisfying viewing experience. EEk. There we are, artists, standing without our clothes. Some are more astute at reading the terrain of our naked selves and others just get the feeling that perhaps one of our hips are higher than the other or our mind is on the fight we had with our kids this morning. Our attention is requested every moment, over and over, if we are going to create art that speaks of who we really are and touches the heart strings of another quivering being.

So I was inspired to drag out my Frederick Franck books, for he manages to layer the language of art and the dharma into a delicious and nourishing sandwich. Let me end with a little appetizer whipped up by Franck: "Looking & seeing both start with sense perception, but there the similarity ends. When I "look at the world and label its phenomena, I make immediate choices, instant appraisals, I like or I dislike, I accept or reject what I look at, according to its usefulness to the "Me". This me that I imagine myself to be, and that I try to impose on others. The purpose of "looking" is to survive, to cope...... When on the other hand, I see, suddenly I am all eyes, I forget this "Me", am liberated from it and dive into the reality of what confronts me, become part of it, participate in it. I no longer label, no longer choose. (choosing is the sickness of the mind, says a sixth-century Chinese sage.)." from "The Zen of Seeing"

Waving Goodbye

By yesterday afternoon I was exhausted and over- whelmed. Packing and making decisions about what to do with "stuff" were taking their toll. I realized I was doing the classic add-on. I wasn't just tired, I was "I am so exhausted what if I can't finish all of this, what if I get sick. Why can't I just go with the flow? Why can't I just enjoy this? And yada, yada, yada." In my head I know better and yet the siren's song of habit beckons. It lures me on to do it the way I have always done it. And that was yesterday.

This morning brought fresh energy and the opportunity to start over. Less add-ons. More just doing. More things flung into the give-away bag and the pot-luck potlach boxes. Tomorrow some friends are having a little "leaving town" pot luck for us. I thought I would take along a couple of boxes of the more interesting treasures I am parting with and let people see if any of it calls to go home with them. I thought it might be a fun end to the evening. Not quite a potlach but a nod in that direction, perhaps that pottery cookie jar might find a new cookie baker to keep company or the Christmas tea pot might settle in to a new cupboard.

On other chapters that required closure.... Yesterday I drove by the place where my homeless friend had her camper parked. She was gone, without a trace. In the past several weeks I had run out of ideas and energy to offer. I had to turn my attention to my own moving. Last Tuesday when I'd stopped by her camper was still there but she wasn't home. And now I was left wondering, what had happened, where did she go? As is the human tendency I expected her to still be there doing the same thing. When I found her gone I worried she had been towed away against her will. The thought crossed my mind that I could have done more. I reminded myself I didn't need to feel like I'd let her down.

And then this evening the phone rang. She remembered that soon I would be gone too, from my home, from my phone number, that she might not have any way of contacting me. She called to let me know she had taken her insurance settlement and found a bed and breakfast room in a nearby town. She wasn't clear what her next step was, but all the avenues we pursued that lead nowhere showed her that it was time to leave Victoria. Her settlement allowed her to pay off a sizable debt that she owed and now she could move on. She said that if we never met again she wanted me to know that I had been helpful to her on her journey.

All this was said with such humility and a sense of wisdom. Sometimes during the process she had just seemed confused and indecisive to me, but here she was at her best, speaking from a deep place of clarity and kindness. When she said she didn't know what was next and was simply waiting to see what came up, it reminded me of a true Dharma practitioner. And like a mindful practitioner she was taking care not to create a further wake of karma, by calling me and bringing closure to the little part of the journey we'd traveled together. She was, in essence, pausing at a fork in the road up a head and waving good bye. It was all spoken like a true Bodhisattva, with gratitude, humility, clarity and a recognition of our place in the cosmos, one where we do our part, but are not the conductor of this little travel plan. It felt good to know she was safe and dry and had taken the next step. She offered me her love and blessings on my journey and I to her, in return. A little sad, a little sweet, a little puzzling, like many of our encounters in this life.