Chewed Mala

This picture has nothing to do with chewed malas. I was playing around with my iphotos and turned a pretty ordinary Utah picture into B&W and I think improved it immensely.

Today I had my painfully hand sewn rakusu written on and stamped by the rochi. This makes me more of a Buddhist than I was before. While I was meditating my dog Shadow was busy chewing up my two bracelet malas, which are made of wooden beads. I imagine that the sensation of splitting the hard little nuggets with her teeth must have been a sensory experience of some value to the dog, but I assure you she is in the dog house now and she knows it. One of the malas I found beside the river in Irkutsk, and I took it to be a Sign. Now the dog has eaten it. Is that another Sign? Is the fact that I spent the whole day finding as many of the beads as I could and gluing as many of them as possible back together also a Sign? Oh yes, she also chewed up the lovely silk bag I keep them in, which I bought in Viet Nam. I also mended that as well as I could. How pathetic can you get? Would a sensible person just have thrown the whole sad mess away and started looking for replacements? Just for the record, I did look for replacements on the net and all I could find was touchy feely New Age crap that I wouldn't put on my dog. Of course if she had attempted to chew them she might have been deterred by the fact that they were all 'crystal' and would have provided an entirely different sensory experience.