Night Journey

I was dancing on leaf piles this afternoon when a huge wind came out of nowhere, carrying with it dust, dead leaves and rain drops. Pecans and small branches came crashing down and the dogs and I ran for cover in the house, which was scant comfort to the dogs because it sounded like a machine gun attack on the metal part of the roof. When I happened to notice the astonishing beauty of the light I raced out with my worthy camera and grabbed a few pictures before the light changed.

I have a cold which I always have when I return from a visit with my grandchildren. Thanksgiving was everything it is supposed to be and quite wonderful. Unfortunately my Priceline ticket put me on a plane from Portland at 0620 the day after, and I was a four hour drive away over snow choked mountains. I left late T'giving night and took the long way, north up the east side of the mountains then west through the Columbia Gorge. There was a little snow and if there was any ice I didn't notice it. I drove slow and listened to the radio and remembered the thousands of exhausted nights driving to work on little sleep. When I first did that I listened to a top 40 a.m. station. In the mornings on my way home the DJ always played 'You Are The Sunshine of My Life' for his little boy who he had lost in a divorce. I always knew what time it was when I heard it. That little boy is bordering on middle age today I suppose. The flights home were horrible as usual. I was trapped for a while in a Dallas Ft Worth Airport ground transportation device, and nearly missed my connection. Hardly had time to buy a quick snack before boarding the food deficient plane.

My friend's dog died. She is grieving, but she believes he has reincarnated by now. I know he has, because his reincarnations are running all over the town and have been for years......

Found Object

I picked this thing up on a god forsaken stretch of litter strewn desert. I'd stopped to let the dogs have a chance to do whatever they needed to do, and I saw this and thought 'firewood'. When I got it home it began to acquire a certain artistic quality. It must have been nailed to a wall somewhere. Someone's objet d'art. Can't decide whether I should reconsign it to the firewood pile or find it a dignified corner to preside in mystery.

I'm flying to Portland tomorrow for Thanksgiving. I should be packing but it's too difficult. I know it's cold and rainy there, but I don't want to lug a lot of heavy stuff around.

My dear friend's dog is dying. I am quite sure of this, but she keeps spending more and more money she doesn't have on vets who won't tell her he is dying and I hope he isn't, but it is hard to know what to say because I think the dog is suffering. He is a wonderful dog. When she drove the night employee bus for the casino she saw him skulking, and it took days until she was able to catch him and clean him up and make him healthy. There's something about the spirit of a good dog that never leaves the human who loves that dog. Or so I tell myself.

We welcomed a new Buddhist in our midst today. I must admit a pang when I saw how this man was especially welcomed by the Roche. Then I reminded myself that like it or not it IS a man's world, and few men come to the Zendo. That was a great TV series, 'It's a Man's World'. It only ran half a season about half a century ago, but I still remember it.

Nuts

These are two of my pecan trees. The bare naked one has dropped nearly all its leaves to display an almost frightening crop o'nuts up there. The problem is that these nuts are not very saleable. They are not the tiny wild pecans, but they aren't very big and their shells are hard. The nuts have a high oil content and a good flavor, but they are just too hard to shell. In other words they are a nuisance. The tree with all the yellow leaves has already dropped some beautiful nuts but there aren't too many of them.
The yard was a foot deep in leaves when I came back from my camping trip. I rake them into big heaps then I dance on them. I used to be embarrassed to do this, but it works. I can compact a huge heap of leaves into a smaller heap of broken up leaves. Then I drag industrial sized plastic sacks of leaves to the road and people come and get them. Someone named Hal came and took them yesterday. He asked if he could take me too as I looked like a good worker. Then he rambled on about moving to Uruguay as the Northern Hemisphere is about ready to collapse into chaos and was I interested in therapeutic biofeedback? He also told me a dentist in Texas had the cure for all cancers. I think it was baby pancreatic cells or something. I told him it sounded a little snake oily to me and resumed my work.

Went to see Borat. I had already heard all the funny bits on the radio. Unlike just about everyone else I think the Ordinary Folks who agreed to be in the movie aquitted themselves quite well. The rodeo audience cheered for Our Fighting Men and Women, but became uneasy when Borat advocated toasting every man woman and child in Iraq and leaving it a hundred year wasteland. The frat boys threw Borat out of their trailer with heartfelt assurances that he would be fine because he was in the US of A and I thought they were probably right about that. I give it my OK rating which means 'well if you have nothing else to do...'

There's a brand new truck stop in the village. It has a steak house type restaurant with real white tablecloths and twenty dollar steaks. What are they thinking??

Which way is South?

These are my dogs. The Catahoola is as hyper as a living thing can be without actually spontaneously combusting. Today I left them alone in the house from 0900 to 1900. I did this with the utmost trepidation. I expected to return to a trashed and mutilated house, but in fact as far as I can see nothing was destroyed. I was pathetically grateful to them.
I was gone without them because J had a rental car over the week-end and she wanted to put some miles on it. We went to the Zendo and our post meditation conversation was quite interesting. About violence. Deep Buddhism looks on violence as simply a part of the all that is nothing, but if you take a pragmatic step to compassion as a way to live, then obviously violence can be looked on as undesirable, so how do we handle it? Defuse it, J said. Chewing on this knotty subject we continued on to one of those magic places that I hope exist quietly all over the country, an undiscovered piece of heaven. The water was high so we waded across to find petroglyphs on the flat rocks along the river. We kept meeting hunters and friends of our guide in this lonely place. J found an arrow like glyph within a half circle, and she just needed to know what direction the arrow pointed to make the whole thing make sense astronomically. A sturdy hunter with a GPS and two compasses showed up but he had a hard time figuring out where the arrow pointed. Eventually he decided it pointed SE which bore out J's theories about the sign. We met three genial potbellied bearded men who were friends of our guide who is a sculpter. One of these Santas out of uniform had a dog like my Catahoola. She was nearly four years old and still running in ever accelerating circles just for the fun of it. Oh dear.
When we got back to the car the sun had just gone below the horizon and the great Hunter's Moon was rising in the (I think) East. J had left the car's lights on. It would not start. We had no jumper cables. Our guide called her daughter to bring jumper cables. It started to get cold and we had wet feet. After ten minutes or so J tried the car again and it started. We had to wait a half hour for our guide's daughter to let her know we didn't need the cables. We stopped at the big casino for coffee and made our way home. A good day.