Finally some rain. It has, as local readers know, been unusually hot and dry. Oddly, the streams aren't all that low, perhaps a consequence of last year being so wet. The cornfields behind my neighborhood were flowing with two feet of water at one point. Walking through thigh deep running water amidst seven foot cornstalks was a little eerie. Felt a bit like 'Nam. Except for the corn being much taller than rice and no one hiding out trying to kill me and my home being 1500 yards away.

  Over the weekend I spent a bit more time reading news and trolling the internet than I often do. There can be so much to take in... at first it is enjoyable, then revs up into info-greed, and soon the swirl of emotions (provoked by politics, advertising, and general weirdness) mutates into compulsion. For me, it is a tense and de-centered feeling, which once I become aware of it, becomes a physical restlessness. It become more difficult for me to concentrate as a result.

   So I pull back. Of course, at this moment I am blogging, but it is number 7 on the list of things to get down this morning bracketed by photographing parts of the garden and a trip to the post office and guitar store (my favorite makers and repairers: those two angels at The Guitar Parlor). My internet misadventures did turn up a few items I would like to share: the truly awesome, but non-consequential fact that space indeed has a smell, and a sharp little taste of a new edition of William James' work on religious experience (e.g. James "constantly worried that we’re being encouraged by a certain type of scientific analysis to put our faith in abstracted explanations, often at the expense of our own experiences — the only things that we can truly know anyway. In the Varieties James is examining the emotional fundamentals not only of religious belief, but of all belief.")

   Per James, it isn't just scientific analysis that leads us to "put faith in abstracted explanations". This has always been a problem within religious practice. It is so easy, for people of particular temperaments, to simply enjoy and take comfort in the formal practices, the robes, the incense, the schedule, the liturgies, and so on. It is equally easy to completely reject these as superficial and distracting. And it is not a matter of simply splitting the difference. It is the essential task of living my own life and responding to what is around me genuinely and with deep engagement. Ritual and the rejection of ritual can be equally abstracted from direct experience.

   For some, ritual can be a dynamic mix of challenge (hearing what you don't want to hear, sitting zazen for an hour, etc) and comfort (co-religionists, inspiring words, sights, and sounds, escape from daily pressures). Taken together, it can be pretty strong stuff. If we pick and choose, however, we run the risk of merely creating a rather monochromatic expression of ourselves to gaze at, rather than the direct experience of the inner and outer life.

  Picking and choosing is what we do naturally, isn't it? For the most part we move away from discomfort and toward pleasure or relief. And as we deepen our sense of self, we radically broaden what we experience as pleasure, folding into this many experiences that our younger selves might have really run away from. In Zen practice, sitting might be one of these. Or training martial arts. But for some of us, being radically open and connected to others is the great challenge, the one most riven with doubt.

   The primary delusion is that we are fundamentally separate from others. I would like to discuss this further a little later...