Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

Tomorrow will be the last of the Dogen classes; I have really enjoyed hosting the conversation, which has been pretty lively and in-depth. I worried that I got a bit bogged down in the second class, especially since at the end of it – half-way through the course – we had only got to the end of the first paragraph of the text. It did feel important to set the stage fully, and hopefully people felt prepared to meet the text. Last week we made more progress, and I hope that I can hit the main points for this final session. After which I can turn my attention to the dharma talk I am due to give on the 21st.

Apart from the teaching, the weather has been front and centre of my attention recently. Last Wednesday it only just stopped raining before a roam was due to start, though several people had cancelled, and the grass where we met was quite waterlogged. On Sunday’s roam, I was wearing a t-shirt and shorts as we wandered around the Mission in temperatures approaching seventy degrees. 

I got pretty drenched on Wednesday when I had to go out to my student’s company in South San Francisco for a meditation session, though thankfully, it was just on the last leg of the homeward journey. Considering how much rain fell, I was glad to miss the lingering showers on Thursday. Sunday’s roam to see the magnolias, though, has been cancelled, as we are due another inch that day; now it will clash with the Superbowl  – the city was quiet enough during the game against the Lions, so I expect it to be a ghost town on the 11th.

One marker of how little I have been riding, between teaching and the rain, is that I have barely made a dent in my stock of energy bars since December; I have been on my bike, but I haven’t really gone far enough to need refuelling. I hope that having Saturday mornings free again will give me extra opportunities to manage that.