Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

It often seems to happen that I pen a personal post and then leave out one of the most important points I had meant to convey. For last week, it was that I really took Labor Day off; I did nothing work-related all day, which is rare, and which was a challenge because I had work to do, and I decided to postpone it until Wednesday. I rode my bike in the morning, and we took our afternoon walk down to Aquatic Park, that was all. 

It’s hard to take this kind of time off as a self-employed person who still has to hustle to keep himself financially afloat, but I was also happy to note that I had another pretty light weekend after that as well; originally I had been contacted about officiating a wedding ceremony (one of several that this multi-cultural couple intended to have), but that fell through, and I had an empty calendar on Saturday, as well as no teaching on Friday. So, having felt a typical resistance to going back to work on Tuesday after the long weekend, the week was not so arduous. 

Ruth and I both exercised hard on Saturday morning; I had wanted to take the Sawyer Camp trail for the first time in many months (and end my ride at San Bruno to take the BART back), but it was closed once again, so I turned north and rode all the way home through the damp fog of Daly City, three hours in all, which is a lot for me at the moment. Then I turned straight around to go to the Ferry Building farmers market. 

We had an intention to go to the dahlia garden in Golden Gate Park in the afternoon, or even visit Sisterhood Garden that the roam had visited the weekend before, on our way to Fort Funston, but the fog seemed pretty set in, and once we landed on the couch after lunch, we ended up napping – even me, which is a rare occurrence – and didn’t go out at all.

Nonetheless, we made up for it by going to the park on a sunny Sunday morning, where they were warming up the sound system for the live opera later, and doing a lap of the still wonderful dahlias (I am posting more pictures on Patreon today). After a light lunch at a cafe in the Outer Richmond, Ruth and Georgie went home, and I led a roam down to Mile Rock Beach. The fog had been creeping over the area, but even so it was nice and warm out of the wind; we spent an hour on the beach, which did not seem too long at all, and saw the veil of fog rise enough to reveal the coastal hillsides of Marin.

I had a chance to listen back to my recent City Center talk (the link is to the video version which includes the question and answer part), and it held together a little better than I felt at the time – even if I could have connected some of the themes a little more concretely – but I was terribly embarrassed at how my mind had been led astray while I was listening to the first questioner. I told her I would try to re-answer her question after I had listened back to the exchange, and I will try to piece something together for her this week (that will probably also appear on Patreon).