Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

I was chatting with a neighbour the other day about getting the trees on our street pruned back. That should happen by the end of the summer, he said, followed by, how can it be August already? This week the Premier League starts up again, ending a few weeks when I have not been distracted by any sports, and have thus had more hours in my week to get things done (it has also helped that a number of my regular commitments have been less regular recently). 

In the mornings it is getting light noticeably later; close to the solstice, I knew if it was time to get up by seeing a little light through the blinds. Now, it has taken me sleeping until six to have the same effect. It has also continued to be fairly damp and foggy for much of the day, with short burts of fitful sunshine in the middle.

My road bike is still out of action while I wait for a replacement deraiileur – though I got the wheel fixed – so I did not get a lot of riding in over the weekend; my old road bike is fine to ride around on, but less easy to climb steep hills on, and is not set up for long distances.

We had a pair of errands to carry out on Sunday, in any case: picking up some of David Chadwick’s boxes from a long-time sangha member who lives up in Marin. We made an outing of it, intending to get Georgie a walk and paddle in the bay, and then not finding the right spot for that; then having lunch, before collecting our precious cargo. I also had some boxes to collect from City Center with more tapes that had emerged from cupboards at Green Gulch and Page St, which we did on the way back. I would love to dive in and examine everything, especially since the first box of David Chadwick’s stuff had cassette copies of talks from Tassajara in the sixties (clearly labeled as copies, so almost certainly talks we already have – and yet, you never know what might appear).

Dan did a heroic job of pinning and ironing my long okesa border during sewing class so I could tackle the second and third rows. As I mentioned last week, I remember doing this part outside on a chair at Great Vow twenty years ago, just sewing, and nothing to fiddle about with. This time I was on the couch with Georgie sleeping beside me, but it was equally relaxing. That job is now done, so we have to do the same with the bottom border, and then it is just corners and ties. I tried to sew my rakusu straps during the class, but was not happy with how it was going, so ended up taking those stitches out; that will be next, and the pine stitch, and then the zagu.