The Vaporous Softness

Oolong in my old tea bowl

It's raining, but the hay-bale cave out in the garden is dry inside. (However, the wet has let loose the scent of hay.) This is my dedicated meditation spot, which I built from piled up bales last summer. 

 I brought out to my cave with me the words of two people I've never met, and never knew at all before they posted here on my blog.  (For anyone interested: their comments are appended to my next post.) As will be clear to anyone who's read in this blog before, I also brought with me the snarl of frenzy, angst, and loose-ended live wires of my recent attempts to tidy my farging house.  While I sogged through the garden to find a nice, dry corner within the bales, the words of these strangers and my state of mind must have introduced themselves to each other and then communed, with me all unaware, because when I sat down to meditate, my mind was already quiet. Quiet for the first time in, oh, I don't know, months? Yes.  So I just went on to do what you do in your kindly, still place to meditate.  Then I squished through the mud and came back into the house,  where I painlessly finished three massive projects. OK--I finished them in about an hour, so they were only massive within a tortured state of mind. . . .

• I removed all the corroded and paint-coated hardware from the lovely old door I'll use for a headboard to my bed  and applied a transparent wash of pale celadon to it.

• I completed a coat of tarnished copper paint to the old refrigerator I'm dressing up as a  yet older steamer trunk.

• I Ironed and hung two draperies I'd made for my living room window then thrown aside to let Wolsey the dog and Olive the cat apply wrinkles to them.

All the happy juices of my being flowed into these doings, and I seem to have shed wisps of hay on the floor as I worked. Well, I like the history of worn old things around me, and I also like the history of my day around me, too, when it's good, so the hay doesn't count as a mess. And Namaste, alanaincanada and drwende! 

(Then I had some hot tea in my old, cracked, raku tea bowl, as indicated at the top of this post, and enjoyed the vaporous softness of being alive.)