Sanskrit names etc

Monday night 6/09/10

Is my  commitment to blogging already waning? Is my blog doomed to become another of those abandoned sites? Possibly. I’ve been scribbling in the old pen-and-paper diary. Sigh. What to report? So much happens, all the time. People coming and going through the front door. Thoughts. etc

There is the garden renovation, the three blokes here all day for the last week, ripping out weeds, rebuilding the broken steps down to the laundry, laying down flagstones on the north side of the house, a little spot to catch the winter sun. 

They are nice guys. But I still find it hard having them here, in my space. When I expressed this to T the other day, she said ‘sounds like heaven to me’. She couldn’t afford such luxury. Yes, I should be grateful!

The gardener told us that his wife is a sex therapist. I love that sort of thing about living in this area: The electrician has a sanskrit name. The guy who came to sort out my computer  is a Zen practitioner and has set my home page so that it keeps popping up sayings about emptiness and the false self and reminding me I am God etc. 

Then there was the cleaner who came for a while - she had an Indian name too - who told me that she couldn’t remove cobwebs, because there are enough homeless creatures in the world and she didn’t want to destroy spiders’ homes. Her  commitment to all life unfortunately  seemed to exclude the possibility of removing even the  oldest dustiest cobwebs. 

The gardener’s two young offsiders play gentle meditation type music while they work. 

And we have a local paper that describes itself as  ‘insouciant since 1984’

I’ve found a great acupuncturist. Though he has a tendency to deliver lectures while I’m lying immobilized  and pincushion-like  on his table ‘We have to let go of dogma’ he said the other day, while stabbing a couple of needles into my calves. 

He himself spent decades of his younger life practising extreme martial arts disciplines in Japan. Bare-chested in the snow with ice on his chest hair. Now he’s given it all up. Let all that folly and striving and illusion fall away. 

Heard a young guy busking on clarinet at the market the other day. I went up and asked him if  F. could come and get some lessons from him. Had the first one last week. Now F is suddenly playing all this jazzy bluesy stuff.  Tonight after dinner he put on a Ray Charles cd and played along. 

D phoned from Melb. Its cold and dreary down there, he says, though conceding that coffee and bookshops are good. He reckons it’s making him appreciate the nice life we have here.