I’m coming to terms with my apartment right now, and I hope this isn’t some phase. Basically, the place has been a disaster area ever since I moved in, and it’s still a mess now, but it’s starting to piss me off. I’m embarrassed to bring people over to the apartment, and that’s no good.
[Hammerhead](http://hammerhead.livejournal.com/) has been encouraging me to do longer runs, so last night at the gym I started out by setting the timer to 45 minutes. There were lots of machines free, so I didn’t feel guilty about ignoring the 30-minute time limit.
This is my third and final night at Tassajara. I suppose things have smoothed out a little bit. I feel like an outsider, but not as much as I did when I arrived. Now I feel like a… perhaps a visitor. It’s very plain to me that I’m seeing something that is just a sliver of the experience and the richness of this place, and I’m seriously considering coming back soon.
Again I’m uncomfortable because I’m followed around by this person called me. Being here at Tassajara has been very challenging. I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to sit for long enough to make it through zazen, but this Morning without realizing, I sat longer than I ever have before. Taigen told me that including the time before the bell, (we arrived early) I sat for about an hour and a quarter.
At sitting tonight I sat at my zafu and immediately started to sob. I was faced with a n overwhelming sense that I was in the middle of something much bigger than I am. I felt that here I am protected, and maybe I’m able to see myself in this refuge. I have the opportunity to take refuge here in Sangha in a way I’ve never been able To before. yet I’m frightened of this opportunity to tahe refuge. It seems as though I am afraid of what taking refuge means that I can’t do it myself, That I have to ask for help.
Only five or six more hours and I get to go home. I want to take it easy tonight, as I’m going off on retreat and am leaving at 6am for the Tassajara monastery. I’ll need to get plenty of sleep tonight. I think I’ll go to the gym on the way home, work out, pick up something to eat at the grocery store, then go home and eat and pack.
Thursday is my last day at work. I’m getting pretty excited about leaving the workaday world, and I’ve been starting to get real bad about getting to sleep at a reasonable hour. Last night, or very early in the morning we had a power outage here, and I used that as an excuse for my oversleeping, although the real reason is that I went to see Jurassic Park III at the Metreon on the IMAX screen. It was pretty fun, although it lacked imagination.
Slept until 1:30pm today. I hate letting the day go down the drain like that. Of course, there’s plenty of time in the day to do a lot of things – I’ll be going to Alameda soon to see Erik’s new deck and maybe watch *High Noon*.
I got a few more chapters from the Tao Te Ching transcribed today. Chapter 16 really jumped out at me in a very intense way last night, and I think that’s part of why I got through the other chapters. It really feels like a good practice to me.
I went to the drycleaners to pick up my only suit, which I bought in 1995 in anticipation of Matt and Mallory Diedrich’s wedding. The suit didn’t quite fit then; the jacket was fine, but the pants needed to be let out as far as they could be to accomodate my waist. Even then the pants were tight around my waist. The tailor who made the alterations tried to convince me to take the suit back and get a different one, but I knew that I couldn’t get everything done and have the suit ready in time for the wedding, so I had him make the alterations despite his protestations.
Woke up early enough to exercise or meditate, but did neither. I did however make oatmeal for the second time, and put about a third the brown sugar in that I did last time. It was tasty, even if it lacked the reminiscent flavor of instant oatmeal from childhood.
Progress point to note: Friday the 13th would have been the third anniversary of Vikki’s and my domestic partnership, and it didn’t even occur to me until yesterday (Monday). I went through the whole day and two days after without realizing that the anniversary had passed.