Updates, updates, updates

I am still knee-deep in my on-call shift (3 days more to go…), but I have some updates to share with folks:

1. Day 2 of my observance of Juya-E continues swimmingly. I was super-tired yesterday, and almost gave up, but I hung in there. Actually, I find that I really like reading the Amitabha Sutra aloud as part of the observance. As stated in another post, I don’t recite the sutra in Japanese, as is tradition. I don’t chant it either. I just read aloud, as if doing a book reading or poetry reading. I find reading aloud helps for me. Each day I read it, I feel like I grok* the text a little more than before, and the text is compact, but has a lot of good stuff to say. I am planning on writing commentaries on the sutra sometime soon based on my own experiences.
2. My daughter is going to become the next American Idol, I think. She has hit a phase where she likes to sing and dance now. As she is 22 months old, she’s become very sure of herself. She likes looking at old pictures on the computer of herself, and she likes to show off for Mom and Dad. So, at odd times, she’ll just start singing nonsense songs, and swinging her arms up and down, and wants Daddy to join in. Sometimes she’ll try to sing songs we sing like “Twinkle, Twinkle” or some Japanese folk songs, but other times she’ll just make up songs.
3. My efforts to gradually, gradually move away from meat are still on-going. I said before that I would give up pork, beef and lamb this year, then next year move onto other things, and I have been able to stay with it for the most part. I have eaten pork twice now, beef once, in the last 2 months, but compared to before, this is dramatic reduction. I don’t plan on accelerating things though because I’ve been a meat-eating person for 30 years, and it’s kind of hard to change right away.
4. Baby has recently been waking up a lot at night, crying loud and asking for Daddy a lot. The bed is pretty small, so I sleep in the spare bedroom, but even if I come to the bedroom to comfort her, she cries as if I am not there (i.e. oblivious to my presence), and is difficult to put back to sleep. Eventually she does fall back to sleep and then does it again an hour or two later. I think she might be having Night Terrors.
5. My recent practice of zazen (as an addition to my path in Pure Land Buddhism) continues more or less uninterrupted. I took Brad Warner’s advice and setup a time early in the morning to meditate. I set my alarm daily for 6am, rather than just sleeping in, and wake up to do zazen for 10 minutes, then read quietly by myself** until baby wakes up. It’s a nice routine to get into, though being on-call has made this difficult. Sometimes I get paged in the morning, and my plans go out the window, but Buddhism is about bending like a reed, so you just roll with it and get back to your practice when you can.

That’s all for now. Thanks!

Namuamidabu

* – The term “grok” is a nerd term meaning, among other things to “internalize” something thoroughly so that it becomes a part of you. I think a very important practice in Buddhism is to grok the texts that are part of your tradition. Not something you do overnight, but just something that happens over the long-term.

** – I have been shuffling around my bookshelf lately, and set aside all the books I haven’t finished (Buddhist, computing, Roger Zelazny novels) into one pile next to where I do zazen, and have resolved to finish them before buying more books.