i give thanks

Many warm thank you's to all those people and events in the past 24 hrs that have summoned my buddha nature.

let's start the roll call off w/ the safety class i had to take last night at legacy emmanuel, which goes back to a traffic infraction i made in july (ran red light on bicycle in front of law-enforcement enforcer) the veracity of which i think is dubious but i ultimately need to take responsibility so i will. the class, while pretty much exactly what you'd suspect 2 plus hours of 'instruction' led by a bike-riding judge, a trauma nurse, a crunchy bike alliance guy about sharing the road in portland would be like still had moments of wit and insight. To handle the wit-less, insight-less moments you simply take breaths, take inventory and arrive at a platform of gratitude that this class is a welcome substitute for the $242 penalty of your violation. thank you class, even though attending meant i missed the Blazer game last night. thanks Legacy emmanuel too. the last time i was there i met with a radiation oncologist. comparatively speaking, i'll take a boring class any day of the week...

next up let's give thanks to pyramid taproom at the rose garden, where i arrived after class to meet my wife. i found a decent parking spot a few blocks away and walked thru the windy chill to the arena, planning to sit my fat seat in a chair and watch the game on TV while downing a handsome quanitity of beers. I tried to enter from the plaza/promenade at the door that said "Enter" but the employee/guard told me i had to go thru the arena instead. I walked into the arena and 3 red-vested ushers met my request (to go sit in the pyramid room and drink a beer while waiting for the game to end and my wife to come join me) w/ a glazed bafflement. "You don't have a ticket" they said. I explained that no, i did not have a ticket but i wasn't entering the arena, i was merely going to be in the pyramid room drinking a beer and that i didn't see what the big deal was b/c last summer my dad and my wife sat in there before a game and had dinner but they were unimpressed by this claim. There was 4 minutes left in the 3rd plus the whole 4th which translated into at least 45 minutes of real-time for me to kill. I went outside and sat in the wind and chill, staring thru the windows at the patrons and felt a burn in my stomach. I acknowledged it and took deep breaths, grateful to be drawing them at all and listened to this american life on my ipod. eventually the game ended and i saw my wife through the glass in the restaurant, wondering where i was, and we were happily reunited. thanks to all involved.

now, let's give a warm and generous shout-out to henry and strunk - our cats. On the drive home margaret and i joked about how they were going to be upset that we were coming home so late and that they didn't get fed dinner. I said "they probably shit on the bed". Well I was wrong, they did not shit on the bed - they pissed all over the bed, in two giant pools that necessitated stripping, soaking, washing and drying of bedsheets and linens. thank you kits, for making me laugh. It was very instructive indeed.

major shout out to norman who has reasons of his own that may not be visible to me. his refusal triggered a familiar swell of gut-burn anger that i've been breathing into and exploring for the past hour or so. maybe i'm looking at the small not the big? who knows what's underfoot?

the fact is that in meditative reflection and spelunking of the inner variety one encounters terms like 'obstacle' or 'challenge'. Those are abstractions. The above are specifics. Losing your toolbag out in space is specific. The junction of the sublime and the mundane is near. In fact, right here.