We just had another work/practice day here at Tarantland. Got a ton done and am quite pleased. A bunch of really fun people came. We started off with zazen in which each of us attained Buddhahood. I was blown away. Actually for me it started when I woke up and leaned over to look at the clock. I'd been up 'till two working on matters of great import to all sentient beings here at the computer but I still usually wake up before the alarm. Oh god no! It was ten twenty! I'd overslept. zazen would already be over and they needed me to tell them what to do. I was filled with shame and humiliation. Then I noticed that my clock, a round clock with only a slight flat spot to keep it upright, had been knocked onto its side because when I picked it up I could see that it was more like seven ten. Ah thank god.

I was late to zazen though. Clay's mom was coming to get him to go to the morning show of that German movie on Hitler in the bunker which I hear and read is quite good and all I could find for his breakfast was some stale white bread. "That'll be good enough for you," I told him. "You're lucky to be alive. Why when I was a kid..." But there was no time. Luckily, stale white bread contributed the essential element to what he considered to be the best breakfast of all time or at least in the running - French toast with grade B maple syrup. I told him that next time we'd soak it a lot longer, that that makes the ultimate best French toast I mean Freedom Toast. So he went back to get his drum set ready for his mother and I went to zazen late, squeezing into the last available spot in the living room now more spacious as a zendo since the giant Balinese cabinet obtained by Ken Ireland rests in the garage waiting for that room to be transformed.

I'd been sitting for a good ten minutes when I heard Elin, Clay's mother's voice (it's quite a decision how to apostrophize that). I hobbled plantar fascitisly to the kitchen. She couldn't find Clay. He was on the trampoline. We got the drum set in the car and she and he and her mother and lover were off. Back to zazen. But once again deep salami was broken, this time by the efficiency of the sub-conscious which had knocked on the door and informed me that we needed money for the dump run. John was on his way out to a meeting and I caught him and that was worked out. Back to zazen. Ding. Time for work.

In prior posts and emails we've seen the tasks to be done and we could have done them all but miraculously almost everyone had either flown off to the Tushita Heaven or met the love of their lives and went off into the woods to stare joyously at each other. One of the problems with the work/practice day here is that people tend to accomplish all they'd wanted to in this lifetime before the work starts. All that was left was Rachel Flannery, David Weinstein, and me. With a song in their hearts David W and Rachel F (there were three Rachels and a Rachael at the recent koan workshop - four R___'s if you don't have to spell it) washed windows while I worked towel racks. Then, miraculously, Brian Howlett showed up like Hans Solo coming back with a truck to save the day. While Rachel made a lunch that later had us all in tears, the three guys among us loaded the truck with everything we don't want around here that can't fit into the trash container - two mortally wounded fridges, an iron bathtub, two tires, and a bunch of florescent light uh things - not the bulbs but the metal part you put the bulbs in.

As a result of yesterday's work/practice day, countless beings were saved, things done, and trash relocated. The praline tort was to-live-for.