Goodbye, Stanley Marie

As in, the kitty belonging to R. who i took care of 2 weeks ago. R. called me yesterday to let me know the sad news. Stanley was a loving kitty, a grouchy arthritic grandma who would lethargically lay about the couch on a Sunday afternoon while the person in her life read the paper. She will be missed.


Worldly concerns press in on my fragile sense of artistic identity. A baseball game, the blaring lights of grocery stores, birth, death, car break-ins, visits from friends, and the need for making money have conspired to derail my best creative intentions. The most i could muster this weekend was gazpacho (thank you TDog for the tip about blanching the tomatoes first!).

But new acquaintances deepen into friendship, the migrants have almost all gone and I am left looking at my hands and wondering, what next? Sunim, the Buddhist spiritual teacher at the Zen temple, said this week that failing to cultivate one's mind after attaining human life is like coming home broke from the treasure island. I also have this opportunity to cultivate awareness--inquiry-- which is all I ever felt the need for intuitively anyway! Inquiry can seem masturbatory at times--except when I manage to see my own prejudices and learn to background my own ego and see what is actually there, instead of what I want to see. Birding is perfect for this. And yet I haven't birded in ages.

can i revisit, re-integrate artwork into my days, my life? this blog posting feels like a first step.

Happy Summer Solstice to everyone reading this.