...everything we do is music...
John Cage
... returning from Casa Zen to Punta Coco on the last afternoon, heard unmistakable barbaric yawping of howler monkeys in the trees by the tiny escuela across the street...unmistakable not because I recognized or had heard them before...but since, having heard of them, could imagine no other answer to the inevitable what the hell is that??!!...like a roaring hippo mixed with a cement mixer and filtered through a wah-wah pedal...
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...though it wasn’t on the official agenda, managed to wander out every morning straight from bed to sit, legs crossed, back relatively straight, on a folded up towel on the rocks, peering hazily out to the sea for half an hour...though morning yoga was at the ungodly-for-me hour of 7:00 AM...sometimes was out even before the sun rose at around 6:00...on the last morning, when we needed to catch an early morning bus, it was closer to 4:30...with a bright red moon and a shooting star...made somewhat easier by the near-unimpeachable logic that peering out to sea while the moon goes down and the sun comes up is better than sleeping, anyway....
...Zen Buddhists...when not talking about the pointlessness of talking about anything...talk about something called monkey mind...a term which describes the way thoughts go leaping through the leaves and branches of consciousness...so quickly...in seemingly random motions...that convincing them to be still seems close to impossible...and even to calmly follow and watch takes great skill...
...ended up taking nearly seventy pictures up into those trees, in crappy light, of creatures that, like my thoughts, won’t seem to keep still...hoping one or two might come out okay...(now that I think of it, this rather forced metaphor might relate more to writing than meditation...whatever works)...and, like denizens of the deeper recesses, don’t, apparently, want to be seen very clearly...though ever ready to leap out and disturb any seeming calm...
...back home, I’ve managed so far to keep the morning meditation thing going...if a bit later...and just so long as I’m willing to let the monkeys howl...
