I'm going to post this on my zen blog later this week, but right now I want to post it somewhere and I'm too tired to compose a post over there, so I'll post here instead!

As we do every year, nyxie and I spent New Year's Eve at the Zen Centre for its New Year's ceremony. It's a longish ceremony, starting at 8 and going until 12:30 or so with a social ( Read more... )

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Generosity, or dana, is one of the ten paramitas of Buddhism. This quote opens an article on it in this month's Tricycle:

When you are practicing generosity, you should feel a little pinch when you give something away. That pinch is your stinginess protesting. If you give away your old, worn-out coat that you wouldn't be caught dead wearing, that is ( Read more... )

From perennial favorite Meditation Matters, where Ellie Finlay notes, "this is an excellent way of clarifying the distinction between letting go and indifference:"

Once we see that everything is impermanent and ungraspable and that we create a huge amount of suffering if we are attached to things staying the same, we realize that relaxing and ( Read more... )

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From today's Tricycle email:

When we get sick, our suffering can put us in touch with the pain of others. When things go well, however, our mind easily accepts this. Like oil absorbing into our skin, attachment to favorable circumstances blends smoothly and invisibly into our thoughts and feelings. Without realizing what's happening, we can become ( Read more... )

Right on schedule! Wheeeee! I'm really happy with how it turned out.


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Halfway done! I'm pretty happy with it so far, most of the messiness is my handwriting, although I find when I try to "correct" the weirdness of my handwriting it looks worse (except for the "p" in "slips" which is driving me nuts and I might pull out and redo without the downstroke).


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Updated pattern, fixing line spacing, word spacing, and the suggestions from my last post. I figured I'd share it so those of you who made suggestions can see what I did :-)

Thanks to eyeteeth for the suggestion to just scan it in and manipulate it in a graphics program. For some reason it hadn't occurred to me to involve a computer in this non-computery ( Read more... )

So far so good! I've been practicing on my own handwriting, and learned some things -- that I need to use a smaller needle, for instance, and that two-strand whipped backstitch seems to be the right weight and slubbiness for what I want to do.

I also found a frame! This is great because all of the places where I thought I'd be able to find a nice ( Read more... )