Yesterday my friend Marin came over to help me address some things in the house that require two pairs of hands and an eye for proportion, balance and levelness. Marin is one of those gifts from real life for which I am immeasurably grateful – Thich Nhat Hahn tells the story of “Angelina” in his Teachings on Love, where “Angelina” is someone who steps into one’s life and somehow makes life more expansive and rich, who reminds us of the boundlessness of human love and compassion. This is not romantic love, but loving kindness, the love that can be experienced and shared when one is willing to be open, honest and truly there for someone else. Marin is an Angelina, my dharma sister, who entered my life through Twitter and stepped into the waking world to help me selflessly in many ways – moving me into my home, looking after my birds and my home while I am away chasing the Dharma, arranging and re-arranging my space so that the chi can flow better and the dralas have somewhere to land in the chaos of my life.

A note: this is a purely spontaneous post, and the last paragraph came from my feelings of unexpressed gratitude. Appreciation for one’s good fortune is, according to Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche, absolutely critical for the accumulation of the kind of merit that will permit one to progress along the  Buddhist path. I bow in gassho to my dharma sister Marin.

So Marin came by and helped me with hanging curtains in the front of the house and in my practice room, and re-arranging furniture in the living room and practice room. If this was all that she did, that would be more than enough, but her impending arrival was the motivation I needed to spend all of yesterday relentlessly attacking the clutter that seems poised to consume my living space and what is left of my sanity. Most of yesterday’s efforts did little more than re-arrange the items, organizing the boxes of the flotsam and jetsam of my life so that I can attack those in a more orderly fashion. The clearing of space so that I can walk around and sit down in my living room is nothing short of monumental (if you haven’t lived in the Cavern of Clutter or one of its emanations, you cannot possibly understand), and I can now tackle smaller chunks in the evening when I am home from work instead of feeling overwhelmed. Feeling overwhelmed is death on making progress with machete, torch and maul through the standing fields of things I own.

This was not exactly what I was going to write when I started paragraph #2. Welcome to the unbridled, untamed wildness that is my mind. And yet I am finally getting to the point I wanted to make a couple hundred words ago.

We went to dinner at this little Thai restaurant down near the waterfront on the line between Canton and Fells Point after our labors. It was a delight to find after trying to make sense out of the options for eating in Canton (read: not terribly vegetarian friendly, and although I forget if Marin is vegetarian or just sparing in her consumption of meat, it’s been a year since I gave up meat and so vegetarian is key), but I would never had found it if it weren’t for Google’s location-based search and my iPhone. The food was yummy, and we caught up a bit both with each other and on the happenings of my #twangha (Twitter sangha). During the conversation I had to admit to Marin and myself that Twitter may  be somewhat “toxic” for the likes of me, because of my confirmation issues, tendency towards anything that distracts from those things which my mind has labeled distasteful or undesirable such as housework, paying bills or generally anything that is not “fun”. I said I’d begun to see a bit of the Luddite point of view, but perhaps I should say Neo-Luddite after reading some about what was really behind the Luddite movement. I make my living from technology, I am using technology right now to expound upon my thoughts, and yet I am not convinced that technology on the whole has made things “better”, just “different”.

I’m not sure where all of this is going, and it has rather turned into a bit of a ramble, so I think I shall call it a “post” and move on. I’ve more to say on the topic of being off the grid, but for now real life beckons.

TTFN