Tonight's writing exercise: we all looked at art books, each choose a piece and briefly described it to everyone else. We all took notes on the descriptions; that's the first part below. (Mine is #5.) Then we used these as feedstock to write poem. Obviously I stuck on the first one; others integrated all the descriptions into their exercise.

(Also I probably radically misheard some people's descriptions. Doesn't matter for this purpose.)

1) green background, large mouth with blender-like mechanical points, crescent shape

2) translucent body, prostrate, bright yellow flame ascending into eyes everywhere, observing

Zelda's at the new space at St John's tonight...it's a nice space but sort of an inconvenient place, not much around and a farther drive for me. I've walked up to Xandos, near JHU, for a veggie wrap and a coffee.

Yesterday, worked all day on server migration for the day job. Loads of fun shepherding that. In a well-designed system it would be trivial, but this is such a patchwork, a mishmash, that it had to be babied through. It took pretty much all day, with a few bumps and some things to still work out this morning - and the boss said it went a lot more smoothly than some past migrations. Yeesh. So now that we're moved I'll see what I can do about getting better practices in place.

I've been considering the idea that the Buddhist precepts basically boil down to "Don't make trouble" and "Don't settle for cheap thrills". Add in "Tip your bartenders, servers, and musicians" (i.e., the practice of charity) and it becomes also a good guideline for a night out on the town. (Which is, perhaps, indicative of some sort of overarching metaphor....)

Friday, went down to Ellicott City for lunch and ended up over at Gramp's Attic Books, a used and rare bookstore where I often find interesting things. I found a collection of some of Emerson's journals, a cheap copy of On the Road, a complete Whitman collection as well as a biography of him, and an interesting-looking scholarly book about the image of India in German Romanticism. Great research stuff.

And so summer either begins or hits its midpoint, depending on how you count, here on the Solstice. I've come down to the Judge's Bench to toast it.

Last night I got to go over and catch up with Mike, hadn't seen him since I got back from Japan. Joe came over too, so I was able to hand out their omiyage.

I've been mucking around more on ancestry.com the past few days, digging back through census records, finding out a little bit about the great-grandparents and even some more great-greats and great-great-greats. Might have found some distant cousins through the site, over on the Sprole side.

So I'm contemplating the metaphor of fire for love, and thinking of how they leave behind a mess of soot and ashes and smoke that has to be cleaned up. Or that will eventually soak into the soil and nurture it, but meanwhile is a mess.

But it's interesting to consider the perspective of emptiness on the end of a relationship, as we would apply it to death...we might understand that a "self" is a dependent arising, not a real thing. Can we see the same in a romantic (or other sort of of interpersonal) relationship, that it is an aggregate of things that come together and come apart? Just as when a flame is blown out, yet all the molecules of air and fuel remain, so she and I remain, and so does the space between us.

Of course, contemplating that the flame has not really "gone away" anywhere is not useful when the fire goes out and you're freezing. Emptiness is also empty.

So, let's stretch the writing muscles with a little poetic exercise. Supported free-write on a random overheard phrase: "light me on fire"

Got back from FSG yesterday...pretty mellow festival this year, even though there was a higher level of attendance.

orange, the teeth break the skin, the juice sprays into the mouth, and I think of orange slices given to us when I played soccer as a kid, somebody's idea of a vitamin pick-me-up, some coach's wife (I'm half presuming half remembering) slicing up oranges the night before or the morning of the game, plastic bag full of slices, halftime, boys with orange slices in the mouth, pretending to be boxers with mouthguards, the fresh smell of the leftover skins, spitting out seeds

It seems that absence does not always make the heart grow fonder.

When you're apart from a lover for a while, sometimes you come to realize how much they mean to you; sometimes you come to realize you can get by without them. While I was doing the former, thinking about Cathy quite a bit while I was in Japan, coming to understand how much her presence has meant to me the past few years, she was doing the latter, rethinking whether the whole dynamic of our relationship was working for her, and concluding that it wasn't.

So on my return I'm not just entering in to a whole new sort of relationship with my home country, but also into a new "just friends" one with my lover of the past several years.

Change. There you go.

So I'm a bit sad about that.

Ok, more than a bit.

Not really much more to say about it, still processing I guess.

Right now I'm on the train up to New York for black belt clinic at Honbu. It occurs to me that this would be an absolutely unacceptable ride in Japan; rough jouncy tracks, loud people shouting into cell phones, trains dirty (by Japanese standards) inside and out; freezing over air-conditioning. (Really, turning the AC thermostat up to 76 would save so much energy...)

By the way, I lost almost ten pounds while I was in Japan. Perhaps going to a different country is an extreme weight-loss plan, but walking everywhere and eating smaller portions and less junk, burns off the fat. I haven't weighed 145lbs since I was in high school. If I can maintain about that, it ought to be good for me.

Back in Baltimore. I woke up this morning around 4am and for about a minute could not figure out where in the world I was. Kameoka? Osaka? Baltimore? New York? A very odd feeling. I had to turn on the light and look around before I could make what I saw match up with "home" in my head.

A few random travel observations:

• Avoid flying United Airlines if possible. Up to now my experiences with them had been fairly positive, but they decided to change the rules on me after I bought a ticket, which is unacceptable. When I left Baltimore, the weight limit on checked bags was 70 pounds for flights to Japan. Ok, I was well under. I planed on that for returning; I realized I might be a little bit over that 70 pound limit on my suitcase, since I'd bought some heavy items, but seemed more sensible to pay a fee of about $25 for a slightly overweight bag, than to airmail another box home.

  But when I checked in for my return flight, I found that they had lowered the limit to 50 pounds - regardless of when the ticket was purchased. The best the woman behind the counter could suggest was to move some things to a third bag (fortunately I had an empty small backpack in my suitcase) and check that, bringing the suitcase under 70 pounds and so only a small fee for that, but a large fee for a third bag; the fee for a 70+ pound bag was now astronomical.

Probably final entry in Japan.

Zen center was great. So yesterday evening, Lester (older guy from NY, now living in Japan), his daughter Katee ("double", grew up in Japan going to gaijin schools), and her husband Max (from Manchester, early 30s maybe) arrived. We all went down to the main zendo, in walking mediation down the streets for a few minutes. The roshi came out for this, which was cool (he apparently just got back into town).

Lester was having some problem with the sitting - turns out he has some health issues. At first I was getting a little annoyed, then the compassion kicked in a bit. I remembered a verse from Ikkyu: "Don't wait for the man standing next to you to cut off his own arm/ help him now"