Well, it’s Tuesday and it’s just shy of my first week in the city of the broad shoulders. Yesterday I hung out in the two spots ministers-in-residence are supposed to hang out to be available to students. But not much business, that first day of the quarter it appears the students, and pretty much everyone else, had better things to do than hang with an aging Zen minister who wanted to harangue them about sickness, old age and death.
So, I went for a walk. I stopped in two bookstores. (They’re everywhere here in Hyde Park) The first was a lovely antiquarian shop, but my interests are so narrow they had nothing to hold me. The other was a branch of the famous Powell’s Books which most, including me think of as a Portland, Oregon landmark, and that it is, but turns out started in Chicago. I quickly spent a hundred bucks before prying myself out by promising to return in a week or two. I parked the books behind the counter and continued my walk to the local coop grocery, purchasing as poor areas of cities seem to specialize in, limp lettuce, wonky bananas and suspicious looking apples.
Eating some Trader Joe portabella-stuffed ravioli’s for dinner I gloated over my stash. I ended the evening watching some TV and avoiding work on the book I’ve promised Wisdom Publications. (Just an edit-job, I tell myself. Won’t take long, I tell myself. And with a hundred channels, there must be something edifying and entertaining, I tell myself. Funny how often I’m wrong…)
Today I plan on spending the morning doing school related things, then, as the TV said today would be sunny but the rest of the week cloudy and perhaps filled with rain to try to find a direct bus downtown and do a little exploring.
While noodling the web I ran across a site put up by an old Zen friend. I like him for lots of reasons, but one is he’s an anachronism among us pale, close cut haired middle-class Zendoids who’ve come to dominate that scene. Lots of hair, if now thinning, disapproves of jobs that aren’t directly related to his interests even if it keeps him dirt poor, but handy and industrious, likes spending time in a shack in northern Vermont’s woods, has lots of pagan friends as well as the Zen types, knows what a zafu is for and knows the real koan is his life. Turns out he’s a bit of a prose poet and has an online version of a small collection originally published in a small New York literary rag which I found much more interesting that what’s on TV. It’s called the Heathen Preacher.
Relata refero. Ne Iupiter quidem omnibus placet.
I only tell you what I heard. Jove himself can’t please everyone.
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