Day of the Inner Lid, 54th of Hagwinter, 525 M.E. (Electra): The Stable Genius has sued Fulton County to inspect the ballot I cast five years ago in the 2020 election. 

That sounds like hyperbole but it's true and a sad indication of how far we've fallen as a nation. The Stable Genius still continues to question his loss in that race to Joe Biden, and his administration is now suing to seize and inspect the ballots from that election. Those ballots include the one I cast by mail-in vote in that year of the covid plague.

The Stable Genius has long fixated on his defeat in the 2020 election and continues to promote his lie that the election was stolen from him. Since returning to office, he has embarked on a wide-ranging campaign to settle scores related to his effort to overturn the election, including issuing a sweeping pardon to nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol on January 6.

Fulton County, which as the NY Times reports is largely nonwhite and voted overwhelmingly for Biden, was one of the main focuses of the Stable Genius' effort to cling to power after he lost the election. He and some of his allies were charged with criminal election interference in Georgia and the former president was booked at the Fulton County jail. That was a good day, but unfortunately he was allowed to leave and things never got that good again. 

Although Georgia's Republican leadership confirmed Biden’s victory with a manual recount, the Stable Genius pressured Georgia's Secretary of State to “find” him enough votes to overturn his loss here.

The Stable Genius has repeatedly argued, without reliable evidence, that the 2020 election was affected by mass voter fraud, and it's feared that a new inspection of the 2020 ballots may be used to stoke suspicions of fraud if the 2026 election doesn't go his way. His administration is trying to establish a national voting database in a quest to bolster the unsubstantiated claim that "millions" of undocumented immigrants have voted illegally and the Justice Department also sued four other states to obtain personal and private information of voters. 

I don't know about you, but with their track record of retribution, grudges, and vindictiveness, I can't think of too much good that came come from the Stable Genius and his Republican enablers having access to the names and addresses of every person who voted Democratic in past elections, including, and this part is important to me, my name and address. It's almost like if, say, Elon Musk and some unvetted goons were allowed access to my social security and other sensitive files. 

In related news, the Stable Genius announced that he was pardoning a former Colorado county clerk who was convicted of tampering with voting machines in an effort to prove false claims of fraud in the 2020 election, even though the president has no legal ability to pardon a person from state crimes.

 

Smoke of the Shore, 53rd Day of Hagwinter, 525 M.E. (Deneb): I consider a walk of five to six miles a "Monroe," named for the fifth president of the United Snakes. My Monroe Doctrine is to walk at least five miles every other day, although between the cold weather, early sunsets, and recent Rohatsu practice period, I've only been getting four-mile Madisons in lately. 

The other Monroe Doctrine was outlined by James Monroe in his annual message to Congress on December 2, 1823. Monroe, a Virginia planter, owned as many as 250 slaves throughout his lifetime. He inherited some of the slaves from his father and worked them on his family's plantations, and some were brought to the White House with him to work as household servants. Some of the slaves remained in bondage even after his death. He did support the American Colonization Society and its goal of colonizing freed slaves in Africa, but the plan was not a commitment to freeing his own slaves. 

In the early nineteenth century, Spain’s empire in America was crumbling. Beginning in 1810, Latin American countries began to claim their independence and in just two years from 1821 to 1822, ten nations broke from the Spanish empire. Spain had previously restricted trade with its American colonies, and the U.S. wanted to trade with these new nations. 

As president, Monroe and his advisors worried that the newly independent nations in South and Central America could revert to alliances with the European colonial powers, severing their new trade ties with the U.S. and orienting their allegiances back toward Europe. In his message, Monroe warned that “the American continents . . . are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.” The United States would consider any attempt by Europe to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety. 

In 1902, Theodore Roosevelt established what came to be known as the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. He noted that there was no judicial way of enforcing international laws, and so military powers have to serve as international police. Such policing included protecting Latin American nations from foreign military intervention and also meant imposing U.S. force on nations whose unwillingness to support U.S. goals "violated the rights of the United Snakes or had invited foreign aggression to the detriment of the entire body of American nations.” 

Couched as a form of protection, the Roosevelt Corollary justified U.S. military intervention in Latin American countries and established a U.S. sphere of influence over the Americas. However, the two world wars in Europe and the Pacific during the 20th Century illustrated the danger of spheres of influence, in which less powerful countries are controlled by regional superpowers, and the emergence of nuclear weapons and ICBMs rendered the embrace of localized spheres of influence quaint.  

The Stable Genius' Deviant of the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine promises not to protect Latin American countries from foreign intrusion but to reward and encourage the region’s governments to align with U.S. principles and strategy. The Stable Genius says he will promote stability in the region by turning the U.S. military away from its European commitments and focusing instead on Latin America, where it will abandon the “failed law enforcement-only strategy of the last several decades” and instead use lethal force when necessary to secure the U.S. border and defeat drug cartels. Then, he says, the U.S. will extract resources from the region “to make neighboring countries as well as our own more prosperous.” Already, he's blasting suspected drug-running boats out of the water and seized an oil tanker off the Venezuela coast, and has announced his intention to keep the oil seized.  

The U.S.-led international system and pacts such as NATO have kept the world relatively safe since World War II. But the antiquated notion of spheres of influence, a system in place before World War II,  is once again favored by Vladimir Putin, among others. The Stable Genius is abandoning Ukraine to the whims of Russia as that's not in the United Snakes' perceived sphere of influence, and he has recalled the U.S.S. Gerald Ford, the world's largest aircraft carrier and the largest warship ever constructed, from the Middle East to the Caribbean. The military buildup in the Caribbean region is the largest unrelated to disaster relief since 1994, when Bill Clinton sent two aircraft carriers and more than 20,000 troops to Haiti.

This isn't going to end well. 

 

Day of the Mind Blizzard, 52nd of Hagwinter, 525 M.E. (Castor): The Stable Genius, now with his FIFA faux "peace prize" firmly fixed on its shelf, is determined to drag the United States into another pointless, costly, and fatal overseas war. Anything to divert attention from a faltering economy and, of course, the Epstein files. Today, the United States seized an oil tanker off the Venezuela coast, part of an escalating series of strikes including the unsanctioned assassinations of the crews of numerous boats in the Caribbean. 

Hands Off South and Central America (HOSCA) maintains that the Stable Genius' adventures are just a continuation of the U.S.'s long - and legally and morally questionable - history of interventions in the region. There have been dubious actions by the U.S. in the hemisphere going all the way back to 1823's Monroe Doctrine, issued when Latin American countries were first winning their independence from France and Spain. The Doctrine asserted to European countries that the U.S. considered Latin America its sphere of influence and their meddling would be considered a meddling in U.S. affairs. In the 19th Century alone, HOSCA counts the following dubious achievements:

In 1852, U.S. President Millard Fillmore had the Marines land in Buenos Aires to protect American interests during an Argentinian revolution.

In 1853, Fillmore's successor, Franklin Pierce, used the American military to protect American lives and interests during political disturbances in Nicaragua.          

In 1854, the American captain of a steamboat in Greytown, Nicaragua shot and killed a native boatman in cold blood. The U.S. minister to Nicaragua later prevented the captain’s arrest when he cocked and leveled a gun at the town's marshals. That night, an angry mob confronted the American Minister over his prevention of the murderer’s arrest and a resident threw a piece of a broken bottle at him, striking the Minister's face. In retaliation, the Navy sloop-of-war USS Cyane bombarded the town with 177 rounds of cannon fire, leveling the town before the Marines landed and burned down anything left standing. 

In 1855, President Pierce sent U.S. naval forces to Uruguay to protect American interests during an attempted revolution in Montevideo.

The Spanish-American War of 1898 led to a number of 20th Century interventions in Latin America, particularly in Cuba. The Cuban revolution against colonial Spain inspired many Americans, who saw it as a reflection of out own revolution of 1776, but led to concerns among some about a potential majority black regime ruling the island. "Two-fifths of the insurgents in the field are negroes," an 1896 article in The Saturday Review cautioned. The author, a young and eloquent English-American imperialist named Winston Churchill, argued that while Spanish rule was bad and the rebels had the support of the people, "another black republic" might be worse than continued Spanish rule. The "other black republic," of course, was Haiti.      

The U.S.S. Maine was sent to Havana in January 1998 allegedly to protect American citizens. After a mysterious explosion sank the battleship a month later, the U.S. began a naval blockade of Cuba and went to war with Spain. The Marines landed in Guantánamo Bay in June 1898 and moved swiftly through the island. 

This was the start of a long period of Marine involvement in conflicts in Central America and the Caribbean. “Before the Second World War, this is what the Marine Corps did,” The New York Times. quoted an authority on the history today. “Their bread and butter was destabilizing and overthrowing governments in Latin America.” HOSCA agrees with that sentiment, and the Times recounted several of the United States' 20th Century adventures in the region. 

In 1912, while Nicaragua was in the middle of a revolt against its right-leaning and pro-American president, U.S. President William Taft  sent in the Marines, again "to preserve U.S. interests." This quickly turned into a direct military intervention and began 21 years of U.S. occupation of Nicaragua.

In 1913, the U.S. supported the overthrow of a Mexican president in favor of another who was viewed as more pro-American, leading to a coup d’état. However, the U.S. turned around and withdraw its support for the new president, backing instead the bandit and revolutionary leader Pancho Villa to depose him, before turning around yet again, and opposing Villa. After the Mexican government refused a 21-gun salute in apology for nine American sailors arrested in April 1914, President Woodrow Wilson ordered a naval blockade of the Port of Veracruz. An arms shipment was subsequently discovered heading to Mexico in violation of an American arms embargo, so the Navy seized the Mexican port of Veracruz, occupying it for seven months.

After the president of Haiti, that "other black republic," was assassinated in 1915, Woodrow Wilson sent the Marines. The stated mission was to restore order and stabilize the civil disturbance, which had been fueled in part by U.S. actions such as the seizure of Haiti's gold reserves over debts. The Marines stayed almost 20 years, not withdrawing until 1934.

In 1983, Ronald Reagan accused the government of Grenada of building an airport that would enable the Soviet Union to land transport planes capable of carrying weapons. After a political crisis in Grenada and the execution of its prime minister, the military announced a curfew and said anyone on the streets in violation of the order would be shot on sight. Reagan sent 7,600 troops, including Army Rangers, the 82nd Airborne, the Marines, Delta commandos, and Navy SEALs, ostensibly to protect 600 American medical students on the island. Grenada’s military government was quickly overthrown, and an interim one was installed.

Gen. Manuel Noriega, the military leader of Panama, helped the U.S. sabotage the left-wing Sandinistas of Nicaragua and revolutionaries in El Salvador for decades. Noriega also worked with the DEA to restrict illegal drug shipments, and laundered drug money on the side. In 1986, news reports surfaced in the American media about Noriega's criminal activities, and American courts indicted him on drug-related charges. The general survived several attempted coups and a disputed election and in 1989, Panama declared a state of war with the United States. President George H.W. Bush ordered U.S. troops to remove him. 

In 1994, Bill Clinton sent the Marines to Haiti again to restore to power President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who had been democratically elected but quickly overthrown. Ten years later, Aristide was out of favor with Washington and ousted in a coup orchestrated by the United States and France.

Since September of this year, the United States has been attacking boats in the Caribbean that the Stable Genius claimed were smuggling drugs. To date, the U.S. has launched 22 known strikes, killing more than 80 people. On top of the strikes, the Stable Genius has ordered a massive buildup of U.S. forces in the region, with more than 15,000 troops and a dozen ships in the Caribbean, including the aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford. Covert action has been authorized against Venezuela and the Stable Genius has warned that the United States could expand its attacks from boats off the Venezuelan coast to targets inside the country "very soon." 

And now, on top of all that, he's gone and seized a tanker full of oil, as if, as HOSCA points out, there was ever any question as to what the conflict was really all about. Venezuela has the world's largest proven reserves of petroleum, and the Stable Genius has shown little interest in alternative energy or sustainable fuels.

 

The Glistening Drivers, 51st Day of Hagwinter, 525 M.E. (Betelgeuse): The EPA has removed references to the fact that human activity is causing climate change from its website. Specifically, a page titled Causes of Climate Change and another that tracks the impacts of the global warming in the United States were both scrubbed of discussion of man-made causes.

A spokesperson for the EPA said the agency is focused on protecting human health, rather than what she called left-wing political agendas. “This agency no longer takes marching orders from the climate cult,” she said. Apparently, they're now taking their marching orders from lobbyists for oil, gas, and coal, the main drivers of global warming

The Stable Genius has taken aggressive action to boost fossil fuels and has called climate change a “hoax.”  He has eliminated climate regulations and made it easier to build fossil-fuel plants and harder to develop renewable energy like wind and solar power.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Dept. of Energy commissioned five climate skeptics to write a report that downplayed the seriousness of global warming. And the EPA is about to eliminate a scientific finding that climate change threatens human health, a move that would erase the federal government’s legal authority to regulate carbon dioxide and other planet-warming pollution.

We're fucked, but out children and grandchildren are fucked even more.

 

Secrets of the Essence Chamber, 50th Day of Hagwinter. 525 M.E. (Aldebaran): Rohatsu. Monks around the world tremble in anticipation. On this eighth (and final) day of the practice period, the actual day itself, I sat for 5½ hours, bringing my grand total going back to November 30 to 31½ hours.

It feels inappropriate to talk publicly about the number of hours. It feels like bragging, and bragging about the wrong metric at that. It's quality, not quantity, but the quantity does still matter. For what it's worth, the posts here these last few days weren't addressed to some public I imagine is out there reading this like I was some sort of Instagram influencer, it's written for and to myself to encourage me to keep on going.

The past few days have been my own personal sesshin, really the first I've ever done without a sangha. It's so, so easy to just quit, to throw in the towel and say "that's enough for one day." Sitting with others encourages one to keep on going, and for me, documenting my effort in this personal web log was a form of encouragement.

Last month, contemplating the upcoming Rohatsu week, I set myself a personal  goal to sit every day of the week instead of my usual schedule of every other day, and, starting with my usual 90 minutes, to add a half hour every day. I made a commitment and today I completed the task I set for myself.

All this while maintaining my alternating-day walking schedule (although at fewer miles each day in the interest of time) and making daily calls to my brother-in-law in Massachusetts to support him as he cares for my sister in her recovery from cancer surgery. Also, I somehow managed to sneak a David Byrne concert into there and, possibly not unrelated, to catch a cold.

It's over. Done. On to the next thing.

Happy, Rohatsu, y'all.

Day of the Banner, 49th of Hagwinter, 525 M.E. (Helios): Seventh and penultimate day of the Rohatsu practice period - five hours of zazen. It's also a walking day, so I got a Madison out of the way early because it's easier to sit indoors after sunset than it is to walk outside. I split my sitting into a three-hour and a two-hour session, with a short meal in between.

With my feet on the ground and my head in the air, where is my mind? After five hours of zazen, where is my mind? Where is, where is my mind? 

   

 

The Book Lingo, 48th Day of Hagwinter, 525 M.E. (Electra): The Rohatsu practice period continues (sixth day). Today, I sat for four and a half hours, but had to split it into two sessions so that I could watch the SEC Championship Game (it may be Rohatsu, but I'm not crazy). I sat for three hours in the afternoon, three Caves, an Occam and, three Sisters, and then for three Caves in the evening after the game was over.

If you don't know what I mean by Caves, Occam, or Sisters, either go back and read the last several posts or just accept the sweet mystery of life - your choice.   

All of which is to say I didn't do much today other than sit, watch a football game while sitting, and then post this blog (still sitting). Electra is a sitting day.     

 

The Mad Albino, 47th Day of Hagwinter, 525 M.E. (Deneb): The psychiatrist Oliver Sachs once wrote about a man who had lost the ability to form new memories, like the protagonist of the movie, Memento. However, his patient had been a concert pianist before his affliction, and could still play long classical sonatas on the piano solely from his earlier memory. 

When not playing, he was constantly afflicted with a disorienting sensation like just awakening from a deep, deep sleep ("Where am I? Why am I here? What am I doing?"), but when playing the piano, he could always tell exactly where in the composition he was - say, an early, mid-, or late passage - and he found that sense of place comforting, even if he couldn't remember sitting down to start the piece to begin with. The length of the composition was longer than his memory, so playing music served as a sort of prosthesis to compensate for what his memory lacked. He couldn't remember playing the intro sequence, but he knew that he'd been at that piano playing Bach for at least a half hour, based on his knowledge of the piece, and he knew he'd be there for another 10 minutes until the end.

But that's not what I want to talk about. Imagine yourself a sailor on board one of the ships in Columbus' first fleet. You're heading for a distant shore that you think exists but you're not completely sure (some on board say it's not real), and no one has any idea how far away it is.

You stand on the deck and for all 360° around you, you can see the sky meeting the ocean on the horizon. Not a speck of land anywhere to be seen, and you don't know if it's going to be another two days, two weeks, two months, or ever, that land appears to the west. On the other hand, as soon as the next wave crests, land might appear on the horizon. You have no idea. All you can do is watch and wait.

Sitting for long periods of meditation over many intervals sometimes feels like that. The umpteenth sitting period is in progress, and although there were regular kinhin intervals between the periods, all that sitting starts to bleed together. Soon after the echo of the starting bell fades away, you can't tell if you've been sitting there for 5 minutes or 25 minutes. Or maybe longer. You're lost in time just like that sailor lost in the endless sea. The ending bell might not ring for another twenty minutes, or it might ring . . . right . . . now. All you can do is sit and wait. 

When you're lost in time in that quiet space, any external distraction is like a marker. Somebody coughs, a noisy car passes by on the street, or a dog barks, and for at least a short while you know it's been one minute, then two, then more since that little distraction. You may not know where between the start and finish bell you are, but you're pretty certain it's been about five minutes since you heard that door slam.

The trouble with music during zazen, even the most droning, ambient music, is that there are constant little markers keeping one aware of the passage of time. Even in the most structureless of ambient compositions, where there's no compositional clues as to how far along in the piece you are, you're still aware of the passing of time. There are no clues as to whether you're near the end or not, but you know it's been 10 seconds since that last little "tink" of a bell, or that rumble of bass.

Today, the fifth day of the Rohatsu practice period, I used several of Brain Eno's ambient "installation" tracks as timers for my meditation (four hours!). It was lovely, quiet, meditative music, but it nonetheless still got in the way of my sense of time dropping away. With all the constant repetition, layering, and cycling, there's no sense of progress to the music itself, but it's still right there, giving the mind something to focus on and keeping you fixed in time.

Still, while it certainly wasn't shikantaza (just sitting), it was nonetheless four hours of meditation. A day well spent. And since today is Deneb, a walking day, after I finished my sitting I went out and got in a 4.3-mile Madison, returning home just as the sun set. 

Three more days of Rohastsu practice to go, although I won't be using ambient music tracks as my timers anymore.

 

The Hundred Lights, 46th Day of Hagwinter, 525 M.E. (Castor): Ausar Temple is a track by the musician Angel Deradoorian (Deradoorian, Dirty Projectors, Slasher Flicks) from her highly recommended 2017 album Eternal Recurrence. The track consist of 2½ minutes of more-or-less random gongs, symbols, and drums. Ausar, also known as Osiris, was a member of the ancient Egyptian gods and the offspring of Seb and Nut. He held a close relationship with Isis, who was both his sister and his wife (eww). The track sounds a lot like the gongs in a Zen temple.and since August 2024, I have been using it as a timer for my kinhin (walking meditation) between my period of zazen (sitting meditation).

Without any fixed rhythm and although still ambient in general tone, I nonetheless found all the clanging and crashing in the track a little too disruptive even for my walking mediation  That's not a knock against the piece itself - I easily tolerated it for over a year, and even came to enjoy the chaos - it's just an observation of its utility for something for which the composer had no intention.  But I still wanted to use the opening, Zen-like gongs as timers for my home meditation practice so last October I fired up that music-file editing software mentioned in previous posts and spliced two minutes of Annea Lockwood's sound collage World Rhythms to the opening of Ausar Temple and, voila, created the perfect (for me) timer for kinhin between the audio timers I use for zazen.

Today, the fourth day of the Rohatsu practice period, I sat for three and a half hours. The timers were very nearly the same as yesterday, although for the additional 30 minutes, I slipped in the whisper-quiet electronic track i come out of your sleep by the artist Ruth Anderson after the three Caves. The track appears on the same LP, Sinopah, as Annea Lockwood's World Rhythms. 

Also, instead of Eno's 60-minute Reflections, I substituted all four 15-minute tracks from his Sisters album. The tracks are generative music similar to Reflections and very similar to one another (hence the title, Sisters). The silence between tracks is shorter and less pronounced than some of the silences or near-silences within the tracks themselves, so it didn't feel like sitting (literally) through four different compositions. And the great part is, one can easily delete one or two of the tracks to create 30- or 45-minute timers as desired.

Here then, is the playlist of timers for today's sitting:

Laraaji - Twenty Five-Minute Cave, zazen, zafu (0:25)

Deradorian/Annea Lockwood - Ausar Temple/World Rhythm (edit), kinhin (0:30)

Ana Quiroga - Ten-Minute Cave (edited to 25 minutes), zazen, zafu (0:55)

Deradorian/Annea Lockwood - Ausar Temple/World Rhythm (edit), kinhin (1:00)

Will Epstein - Fifteen-Minute Cave (edited to 25 minutes), zazen, zafu (1:25)

Deradorian/Annea Lockwood - Ausar Temple/World Rhythm (edit), kinhin (1:30)

Ruth Anderson - i come out of your sleep, zazen, zafu (1:55)

Deradorian/Annea Lockwood - Ausar Temple/World Rhythm (edit), kinhin (2:00)

Brian Eno - Sisters, zazen, seiza bench (3:00)

Deradorian/Annea Lockwood - Ausar Temple/World Rhythm (edit), kinhin (3:05)

Annea Lockwood - World Rhythm (60-minute edit), zazen, zafu (3:35)

All times above are approximate; the entire playlist of timers was actually 3 hours and 32 minutes.         

 

High Paralysis, 45th Day of Hagwinter, 525 M.E. (Betelgeuse): Then, on the third day of the Rohatsu practice period, he sat for three hours. 

Today, I sat for three, 30-minute periods using a zafu (round meditation cushion), then one 60-minute period using a seiza (kneeling) bench, and then another, final, 30-minute period using the zafu again. My timers were three Caves stretched out to 25-minutes each (with five minutes of intro/outro ambient music), an hour-long Brian Eno ambient composition (Reflections), and then a 30-minute edit of Annea Lockwood's World Rhythms. Even though it was aggressively ambient, the Eno piece called too much attention to itself - or to be more precise, my mind was able to focus on it too easily - and I probably won't be using that one again.

Since it's Betelgeuse, a walking day, I got my steps in today too, another Madisonian 4.1 miles.

The Stable Genius probably did something stupid today, I'm sure of it, but I was too busy with my sitting and my walking to notice. In other words, it was a good day.   

 

Day of the Waste Arena, 44th of Hagwinter, 525 M.E. (Aldebaran): The Stable Genius warned today that any country he believes is illegally manufacturing drugs destined for the US is vulnerable to military attack. Great. Because the War of Drugs worked so successfully here (sarcasm) that it's time to take it global.

It's the second day of the Rohatsu practice period and I added a half hour to my now daily (for this period) sitting. Two and a half hours, consisting of two 30-minute sits and two 45-minute sits. 

I use timers for my meditation rather than stare at a clock. I used to use the timer app on my iPhone for a timer, but no matter how gentle the alarm I selected, I still found it jolting when it went off, and then I had to scramble and fumble around with my phone to turn it off. That made for a rude ending to a graceful sitting period.

A few years ago, I came across a compilation album by the label Other People titled Caves, a "compendium of timers for every-day use." Each track starts with some gentle, wordless, new-age/ambient music for a minute or so, and then fades to silence for five, ten, or more minutes. At the end of the silence, the music gently returns for another minute or so. The "caves" are the silences between the sounds. One track by the ambient musician Laraaji is a 25-minute cave, and with the intro and outro, the whole track is 30 minutes in length, perfect for a half hour of zazen and kinhin (walking meditation). The other tracks are all of shorter length, but I used some music-editing software to expand the silences of those other tracks to 25 minutes and for a year now have used three of them as timers for my 90-minute meditation periods.

Meditating while listening to music isn't Zen meditation, or shikantaza ("just sitting") as the Japanese call it. Just sitting is exactly what the words describe - nothing other than simply sitting still, and anything added to it - sitting and chanting, or sitting and practicing mindful breathing, or sitting and thinking about a koan - is not "just sitting." Just sitting, with no "and." So sitting and listening to music is not shikantaza, but with the Caves tracks, the music quickly falls away just as I'm settling in, and the "and" disappears. 

But sometimes, especially during this Rohatsu practice period, I also use some extended-length recorded tracks as my timers. It's not shikantaza, but in my experience it can still be a form of meditation. It won't work if I'm listening to anything with words or singing, or instrumental melodies, or even a fixed rhythm. But there's some drone music that consists of little more than a single tone sustained for extended lengths and there's some ambient music that's so ephemeral and nebulous that there are no hooks or anything else for the mind to latch onto, and those tracks can make good timers. The sound simply disappears into the background, not unlike the other ambient sounds of the house on an afternoon - the fan from the HVAC, the birds outside, the occasional passing car, sometimes (and annoyingly) some landscapers working their gas-powered leaf blowers somewhere in the neighborhood. 

Today, I used three of those 25-minute Caves and two 45-minute ambient tracks for my sitting. The first ambient track was Elaine Radigue's Occam XXV performed by the organist Frederic Blondy. The entire 45 minutes is one long sustained note played on organ that slowly, imperceptibly, rises up out of silence and then fades back again by the end - now that I think about it, the exact opposite strategy as the Caves. It's the aural equivalent of watching paint dry, perfect for meditation (Radigue, it should be noted, is a practicing Tibetan Buddhist). 

The other 45-minute track was Annea Lockwood's sound collage World Rhythm, consisting of field recording of various nature sounds - a babbling brook, lapping waves, bird songs, honking geese, occasional rumbles of thunder, with moments of silence or near-silence. To some people, it might not even qualify a "music," although the counter argument is that sounds arranged from field recordings of nature is no less arbitrary than sound arranged from plucked strings, drum beats, and vibrating columns of air.

FYI, I'm off Spotify now, and all my timers today were ethically purchased off of Bandcamp, including the Caves, Occam XXV, and World Rhythm.      

 

 

The Living Help, 43rd Day of Hagwinter, 525 M.E. (Helios): Forty-third day of Hagwinter, first day of Rohatsu practice period. Even though I sat yesterday (90 minutes), I sat again today for 120 minutes - four sitting periods (zazen) of 25 minutes each, with five minutes of walking meditation (kinhin) in between. 

Also, since Helios is officially a walking day for me, I went out and walked a Madisonian 4.4 miles, the shorter distance necessitated by the extra time needed for all that sitting.

tl/dr: another day in paradise