First of all, thank you for allowing me the respite from words over the long Memorial Day weekend. Sometimes, I feel that a picture can point at the moon more directly than even the best-worded, most carefully composed essay. A picture's worth, et cet.

Sleepless, insomniac night last evening. I stayed up and read until about 12:45, but still couldn't get to sleep. When I eventually did finally nod off, I woke again shortly (about 4 a.m.), and couldn't get back to sleep. I finally decided that instead of laying there tossing and turning, to finally get up and go, for like the first time ever, to the early morning (6-7 a.m.) sitting at the zendo.

Driving there was easy, since last Saturday morning they finally got that guy off of the crane towering over Buckhead. Detectives, luring him close with an offer of water, shot him with a Taser and recovered him while he was stunned. End of crisis: traffic resumed as normal for the rest of the weekend.

My first post regarding this poor guy may have been misunderstood. I did not mean to imply that his dilemma represented an "out of the frying pan and into the fire" situation, but instead that all of our lives are much like his situation - we refuse to look back and acknowledge all of our accumulated karma, and at the same time we do not allow body and mind to drop away and make the quantum leap forward into realization, annihilating the concept of ego-self. Spiritually speaking, we're all out there on the crane, wondering what to do.

I was certainly out on the crane last night as I was laying sleepless in bed. Insomnia tends to bring out dark thoughts that are either suppressed or just not considered during the day - my own mortality, personal failures and shortcomings, desolation, loneliness, the whole nine yards. The morning sit helped. So much so that I went back again in the evening for that service, too.

Don't you wish that you had a friendly neighborhood zendo?