This Week

Sorry for the occasionally cryptic picture posts all this week, but I've been way too busy to post much of anything else.  This week's been quite hectic at the new job, and to make matters more interesting, as readers of the music blog already know, I've been pretty busy after work as well.  

All music, without exception, is a direct expression of the buddha-dharma, but for reasons of simplicity, I decided a couple of years ago to bifurcate this blog and post about music at Music Dissolves Water and keep the other stuff at Water Dissolves Water.  But after nearly 2 1/2 years, I'm going to break my self-imposed rule and include some music here as it's relevant to the week.

For example, on Monday, after a full day of work at the office and after the two-hour Monday Night Meditation session, I snuck out to see the band Cibo Matto perform at The Earl.

Tuesday night, after another full day at work, I was off to hear the magical and ethereal Julianna Barwick perform at The Goat Farm.  That was pretty Zen.

The next day, Wednesday, one of my new colleagues and I performed an ecological assessment of a severely-challenged stream segment in southwest Atlanta.

There was no concert that night, but the next day, Thursday, I was in the town of Stone Mountain, Georgia, performing deep soil and water sampling behind a dry-cleaning shop.  For those of you concerned about OSHA safety issues, we had the power company come out and turn off the electricity in those overhead lines prior to drilling (tag out/lock out - everyone gets off my job sites alive). 

That night, I was at Terminal West for a set by The Blank Tapes and an incredible, two-and-a-quarter-hour high-energy marathon by Southern California's Jonathan Wilson.

On Friday, I drove out to Athens, Georgia, to inspect a construction site.

You gotta love Athens.

That evening (last night), the band Hospitality headlined a late-night set at East Atlanta's 529.

Which finally brings us up to today.  During this afternoon's set by England's Robyn Hitchcock at Eddie's Attic in Decatur, a friend asked me how I managed to fit my meditation practice into such a hectic week.

I did not deceive her and I will not deceive you - it's been a struggle to find the time to sit and be still amidst this whirlwind of activity.  But this whirlwind will pass (everything's impermanent), and I'm sure that by next week, if not this weekend (if not right now), I'll find the time to resume regular sitting again.

What I didn't find last week was the time to post more detail about said whirlwind here in Water Dissolves.