Day of the Rainhouses, 58th of Spring, 525 M.E. (Electra): For some reason, I didn't want to sit for my meditation today. Everything about the day felt a little off - it started with the shutters rattling at 9:00 am from a 4.1-mag earthquake up in Tennessee and then continued with nearly constant rain. I felt hungry all day and eating didn't seem to affect my appetite. Perhaps subconsciously to avoid having to sit, I randomly started on a big cleaning project, emptying out the cabinets in my study into big piles of papers, books, junk, and ephemera onto my floor that I couldn't just ignore and leave there while I sat.

But I did eventually get the piles sorted and threw out recycled a lot of paper. Somewhere in the process, and to give you an idea of the size of the project, I found, organized, and stored all of my tax returns going back to 1980. But I did finally finish, and then, despite my preferences, sat down for my alternating-day zazen. 

It was easy. The hard part isn't sitting for 90 minutes - that's easy. The hard part is just first sitting down and getting starting.

When I finished and started to settle back into my housebound, rainy day, I saw that the Celtics game had started at 3:30 and was already well into the 3rd Quarter. I had thought it was an evening game, but had I known the tip-off was 3:30, I definitely wouldn't have sat down and started my zazen. I would have waited until after the game, and then put it off until after I fed the cat, and then after I ate dinner myself, and then after, well, whatever other excuse I could come up with. I'm glad now that I didn't know the start time. Ignorance is bliss.

The rain's forecast to last through tomorrow and for the next several days. I may not get my every-other-day walks in, but I'm glad I got the intervening-day sitting taken care of today.