Day of the Grove, 69th of Summer, 525 M.E. (Electra): According to my records, I have maintained my alternating day practice of sitting meditation for one full year now.

Although I meditated regularly but infrequently (about once a week) at the Atlanta Zen Center from 2000 to 2013, and even more infrequently on my own between then and one year ago, I started my every-other-day practice on August 2, 2024. Initially, I sat for a half hour for two weeks and then for a hour for two weeks more, before settling in on a 90-minute practice at the end of that month. 

There have been missed days - most recently May 16, 2025, when I was waiting on a contractor to arrive at the house. I deliberately missed a couple weeks in late December to give myself a break, which turned out to be a mistake because I found it difficult to get started back up on a regular basis after that. I missed a week during Big Ears in March, with the same result getting back into a rhythm. Now, part of my motivation to keep at it every other day is knowing how difficult it is to get back into rhythm once so much as a single day is missed.   

I'm glad for my practice. The regularity of maintaining a schedule - alternating days of walking and sitting - is good to structure my time in retirement and keep from falling into dissolution or depression. But even more, the act of regularly returning to study the self and examine its thoughts deepens the longer and more frequently I do it. 

I once read someone say that he was searching with some friends for the best description of meditation practice. When someone offered, "it's like coming home," everyone agreed that was the best analogy and no one could come up with anything better. I didn't understand it at the time - how can sitting meditation be like coming home? - but now as I frequently and regularly sit down and confront the mind I can see it now. There I am again (everywhere I go, there I am). Returning to the self is like "coming home" in that way.

Zen Master Dogen once wrote that to study the way is to study the self, and to study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self, he asserted, is to awaken to our true nature and the true nature of all reality. I'm not there yet, but I'm coming to an understanding of what he was talking about.