Dedication

    I finally finished the shingles and the wood stain on the shade structure over the walk-in cooler at Jamyang.  This was big as I was doing it in my spare time.  It looks great.  My man Johneo owned that structure, yo.  The man made his own trusses.  I hope that when Kat gets out of retreat and moves back into Jamyang house she is not horrified at the structure in her yard.  

    A group of us put in the next layer of Nicole's earth floor today.  She only has the thin top coat left.  It was a great group full of folks from Tucson.  Viet was also there.  He is the man.  He's got a wife and new baby and a trailer.  That's it and somehow he holds it together.  Okay, he's got a truck and a mother in law from heaven.  That helps.  

     A couple of weeks ago on Wednesday I had a small realization.  It was Tsam maintenance day.  I had to wait a while to catch a ride back down to Nicole's house to get some tools.  I didn't like that I wasted time running around for tools when I had so much to do for the retreatants and I was, of course, projecting this feeling over other parts of my life as is my habit.  So I was standing at Nicole's house waiting for one of the other caretakers to drive by and pick me up.  As I stood in the rode I started moving large rocks out of the road, as is my other habit.  If you've never been to DMU, the roads are gravel.  When they come and grade them, huge rocks are unearthed and piled at the sides.  Occasionally, they fall in the road and become potentially dangerous.  I was walking and tossing them into the bush doing little dedications like, "May there be no obstacles to any one's dreams" or "May the road to all meditative goals be clear."  Then I realized that in the back of my mind there has always been an "if".  I love dedicating actions to greater things, I do it a lot.  But in a subtle way I put an "If Karma and Emptiness are real" at the beginning.  It hit me that this would not do.  I picked up a rock and said, "No.  This IS the way to remove meditative obstacles."  I saw that if I continued living with a little "if" at the beginning of my dedications I would get iffy results.  It's so clear.  It is the strong emotion that makes or breaks a dedication.  You have to have some sort of faith backed up by logic backed up by the Lama back up by Love.  If what I've learned about karma and emptiness is true then tossing rocks in the desert is the way to reaching my meditative goals.  One of the ways.  I feel now that the certainty behind the dedicated action also speeds up the result.  I don't know why this should be true but I feel it is.  Maybe "speeds up" is not the thing to say about it.  It's more like that the dedication is so Now that it's beyond speed.  You go so fast you're in the moment.  You bring the dedication fully into your life the moment you say it with conviction.  It is an unshakeable act of truth.