Monkey See, Monkey Do

i’m currently in washington, d.c. (what does district of columbia mean anyway?) and it’s been an amazing trip. i don’t have pictures to upload yet, and my wizzy camera phone filled up and no longer turns on. darn bleeding edge technology, i tell you what…

will be back next week, and i’ll write more about the trip then. spending time with friends and family is grande.

Last night Steven threw a birthday party for our awesome friend Cheryl. Though she was feeling under the weather, she still managed to run around and catch up with everyone and enjoy serious silliness. Click on the picture to the left for a larger version.

Cheryl is tough, she didn’t blow out her candles she pinched them.

After the ecstasy of this week, I had laundry to do. But I managed to also make it to a local Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum to look at mummies and antiquities. I picked up their spirituality flyer too because I’m fascinated by ’secret societies’. Then I stopped by a rose garden nearby. The roses were amazing, each bush named and donated from a different enthusiast. Here’s a closeup and another picture I took with my closeup-only camera phone.

spent some time and finally updated all pages in this journal to have the same style, color, border, date, and alignment rules. I left aligned everything. This weblog package had a bad habit of centering by default, which is harder to read. I also updated my sidebar to include a calendar, monthly archives (now that i’m on my second month), and I softened the color scheme. (just so i don’t forget, here are the ranges of colors i had between the old sidebar and current background: DE5F2F E47C45 EA9A5B F0B871 F6D687 FDF49E. the new sidebar is F0B871)

had a really good week at work. completed four more contextual inquiries and captured video of people sharing files and backing up their computers in each home office. i discovered interesting distinctions around security, knowledge of the recipient’s environment for sharing files, gauging the applicability of email, and just how prolific digital music and photos are becoming.

next week i’m traveling to arlington to put my grandfather in the ground. i’m excited to meet some young cousins on the trip who I haven’t seen yet. i have two good friends who live in arlington too: my cousin patti (from the other side of the family) and my college sweetheart laura. I’m excited to catch up with them.

this fall i have invites for two weddings, a bachelor/bachelorette trip, and a family reunion. i need to make travel arrangements for all of those soon. burning man is another large calendar item for me in august. i have three camping long weekends planned this summer and i’ve been invited to join my parents for a conference in mid-july. i have a wonderfully busy year planned already.

tuesday nights now i’m hosting a meditation group. only a small group could come to meditation this time, but it was the most mind blowing session i’ve experienced yet. we sat in silence for 25 minutes, then had a short break, then sat again for 45 minutes.

a newcomer requested a guided breath meditation for the first session, so i chose to primarily watch my breath instead of a more open shamatha technique i typically practice. a challenge i’ve always had in breath meditation is avoiding having some impact on the breath. when i watch it, i invariably change it. it was until now almost impossible to just let the breath happen naturally, as long as i was aware of it.

until last night. and that caused something more profound.

i think what made the difference was two fold. during the first session, i started by guiding the awareness of the environment and pointing out the sounds and to just experience them. this was a way to start in the present moment, and practice having an openness before turning attention to the breath. sounds just arise and when sitting quietly we have no part in why they are there. the sounds occur and then pass on their own. we don’t need to have an attitude toward them. we can just be open to them. then after sitting and listening for awhile, we turned to watching the breath rise and fall with that same attitude that there isn’t anything one needs to do with breath - it just happens on it’s own and we can be open and unimposing to it.

still i found it hard to not cause some change or subtle control onto my breathing.

then in the second session, i started with a guided session on body sensations and asked the group to at first pay attention only to the top of the head. then expand that to include the temples and forehead. then the back of the head. then the ears. i paused at the jaw for awhile. that typically has some interesting tension and feelings for me in it when i put attention there. as does the mouth. we moved to the shoulders and i paused for awhile there. i went on and on like that until we had expanded our awareness to the whole body. lastly, i asked the group to come back to the feeling the breath - how the movements of the breath subtly move the whole body and how that feels. that guided portion covered the first ten minutes of the meditation, we sat in silence for the next half hour.

during that long, silent period i was finally able to just relax totally and watch my breath as a curious but somewhat impartial observer. perhaps it helped that i was watching the very small effects of the breath: how the weight and posture shifted slightly with each inhale and exhale. some areas of my chest felt scrunched or stretched during the movement. my head bobbed very slightly with the movement of my chest. it all made this incredibly subtle dance. i wasn’t causing each breath to occur, it was just coming and going naturally on its own. i didn’t feel like i was speeding it up, starting it, cutting it off, adjusting it, effecting a pause, commenting on it, critiquing it; all the things that i normally do when i pay close attention to the breath were gone.

that felt like the most liberated moment in my life. My experience of self disappeared, my awareness was simply relaxed and present. i had a few insights but they were more relaxed flashes instead of streams of thought or story.

my first insight was that i was like a corpse floating on a vast ocean. my corpse self would rise up and fall down with the motion of the water but trying to struggle with that would be pointless, and i couldn’t really even if i tried. like the waves of a sea, my breath was moving my body slowly and rhythmic and i was just there. i didn’t need to do anything to relate to the waves of breath moving me. i didn’t need to do anything to make them happen, or to change them, and i didn’t need any attitude toward them or critique of them. they just were.

you’re probably thinking all this detail picayune. but what startled me deeply was after meditation, that feeling of openness and harmony stayed with me. i’ve felt that way in isolated moments, but this time for hours afterwards i relaxed into the openness. it was ecstatic and raw. but unlike the ecstasy of some intoxication, i was awake and keenly aware of everything. i could walk and interact with people, going to dinner afterwards in fact, but my experience of everyone and everything was like a sea of luminosity and dance and my solid sense of self and form was relaxed. Nothing was a problem.

sometime later i had my second flash of metaphor, that my sense of self was like a clenched fist and for the first time in my life that fist took a break and was relaxed and open. i even visualized the fist and i could watch as that fist would close slightly and i felt my sense of self solidifying, but i could hold it open with just some small intention.

for a couple hours i just ate my dinner and held a conversation, the whole time aware of what was going on around me and interacting with people but everything was different and profoundly luminous and like the first time i had ever experienced it.

when i went home i still felt that openness, and i suspected as i drifted off to sleep that i would wake up returned to the clenched fist state of mind. this morning the feeling faded, and i felt depression and loss trying to grasp at the memory. hopefully the memory will serve as a motivator to sit more often at least. must remember not to be attached to it and disappointed if the next time i sit all this eludes me.

My friend and former housemate Shannon graduated tonight from her aviation mechanics program. She was valedictorian! Her speech was really thoughtful, well paced, and inspiring. The program is not huge; eleven people graduated this year from the thirty or so who originally started two years ago. But it was a touching get together for the students who have had a challenging program.

I like to brag about Shannon. She had a dream to be a pilot yet couldn’t take the typical routes of military or aviation college to achieve that. So she worked odd jobs and saved money to take lessons, build hours, and managed by her mid-20’s to have a multi-engine commercial aviation license and her first job flying traffic watch. She’s inspiring with her perseverance and drive, and she’s incredibly creative and generous and rambunctious to boot.

Yesterday went to the Santa Cruz flea market, in search of kitch. I haven’t been to the flea market in forever.

For the most part it was a huge recycling exercise, with people unfolding the contents of their garage storage bins on blankets for all to pick over in search of treasure. Some items were generally useful, like axe handles and screw drivers. Most were detritus. Occasionally we found the sublime, like a framed bon jovi poster in mind condition. I left empty handed except for a small bag of cashews and a sun burn on my neck. But it was happy hunting.

i have a seminar this morning about common software application usability mistakes in union square. so i’m checking email in a starbucks again. darn handy to have these hotspots everywhere. wish every building had a wireless net though.

last night went to see The Matrix Reloaded with 250 of my friends and their friends. It was a completely new movie going experience, walking into the theater and finding friends chatting, catching up, cracking jokes all over the theater. Even after the film everyone was chatting and laughing so long security had to usher us out of the theater. it was distinctly less commercial and institutional. i never want to see a movie any other way now.

ahhhhh… moving is done. yesterday I picked up the last little coffee table and we’re all now completely moved out of the old house. it’s not even my coffee table, not sure whose but it’s going to goodwill soon.

i’m writing from a Starbucks internet hotspot. I know, I know… at least i’m not buying coffee here, just taking up valuable real estate in the store for my internet fix. life on the road requires some sacrifice.

i’m attending a usability conference in san francisco today. picked up some good testing tips already and had a good idea for testing brain dominance in test subjects using a quick card sorting test.

i won’t be able to update as often while i’m on the road, until i get this whole internet connection thing worked out.

all the furniture is stored, though a curio didn’t survive the process and my car has a new dent as a result. such is life, especially when you’re stressed and running like a headless chicken.

my goal is to be cleaned out of the garage today, except maybe the motorcycle, and to finish off most of my room before dark. i still have tomorrow to finish getting everything stored, but i’d hate to run out of time.

and so begins my gypsy summer.

must… finish… packing… and move by tomorrow afternoon…

ugh… i have cleaners scheduled now for friday before i’m officially out of here.

just went through the garage and figured out what is mine and what is old housemates.

now it’s just stuffing everything into boxes. this will take all night. please send caffeine!