JD and I made a run up to Oakland, to have brunch with a friend of his at the Berkeley Thai Temple, and for me to stop by Murasaki. I didn't find a furoshiki (gift-wrapping cloth) I wanted to buy--the ones in stores here are more expensive than the gift I wanted to wrap--but I did buy a statue I felt drawn to, plus the wooden platform, and a nice little no-handle teacup. The place for the statue turned out to be in the middle of all my everyday crap. This is not only dictated by practicality--I am a messy person, utterly unable and unwilling to keep any wide horizontal surface cleared--but it holds meaning for me in the form of what it means to practice in everyday life.

Fear and worry are just like pain and joy: you have to let them in, allow them, accept them. When we do that, we let them become part of our song, and our vision of the song gets wider. Eventually, we see that the song is the whole universe, and includes everything and everyone, including everything buried in our minds.