andydoesrl

Why have I been so low-energy since I got back from Berkeley? I spent ten minutes staring at my craft table during break today instead of living life.

I'm still getting a bit of exercise, walking back and forth to work and to the lodge every day. I'm eating an okay amount. I spend enough hours in bed. I'm not depressed or anything.

Y'know what? I think the vegetarian diet is finally getting to me after four months. Eating whatever I wanted in Berkeley was great. (Being down in the city was fun, too, but I think that was only half of it.) It seems I might need to start going to the grocery store more often for myself.

So the Ratna Zine was awesome. They ran a set of 30-ish and hope to finish off the rest of the 108 of the first edition. What's the RZ, you say? It was the youth of the Ling banding their creative forces together to form one 8.5"x5.5" booklet of art, essays, poems, music reviews, and general visually creative stuff. Some of it is in-jokes for people who've lived in yome-land or been part of the society here, but there's some good accessible stuff for folks from outside the Ling.

To celebrate and share the goodness, we had a party! The kitchen brought down pizza and pumpkin cheesecake muffins to the Tower House last Friday and people gradually filtered in around 7pish to pick up a copy to read - and to listen. Some people read their own contributions, making their pieces even more hilarious and poignant. Jesse described her conversion to vegetarianism, a bit stunning to her quite carnivorous New Zealand family, with humor and a brutal honesty, while Rachel, in a satirical but loving manner, lambasted the plight of a banana plug she encountered while on a morning run. Monel pulled up the myspace page for A Nice Place to Visit for one of Tim's bands and read her "EP Interpretation" - less a music review than a running narration of the album. We all tried to piece through Anna's German captions to her drawings of the different bathrooms around yomeland. That was pretty hilarious, especially the bit where people around the room eventually realized which bathroom was whose.

Sitting around the common room in the tower house with everybody, perusing the zine to find our lives portrayed so- it was pretty cool. I'm very glad that it happened and hope to keep it up into the new year.

You can download a PDF of it from my server, since the creators were kind enough to distribute it to us electronically.

Just a warning: if you've lived at the Ling, you'll read this note, smile ruefully and say to yourself, "Yeah, I've done that;" as for y'all city folk, you're probably gonna laugh at me instead.

Walking from the bindery to the lodge, the quickest route is along the footpath that follows the road. Up one side is grass and the hill with the reservoir. The other side is a copse of trees. Along the path every ten paces or so lives a little footlamp; some burn steadily while others strobe, with the remainder flashing out now and then like lighthouses warning "keep an eye out or your feet will get wet!" Since my flashlight is dying and this week hosts a new moon, those little lights are literally my guiding lights to get from work to dinner. The entrance to the footpath is bounded on the right by some manhole covers for the septic system (?) and on the left by a little light and a tree.

This tree, it eats people if they don't keep an eye out. It'll just lean a branch over--esspecially on wet nights, like tonight--and smack 'em right in the face. I've lived here for over three months now, so you'd think I'd be familiar with it. Oh, I sure am familiar with it.

Tonight, as I approached the path, I figured out that I should hold my gradually weakening flashlight up in front of my face in order to illuminate any errant branches that might scratch my glasses. I got past the warehouse tent, over the road, onto the path - nothing! Great. The flashlight is out to save what battery is left. And-

BAM! in the face. So much for outsmarting the tree. Sometimes, you just gotta laugh.

Soooo last weekend was Berkeley weekend. SO TOTALLY AWESOME. This weekend was the first time I haven't slept at the Ling since I got here, I believe.

The excuse to come down to Berkeley was the Dharma Publishing store! After not having a Nyingma store open in Berkeley since we closed the bakery on San Pablo down five (?) years ago, we're finally opening a store to hawk all of our DP wares: books, children's stories, art, jewelry, yoga mats, you know the drill. DP staff had been going up and down the past two weeks before the opening (this past Saturday) to prep the place: clean up, organize, stock the shelves, hang art and prayer flags, and generally make it awesome. Their hard work paid off!

The grand opening was Saturday with lots of free activities: reading children's stories in the morning, Kum Nye yoga session after lunch, and two talks from Arnaud. A decent amount of people showed up and a lot of people have heard the word that we're back in town! So, lots of happy happy -- and a lot of stress off our backs, now that the store is open and we just have to sustain it with inventory and the occasional visit.

There was plenty for me to do in Berkeley besides the store, though, and I took full advantage of my free time. Instead of sleeping at the Institute, I stayed at lesisputnik's place, which was a super brilliant idea. We went out to the Albatross Pub, which serves fancy beer and $1 bottomless popcorn, and talked about sign language and life all night. It was glorious. P.S. Her house is super-cute, both inside and out:

She also joined us for lunch and hangouts Saturday, which entailed wandering down Telegraph to Dwight Way to find Industrial Tattoo, a sweet tattoo studio. (She and another Berkeley friend -- Jasmine, who cooks for Dharma Mangalam -- both gave it high recommendations. Funny enough, we ran into Jasmine waiting to do her tattoo there.) I got a new piercing (inspired by my dear friend Liz Aresti back in Delaware) and got a sucker lollipop from my piercer, Lysa!


During the afternoon, I got the chance to drop by the Nyingma Institute, so I'd never seen it before. We got the dime tour and man, what a place! It used to be an old Greek house just off-campus, on Cyclotron Rd just below the LBL. (They joke about "that's why we glow.") HUGE HUGE HUGE prayer wheel out back. SUPER view of the bay, especially at sunset. Just huge and labyrinthine and lots of nice to hang out there with our Institute brethren and sistren. The coolest part of it for me was actually seeing a bookstore that I've shipped to, seeing products that I've wrapped up and boxed and sent out the door. It gave me a new inspiration to Ship Well.

Saturday night, DP and some of our Berkeley volunteer and retreatant friends all went out to a Chinese restaurant around the corner from the store -- Great China, incidentally -- and we had a delicious celebratory banquet. yummy yummy yummy and leftovers to bring back to the Ling, too! My friend Dorothy V, who I'm pretty tight with from Delaware, is also out in California, so she rode the BART into Berkeley and joined us for festivities and hooliganaciousness. Our shenanigans took us to the dregs of some random art show and around downtown Berkeley until we ran into a karaoke joint at the end of the night and decided to sing sing sing! In addition to the youth of DP, we brought along one of the girls from the Institute, Kelly. Turns out she went to University of Delaware, too, 'cos Dorothy and her recognized each other from the art department. Small world, man!

Sunday was pretty sedate: waking up, joining Dorothy for brunch at Cafe Durant across the street from the karaoke place from the night before, meandering down Telegraph Ave and checking out the vintage shops, yadda yadda. In the afternoon, Dorothy caught a ride back to Mountain View, where she's working on a show, and I headed back up to the Institute to collect everyone for the ride back in Greg's car. Then -- oh no! -- Greg's keys got locked in his car! Fortunately, his mum was in town from Utah on business and had AAA-style insurance through Allstate, so we took advantage of that and called a lockpick guy. He was pretty nice and told us all about gun control and public/private security laws in California. (He used to be police/military, then went into private guard services. Very interesting! and very genial. We learned a lot from having him pop the lock, not to mention how to pop locks on newer cars.)

So, we drove back up. What a full day and two halves. Berkeley was glorious. Now I'm refreshed and ready to work hard for the Christmas season!

Berkeley was glorious! All of the Dharma Publishing staff ended up down in the city for the grand opening of our bookstore (2210 Harold Way, around the corner from the YMCA and the USPS post office on Allston). We got back from Berkeley last night, tired, but happy.

I'll fill y'alls in on the details later; it was a full weekend. We got to meet up with friends in the city, finally see our partner organizations, and generally enjoy the town and the celebrations.

Today, I get to play catch-up. 14 emails in my personal inbox, 12 in the work email, 13 notifications on Facebook, half a dozen orders left over from last week to ship -- oh my! I'll be back later.

Just in case you haven't been following my blog (and god knows why you would if you're not my immediate family, someone else who works here, or Marion), here's a quick but entertaining introduction to what I'm doing!

I moved out here in the beginning of August, to Ratna Ling; we're in Northern California in the middle of wine country, halfway between Santa Rosa and the ocean, 2 hours north of San Francisco.


When I got here, they put me up in the standard volunteer housing: a yome, which is a big nice tent mounted on a elevated wood floor:


I worked for my first coupla weeks with Yeshe De, the Tibetan Text Preservation Book Project, manufacturing books to send to the displaced Tibetans in India. I did stuff like tailing off (taking books off the end of the production line):


Then, by luck and chance, I was chatting with Gwen about how she got into the Shipping department of Dharma Publishing and, the next Monday, switched over from YD to training under Gwen for DP:


Most of what I do for DP is pack up books and art and ship them to bookstores and individuals both in the US and across the world:


Sometimes I do photo shoots and video shoots, both with live models (for Kum Nye) and with still lifes (for product publicity stuff):


I'm also responsible for work on a couple different web sites, both for Dharma Publishing (on company time) and Yeshe De (on personal and community work time):


All the technology provides a great contrast to living out in the middle of the woods, up in the hills, surrounded by tons of Tibetan art and religious buildings:


Since this place is kinda in the boonies, I've taken to writing my friends letters and asking people to send me crack supplies:


Fortunately, we get off evenings and Sundays, so every week or two there's the chance to go into town or go hiking in the woods or at the beach:


People here are all pretty nice and a little goofy. So are the animals and bugs.


It's a gorgeous place to live, especially if you remember to catch the sunset. (If not, there's so many stars to look at after night falls).


My days are full and I appreciate my nights more. So, g'night, everybody!

For all I bitch and moan about being cut off from civilization and about how the culture here is different from what I'm used to, it really is OK out here. Even though you have to drive 45min to buy shampoo or booze and another 45min to buy classy shampoo and booze, it's worth it to be up in the hills. With the internet, you can order just about anything to be shipped in, or you can hitch a ride into town or ask someone else to buy supplies. We're surrounded by beautiful woods and sunsets, the only smoke I breath is incense and the occasional whiff of exhaust from a forklift, and I don't pay a whit for rent or utilities. People here are all nice, stable, determined to keep things going smoothly both in the factory and in their personal lives. That's not to say that we're super-human or buddhas or anything. It's just that it's so drama-free up here, even when people get a little stressed out or there's miscommunications or misunderstandings; it's so much less than I've seen elsewhere. At least everyone tries to communicate clearly, work with each other, and encourage positivity and a good work ethic.

I guess that's what keeps this going, this huge book production project and publishing company and all its associated groups -- and it's all volunteer staff. We live it every day, so it seems commonplace to me now, but we really do get things done.

I was talking to one of our mail carriers today and she was surprised to hear that we're all volunteers. She asked me why I stay even if I'm not getting paid. Free room, free utilities, stable living situation, fun people, decent work. Why not, man?

"Good food, good folk, good work." That's my mantra and I'm sticking to it.

I walked out of my yome this morning and three deer bolted from different sides of the yome. Then one just stood there in the road, chewing her cud all innocent-like.

I'M ON TO YOU DEER.

I see you scoping out my yome every night, analyzing the flaws, the points of entry, finding out when I leave and when I get back.

YOU'RE JUST AFTER MY FRUITY PEBBLES BROWNIE MIX!

There may be a security detail posted Saturday night to guard the brownies while we're all down at the lodge celebrating Halloween. AN ANTI-HOOF SQUAD.

I was just boggled yesterday when I thought about my job. I'm making web pages that represent a big-time company which has existed for over 30 years. I talk to their clients, I ship their orders: hundreds and thousands of dollars of stuff. And then I get to sit down at a round table with our accountant, a real-world business account, and another volunteer employee and we discuss real business money matters and how to handle the company.

Seriously. I'm 23 and I've got more metal in my face than most people have in their coin-purse. And people still take me seriously. That's pretty cool. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Adultworld.

It's a beautiful, temperate day here at the Ling with a temperature in the mid-70's (I'm wearing shorts and a light sweater over my t-shirt), sunny, clear but with a few clouds in the sky, birds squawking off in the distance. Davie and Anna rigged up some hammocks along one of the trails near the commons and now people are out there with drums and the commons' didgeridoo, barking and howling like Wild Thing. If your tea isn't too strong, you can smell the woody fragrance of all the trees.

I'm out on the porch of the commons, where I can hear the laundry machines squeaking away too. The occasional volunteer walks by along the road; so does Yeshe De, the Nurnberg's dog, he's visited me two or three times already. There's projects to do: some personal programming tasks, a few arts and crafts items, and cookies to bake after dinner. Here on the table are a bowl of sliced apples and a cup of tea.

Life is good!

The past week or so, we've been reading about making excuses (and avoiding that) in Skillful Means. Stuff like how excuses just erode your morale and drag you into bad habits that limit your potential.

You know what's a really bad excuse? "Ugh, it's so far to walk over to the lodge to get some food and down to the bindery to get my computer."

Turns out it's just five minute's walk. Well, it would have been five minutes, except I stopped to look up at the stars, and then I had a conversation across the reservoir with JP. (Yes, across the reservoir. I think he was sitting on the hill on the far side.)

Now I have my computer and I can go watch a movie on it.

Empowering myself, five minutes at a time. The world is what you make it, folks, don't waste time making excuses -- just do it!

Oh, it's break time.

Next question: what the heck just flew past my window?
Answer: it's still break time. Somebody found a Frisbee. Cool.

Yay for nobody on the cutter! Sharing resources on an informal basis is fun; since Yeshe De and Dharma Publishing use the same machines, we have to either request the floor manager (Annette) for time to print our books or we just sneak in and do odd jobs when machines are available. To my good fortune, Roger (our master cutter) is off relaxing, so I can take advantage of his absence. (Not to say that I don't appreciate when he's around, since he's a swell guy, but sometimes I need to borrow his tools.)

In light of that, I'm pre-cutting a whole bunch of materials - Jataka children's tales, which need to be rebound - so that I don't have to wait for another open window.

.. oh look, Roger's coming back from break right now! I have excellent timing.

Not having any streetlamps out here, it sure makes a difference. Yeah, they put in a bunch more solar-powered lights along the trails (they charge from a small solar panel during the day and shine some LEDs during the night), that's great an' all, but you can't cover every trail in the property. As it is, I walked into a ditch along the side of a road, a hole along the side of a trail (in between my yome and the bathroom), a small post (between commons and my yome), and a tree (just the branches, though).

The obvious lesson? Carry a flashlight. I do, for when I don't feel confident about the trail.

The really cool bit? I'm getting really good at noticing objects in the dark, even if they don't reflect. Trees will block the light from other lights, the sky, or other lit objects, so I can see the black hole against the world. Some principle applies to finding the gate in the fence: it's the one spot that doesn't have the straight white lines of the fence, but is more of a breakup pattern.

On the plus side, Gerardo usually has the light on in our yome when I'm coming home at night, so I can see that shining beacon of white canvas, like an oversized Chinese lantern leading me to bed.

Looks like the winter rains have started. This morning brought us a serious downpour, a constant drumming on the roof with the occasional thump from falling debris. The gravel and dirt paths around the property are starting to develop puddles and potholes; I'm glad that the woodchip paths let the water drip through, giving us some little walking space. I noticed that we're definitely ready for the rains, though: the wood flat out by the stuppa is being held down by bricks against the storm carrying it down into the pond.


The prayer flags in the storm are something else. The winds are gusting reasonably strong, especially out in the open where the prayer flag structure stands thirty or forty feet tall. Now all those flags -- some of them 4'x3' are soaked and are getting blown to tatters by the raging weather. It's awesome to watch and to hear, too: if the wind gets fast enough, the flags snap and pop from the force of it. (No crackling, though.) To watch it reminds me of colorguard on a rainy day, when the rain dies down for a spell and the girls try to whoosh all of the water out of the silks for the joy of it.

... oh man, for a second I thought the chanting upstairs was the wind howling! Must be a ceremony day.
eta:

good morning
it is raining cats and dogs
and when I started out at 530 for ratna ling from berkeley
traffic warnings were heavy, roads already flooded
so i turned around.

Business email, aka rain haiku.

tikiti tikiti tikiti bm ffffffff.

At morning meeting, we were talking about the storms of this week and yesterday and joking about the Women's House blowing away like the Wizard of Oz.

When I came back downstairs, Ellen was oiling the stamper; her oil can was a little metal contraption with a long spout.

Follow the yellow brick road, follow the yellow brick road. Follow, follow, follow, follow, follow the yellow brick road... to Odiyan?

The rainy season is upon us. Saturday's work detail (which was optional, incidentally - we got the day off for our lama's birthday) entailed preparing for the storm predicted tonight: cutting down dead limbs, mostly. Looks like our little rain dance precipitated some precipitation this morning; I awoke to rain knocking on the roof of my yome and dripping on me through the trees as I walked to the shower.

This wet weather isn't so much an annoyance as it is surreal. Coming down to work, it's impossible to see beyond the hill due to the dense fog. All I can hear coming down the trail is drip-drip, drip-drip on the leaves and the muted padding of my feet on the moist dirt.

Ah, NoCal, land of rocky beaches and foggy hills. It's pretty -- now, where's my hoodie?

I handed him a sheet of paper with a sketch of some shelves and dimensions a few days ago after dinner. He showed up in my shipping office a day or two later with the answer to my storage prayers:


I'll put up "after" photos once I put the finishing touches on it and get it fully stocked with CDs. It holds CDs three deep! So much better than my old storage solution (pictured below, one in front of the other): a pair of cardboard mini-shelves, two high, one deep.

miiiiike murrrrrrrrrphy is da maaaaan.

Once came a fix-it guy from PA
to Ratna Ling in CA
I said, on a lark,
"My office is dark!"
And there was light, the very next day!

My shipping room went from three lights working to eight! My cave has become a happy den.

Last night was Good Times in Town! Yes, outside world, we do have social lives outside of work... well, more or less. Whatcha gonna do when you live and socialize with everyone you work with? Anyway.

To celebrate Greg's birthday (a week or two late), the young'ns of Dharma Publishing drove down into Sebastopol to enjoy a night on the town. Getting down those windy, hilly roads is a little rough, especially since we're not accustomed to riding in cars, but we made it down in one piece.

For dinner, we went to a restaurant called Hopmonk Tavern, which reminded me a lot of Iron Hill Brewery back home. On top, they had a variety of local microbrews including three of their own. The meal was great: good, solid tavern food, and a lot of stuff we don't really see up at Ratna Ling -- y'know, seafood, sausage, chicken, that stuff that's not vegetarian. (Up at the Ling, the kitchen always make vegetarian food, but we're welcome to eat and cook whatever we like in our personal spaces.) It was a little pricey, of course, but fair for the food: $10-15 entree plates and $4-8 beers.

Getting out in public was pretty nifty, to see all those faces and hear those voices we don't know. We might admit to people-watching and eavesdropping for ten minutes during our meal =D A ball game was playing on the TV, people were out for drinks and dinner, some guy brought his tweeny daughter out for dinner with his friends -- it was a normal night in the world. (Is it obvious I was getting a little cabin fever up in the hills?)

After dinner, we dropped by the Wholefoods supermarket to pick up some supplies for the weekend. Meggie's parents are visiting from Montana and the rest of us were a little a low on some personal stuff. We all got to chat with the Wholefoods cashiers, who were pretty nice folks. Across the street from the store, a city park played host to a drum circle of three: a woman with a bigger drum and two guys, one with a snare and one with a pair of cowbells. dit dit dikka, dit dit da-km.

Per our original plan, we rounded out the night with some birthday ice cream from Screamin' Mimi's, a little local ice cream shop on the corner. It's all made right there and dang, is it good! Almond ice cream in a sugar cone with almond bits, it takes you right to the heaven realms. Also, there was practically nobody else in the store at 9:30pm, so we took the time to actually find out some more about each other's lives instead of the regular old office chit-chat.

All in all, a good night out with the DP crew.

We recently had a new addition to the Dharma Publishing staff, a returning volunteer from Brasil by the name of Ana Paula. Ana Paula is super-nice and everyone likes her. She also used to run her own cosmetics business for some few years, so she's well-versed in sales and management. Although her primary focus at Ratna Ling is studying Kum Nye, of course we'll take advantage of the skills she brings to the table and put her right to work improving our bookstore. Due to her hard work this past week or two, it already looks very nice with missing items restocked and everything presented accessibly and attractively! Nonetheless, she thinks it needs a little extra somethin' somethin', so she called upon the young, fresh, creative (and American) minds of DP to help her out with this project.

Our task, should we choose to engage our brains, is to design signs for the bookstore to advertise our books to a disinterested crowd. As it is, our books are a little hard to approach for a mainstream crowd; but once people crack the cover, they discover this huge wealth of knowledge that's immediately applicable to their personal and work lives. (Trust me, it's some quality shit; I'll tell all another day.) Our goal is to break down that initial hurdle by revealing the sheer awesomeness of the books to Joe the Accountant, who's just walking by the store going home after work, to pique his interest and maybe get him to come check out a book or two. After all, these practices -- means to actually enjoying your workday and improving your whole life view a little bit -- we're not trying to keep them a secret! Everybody should get the chance to be happy: 'tis the Buddhist and the American way. (If we make a buck off it, so much the better for the world: that money goes back to both more books and more happy people and to support Yeshe De, the Tibetan Text Preservation Project.)

From an interesting sales note, we're doing this within the framework of "assisted self-service." Back in the '70s, it was all about interaction between customer and associate, then the '80s brought in an era of allowing the customer to just choose products off the shelf. Now we're trying to strike a balance between those two methods by providing shelves of products for customers to to browse along with visual / textual assistance, such as signs and advertisements, and live people to talk to.

Limitations: keep it cheap, sustainable on a weekly basis, and (per the Nyingma way) successful! Initial framework for the sign: show the book cover, title, and some text that will catch the customer's eye, probably a solid quote from the book.

Any ideas, folks?