OK, after all the bitching and whining and gnashing of teeth, some things I feel good about. No axe to grind here, just minor pieces of good news.
To start with the latest, last night's inaugural Tuesday night meeting of the Nashville Zen Center was a success, in just the way I'd hoped it would be. We had three NZC members including one of our newer guys, and four guests. Two of the guests were friends of mine from the Circle of Friends group, who were probably there just to support me but I hope they liked it and will come back. They were experienced meditators; and then there were two new guys who'd obviously never tried a lotus posture before, and that's even more fun. If anyone's interested, we're trying to do an approximation of Soto Zen rituals as funneled through the Atlanta Soto Zen Center, in lieu of the curious mixed bag of practices the NZC has accrued for its Saturday morning sits. If you've never tried Zen before, this is your chance to get the real stuff; come join us next Tuesday or any Tuesday at the Barn. We don't mind starting from scratch with beginners, unlike at the Saturday meeting, and there's plenty of Q & A opportunity. Contact me if you need directions or have questions.
And again, in spite of all my whining, I did get the new web page for the Nashville Buddhist Festival up and running over the weekend. It still says it's under construction (as it will be in fact until the Festival is finalized next summer or early fall), mostly because I haven't decided what to do with the Welcome page, but it's very diffferent from the old one. I almost feel like thanking the folks at WebHost for their incompetence in not properly backing up the server for Sitebuilder, so that all the data from the old page was lost and I had to re-do, with regard to which I had developed a certain ennui. Let me know what you think. It's sparser and harder, just one more effort in my attempt to counteract the sugar overdose you may be getting from some of the pseudo stuff I was concerned about in my prior post. Insulin for the soul?
And, also with mixed feelings, I've decided to make these Ratzaz Diaries posts available on MySpace. I have real mixed feelings about MySpace, especially as it's owned by the death of all media, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp (which, if you've been living under a rock, brings us brain damage like the Fox News Channel and has now purchased Beliefnet.com, if you can believe it). But it's put me in contact with some very interesting people, and if you're a MySpace member you can get alerts of new posts on this BlogSpot site just by adding Ratzaz as a friend and subscribing to the Blog there (although I'll warn you it doesn't look as good there). I may also put out bulletins on the Blogs occasionally, but I haven't worked that out yet. And if you want to read archived posts, you have to come to Blogspot.
By the way, if you're getting email announcement of the Ratzaz Diaries, and you want me to stop, just let me know; you won't hurt my feelings. Similarly, if you're not, and you don't have the Ratzaz Diaries added as an RSS feed or don't want to use the MySpace option, let me know, I'll be glad to put you on the list.
And also by the way, thanks to all of you who've been commenting on this blog, now that I made it as easy as I can. You can also comment on MySpace. And there have been some interesting links to the Rataz Diaries lately; you can check them out for each entry at the bottom of the post; I found this one and this one particularly interesting. Thanks to especially to Anita Thompson for the mention, and to clintonfan for her comment on Obama.
So really nothing bad to report today at all, except a lot of you seem to be down with various ailments and injuries; I don't read anything into it, just get better. Hope to see you soon.
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