Everyday

With palms together,
Good Morning Everyone,

This morning I woke to the need to drive to the store to buy coffee. It seems we used the last of our coffee last night. Early morning store runs are always interesting. The grocery is just opening, few shoppers, clean floors, the beginnings of hustle and bustle. I chose a dark roast by Folgers, something called Black Silk. I am no coffee expert, clearly. I like ordinary coffee and avoid Starbucks altogether. We'll see how this new stuff tastes.

When we lived in the Refuge and made coffee in a stove top percolator, the aroma of the cedar woodfire seemed to add something to the coffee. And for the longest time we used a small French press here in the city, but my son recently bought us some sort of super duper coffee maker and now we are in the modern age.

I am not so sure the modern age is all its cracked up to be. Labor saving devices make us fat and lazy. Further, and most importantly, they take us away from the nature of the processes, divorcing us, if you will, from nature itself. When I was young, changing the channel on the television meant getting up and walking to the TV to manually turn the dial. And when I was really young, visiting my grandfather, our TV was the front porch of his farm house. Degrees of separation. Today we hardly move to entertain ourselves. It is truly a question as to whether this is an advancement.

The Zen way is the way of involvement in the process. Mindful attention to detail. When we make the coffee, even in a new, modern, coffee maker, we should be aware of the feel and smell of the coffee as we scoop it from the can. We should remind ourselves of the many hands and lives that went into bringing that coffee and the coffee maker to us. In this way we re-connect ourselves to the larger world, even to the universe itself.

In the Zen way, the everyday becomes our prayer.

Be well.