Everything now

Hi all! Ohisashiburi!  Sorry it's been so long.  Busy busy busy busy.
The poetic name for December is "Month of Priests Running" which is supposed to mean that even lazy priests are busy in this month.
The chakai is finished, the dissertation is all in (except for fixing up the bibliography) and the defense is in (this is truly unbelievable to me) one week.
I thought this would be two weeks of recovering and calming down, but it hasn't been that way this week. I'm still not getting full nights of sleep-- I wonder whether it just became a habit not to get to bed at a reasonable hour. That, and we've been drinking tons of koicha (thick tea) this week, which might be keeping me up.

Anyway, this morning, I was the first Midorikaisei out of the dorm and it was gorgeous gorgeous outside--early morning sunlight filtering through the mist and trees. It was, after the pain of waking up and the pain of getting dressed in the cold, hovering over a space heater

(about that: it's such a natsukashii--nostalgic--feeling. When I lived in Japan before I did the same thing.  I didn't heat my room in the mornings, instead just rocketing out of bed, making coffee and then piling my clothes in front of the space heater and standing in front of it to get dressed in the morning.  The checkered way that each garment I pull on has warm spots and cold spots like giraffe spots of heat and cool is such a funny and only-in-Japan feeling to me now.)

Okay. After the unpleasantness of getting up, stepping out into the dawn was a welcome gift, and I felt suddenly overwhelmed with the weight--the living freight of all the people, all the places, all the possibilities: what I've done, what I can do. The world felt very welcoming and full of care for me.
I thought for a second that maybe I should be fully present in just this moment, not the intoxicating and overwhelming feeling of all possibilities and memories and cares at the same moment, but then I also thought well, all these things are present within me simultaneously too.

I have this feeling from time to time-- an absolutely exhilarating feeling of immense richness and possibility... plenitude maybe?-- and it's also totally paralyzing. I can't focus on any one thing to do it when I'm totally prostrated with wonder. I think I need a course in fascination management.

It is luxurious and a privilege and it also kills me a little bit, this flooding unnameable feeling of loving people who are spread so thin around the world--and some who are no longer on it. And strangely, I seem to keep on functioning each moment, despite being scattered to the four winds.

And of course, part of it is the here part. I have that moment every day-- the what am I doing here?! This became normal! When did it become totally normal that I do tea every day and wear kimono and this is, like, WHAT WE DO?
And it became normal that we hang out in weird anonymous institutional rooms on beds with no sheets in Chaken (the building with the boys' dorm as well as all our common areas, like the utensils storage and a kitchen and a little tatami keiko (practice) area.) It became standard that we would work work work on arts and crafts and sweets until 9:35 when we had a few minutes left before curfew to throw everything together and rush down the stairs and out the door and not get locked in the boys dorm overnight, or cause a massive scandal. That's what I do now. For about the last five years of my PhD I've been dreaming about doing material, practical things that have lots of concrete evidence of my having done them (unlike writing, the bulk of which materiality evaporates in drafts and files and the ether).  And I got it. We are making making making. Mostly making feelings, but in such close quarters with hospitality, I see just how material feelings can be.

Everywhere, every second
every attachment, sweet and
heavy on my shoulders.