I’ve been promising to hem several of Majka’s pants for well over a month now, and tonight, I did it. This proves that one can become stir crazy enough to accomplish anything! Huzzah!

Elsie is playing with a stuffed fawn, and Quinn is playing with a stuffed tiger cub. Elsie brings her fawn over to play with Quinn’s tiger cub. The fawn prances around a bit. Then Quinn cradles the tiger cub in her arms and proclaims, “The tiger baby is afraid of the deer baby.”

Is that not the weirdest thing ever? We’ve already done A DECADE in the 2000s? Am I the only one creeped out by that? Wasn’t it just a few years ago that I was listening to Prince’s “1999,” and 1999 seemed like a long ways away? What’s going on??????

Forgetting all that craziness, let’s get to the nitty-gritty. I welcomed in the New Year at my zendo with seven other like-minded souls. We started our little service around 10pm. Each of us wrote a resolution that was supposed to be about our Buddhist practice in some regard. Then we all chanted some good, old standbys: the Heart Sutra, the Identity of Relative and Absolute, a few others. You know. The standards. Then we each banged on the gong, then took the Resolution Paper, lit it on fire, and burned it. In front of everybody. Like it was all spiritual and witnessed and stuff. I’m starting to feel like I should take that resolution seriously or something.

And what was it? you ask. Well, it was pretty similar to the one I made last year, where I decided to give up eating meat and dairy for one month, except this time, I’m doing it for the entire year.* I bandied about the word “vegan” in my post last year, but I’ve made a decision not to use that word this year. As I come to realize more and more about veganism, I also realize that it doesn’t make any sense to be “vegan except for…” It’s kind of like being pregnant or being dead. Either you are or you aren’t. So I’m giving up eating meat and dairy (which means I’m still eating eggs). And I cannot even begin to describe the joy I felt in my heart on January 1st when I discovered that Double Stuf Oreos don’t contain dairy! Or, unsurprisingly, meat.

Majka has decided to make the same resolution I made last year. She’s giving up meat and dairy for one month. She has a love of cheese that I do not share, so this is a harder undertaking for her than it was for me. She’s also giving up soda for the year. That’s a big one.

Elsie says that she would like to change her toys in the coming year. Further inquiry into this “resolution” indicates that she is going to be changing which toy is her favorite. For instance, sometimes it might be Tigress. Then it might be Silver Unicorn. Then it might be the Pink Unicorn with the Hearts on It. Etc. We are not focusing on the fact that this is what she’s done since she was born.

I asked Quinn if she’d like to do anything new in the coming year or make any changes. She looked at me blankly for a long time. Then she said she’d like to watch some new movies.

There you have it! The Seawright Resolution Wrap-up!

*In case you’re wondering what giving up meat and dairy has to do with Buddhist practice, it falls under the “not causing harm” aspect of Buddhism.

I live on one of those little neighborhood streets that you find in big cities – you know, the kind that 18-wheelers should NEVER EVER drive on. And before GPS, I don’t think many of them did. They looked at actual maps and stuck to big roads or – horror of horrors – asked real, live people the best way to get around. But now they have a new god, God’s Piloting System if you will. Unfortunately, god hates the big rigs. (And he’s also surprisingly fond of the ghetto.) So big, big, way too big trucks mosey on down our street until they can’t mosey anymore, and then they’re stuck. Then what to do? The options are 1) blindly go the wrong way down a one way street, 2) back all the way up the street again, or 3) convince themselves that somehow they can turn the truck around via a side street. Now, that was a little misleading, because option 3 is not really an options – it’s an impossibility. But when confronted with options 1 and 2, many truck drivers begin to believe in option 3…and perhaps the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus, as well, I don’t know.

Last night, while Santa’s elves were undoubtedly working hard for Fisher Price, making Quinn a Dora the Explorer doll, a big rig driver with visions of sugar plums dancing in his head backed right into my parked minivan. My minivan was brave and tried to stand its own, but when all was said and done, the 18-wheeler won.

I suppose I could have been really upset about it all, but I wasn’t. Not much point in that really. (If only I could learn to be that way when dealing with people I actually care about. Huh.) Then later, I was telling my neighbor about it, and as I told her how apologetic the truck driver was, I mentioned how I wasn’t freaking out or angry – I even felt a little bad for the guy. And my neighbor said, “Yeah, I’m the same way. My husband is NOT that way though. He seems to think that freaking out and getting as angry as possible is vitally important.” And THEN this story unfolded:

Neighbor: We had just started dating. One morning, as I was leaving his house, I ran right into his BMW and caused $7000 worth of damage.

Sonja: Oh my god.

Neighbor: I was like you – there wasn’t any point in getting upset about it. What was done was done, and I had a yoga class to get to.

Sonja: Oh my god.

Neighbor: A., on the other hand, felt very differently. He lived in a ranch house then, and of course he heard the crash. Through the windows, I could see him come running out of the bedroom, his hands on his head, his mouth moving.

Sonja: Oh my god.

Neighbor: But, you know, I had that yoga class to get to, so I just waved, pulled out of the driveway and went to my yoga class.

Sonja: Oh my god.

Now, try to tell me that is not the greatest story you ever heard. Of course, it’s even funnier if you know them, because A. is definitely the sort of person to run around screaming while pulling out his hair, and V. is definitely the sort of person to smile, wave, and go to her yoga class.

This past weekend, I did another one of those things where you sit all day and meditate. In Zen circles, we like to call them sesshins. In Sonja circles, I like to call them torture. Nonetheless, when most regular, non-Buddhist people hear that I’m going to a sesshin, they say, “Ooh! Have FUN!” It’s sort of like if you told someone, “I’m going to the dentist to have my gums scraped,” and they said, “OMG! Have a good time!” Or maybe, “I’m going to Happiness’s funeral,” and they said, “That sounds AWESOME!” Or maybe… well, you get the point. Let’s not beat a dead horse here. Although, ironically, beating a dead horse is exactly what sesshin is like, and you get to be the dead horse. Yippee-yie-yay! But now that I think about it, a dead horse who is being beaten might be better off than a person in sesshin. At least the horse is dead. Unless the horse was beaten to death and then the beating continued. That sounds about right. But I digress. (And you love that about me. Admit it.)

This sesshin I was at this weekend was a special one because my teacher’s Dharma transmission ceremony occurred during it. (What’s that you ask? I can’t explain everything to you. That’s why god invented google.) It was a three day sesshin (although thankfully I had the good sense only to attend two days of it). In our one day sits here in Philly, when it’s over, we all run screaming from the zendo and that’s it. But at the end of this sesshin, during the closing ceremonies, everyone was supposed to share something.

The sesshin was held in New York (scenic Hudson Valley, not big city) with the students of my teacher’s teacher (who was the one giving her Dharma transition, duh – you know that because of that google search). So there were a bunch of students there from the New York zendo, too. So we had a good sized group of people. People who shared. People who cried. When the first person shared and cried, it took all my self-control not to point and then snigger to the person beside me, “Look, it’s a cry baby. Does the ickle baby wanna bottle? Heh heh.” Good thing I didn’t do this, because it turns out that the person beside me was a crier, too. Actually, a lot of people were criers. People shared and cried. Other people shared about crying. Some people shared about crying while crying as a testament to the fact that they (apparently) had been crying during the entire sesshin. By the time we got to the end of it, I realized that something must be wrong with me, because not only had I not cried at any point during the sesshin, but I’d never even had the urge to cry. I almost cried for myself because of my lack of crying. Except that’s a total lie. I’m much too dead inside for that.

But overall, this sesshin was the best sesshin experience I’ve had. It was my teacher’s teacher (my grandteacher?) who was running the sesshin, and he schedules things a bit differently. Even though the days were longer, the zazen periods were interspersed with more breaks, so the sitting was easier. For me, at least.

The location was quite beautiful, and the building was also beautiful: old, stone and brick; the floors were wood or stone tile; the ceilings were high; the windows were leaded or stained glass. My only complaint was that the walls of the bedrooms seemed to have been made out of paper. From the noises coming from one of the rooms adjoining me, I can only imagine that the person there enjoyed lifting the furniture up and then throwing it down again.

Another Buddhist group was also having a sesshin there that weekend, and they got up an hour before we did (we got up at 6:30am, they got up at 5:30am). Rather than keeping the groups together (you know, Empty Hand Zendo on the 3rd floor, Ordinary Mind Zendo on the 4th floor), the building’s management had us all intermingled. Keep in mind that we have paper walls here. My logical thinking tells me that it must have been the Empty Hand people getting up, using the bathroom, and heading downstairs between 5:30am – 6:00am. My ears, on the other hand, assure me that the noise outside my room’s door could only have been made by a herd of stampeding antelope.

Even though, when I got home yesterday evening, I felt like I was about to die because I was so tired. (Plus, I got sick on Saturday night, but don’t try to get me to tell that story. There’s just no time. We’re already over 800 words here.) I’m still wiped out today. But it did make me want to practice more with my sangha (Buddhist community). I haven’t been at my zendo very much these last couple of months because of the yoga teacher training I’ve been doing (no time for that story either, people!). It might be that I have to give up the yoga training so that I can get some more Zen time. We’ll see.