The Fasting Sadhu

The month of Ramadan has passed its half way mark of fifteen days and I am doing as my son said what I love best;painting! Only every year it has become my responsibility to paint the table legs for the restaurant. There about thirty of them and it is a chore that demands patience and purserverence  of which i am of late loosing much of mine. 

So i tried in my own way to create a routine whereby I can bring my mind to focus on something other than watching Dexter the serial killer  or the 'Wire' where the housing projects in the black neighborhoods are being overrun by drugs and murders. Doing a job wholeheartedly makes my time more well balanced between being relax and being present; although it is never good for my back.

This took place sometime at three in the morning and I started to paint soon after midnight. I keep telling myself it is a meditation practice; it helps to bring my mind into focus; Being in the Here and Now and i can tell when my mind wanders when I start making a mess with the paint spilling all around me.

I kept a watch upon this mind of mine as i work and soon begin to realize how tediously it goes about thinking from one situation, one experience in the recent past, one episode that is related to what came into focus to another; I could do very little to bring it to stop. Thus goes my meditation;simply watching my mind as I work and learning how every thought is linked to the next and to the next until i change my breath, or shift my attention to what is here and now; the painting; the breathing; the aches and pains in the shoulders and the head.

One of the more subtle forms of grip my mind has when it is exhausted  from all thoughts is the need to finish as quickly as possible the job at hand. Time becomes a factor and it would be alright for a while until a mess happens and again you realize that you are caught up in time which is of significance unless you are forced to do the job or paid by the hour!

There is a design in most of what we do if we chose to help make it so by being aware that there is design in the first place; the arrangement of the painted table legs or the whole picture itself when viewed together: it tells us a story. 

The Roshi or Rishi look at 4;30 in the morning...let the fasting begin!