Shaolin Monk Throwing Sewing Needle Through a Piece of Glas (YouTube)

Shaolin Monk Balances On 2 Fingers (YouTube) – music is awful and you might want to get ready to mute

David Hockney’s iPad Drawings

Steve Hagen Interview (Zen)

My Flickr account renews in December and I am not certain I will renew for another year. I am giving you this warning in case you might want to download this or that image.

Sat with Bella at the edge of the property, where I found her this morning. She couldn’t get up and the tumor in her eye grew a lot overnight, perhaps ruptured. The old girl smelled something fierce, and I assumed the tumor was the reason. It was a smell unlike anything I have smelled before. For some reason my mind wondered about the smell of a battlefield a day or two after the battle has ended. Thankful that it’s not something I have experienced.

Later a friend came to help me get the dog to the vet. We improvised a stretcher with Bella’s pillow on a piece of plywood. She was already too weak to make a sound of protest.

Bella was 13 years old, which translates to 104 dog years in her size/weight category. I will miss her.

Afterwards my friend and I talked in my kitchen about death and dying over a few glasses of water, and he mentioned an interest in Tibetan Buddhism. Then the conversation turned to Gary Snyder and Edward Abbey, and since my friend is a fan of Ed Abbey, I was able to give him a book Jack Loeffler gave me, a book he wrote about his best friend, Edward Abbey.

As he was leaving he said simply, I think of it as a life completed rather than a life lost. So simple, and so true, and so beautiful because it is true.

Now I have to get back to the new slideshows. I am looking through 17,000 photos to put something new together…

But first this:

neo bohemia
Heaven or hell, love or hate,
No matter where I turn
I meet myself.
Holding life precious is
Just living with all intensity
Hold life precious.

(Via neo bohemia)

Actually it is all said in the first three lines, I think:

Heaven or hell, love or hate,
No matter where I turn
I meet myself.

Nothing more needs to be said.