It's been a while since the last update to this this meager blog of mine, so allow me to fill you in on some recent goings-on in my world. Been living in a new place, and soon to be living in another. Cool part about being in your twenties is living somewhere different every year, home changes like the seasons. The day job changed as well, still drawing blueprints for a metal fab shop, only now working 50 hour weeks in a sunless room instead of 40 and being permenantely sentenced to just doing the desk part, no more gettin my hands dirty in the shop - I just sit all day. It's not all bad though, with the longer workday comes a longer lunch break (45 mins!) which means more time to meditate in a quiet spot away from prying eyes.
With this job it's been a bit tougher to nail a consistent spot for the iconic lunch break meditation. The pictures you see here are of the primary locale which I've dubbed 'The Hideaway'. It's a little spot of green brushy overgrowth past a gap in the fence line behind the shop, and as you can see is quite serene and dense with foliage in the warm months. This spot has a bunch of really quirky attributes which set it apart from the previous junkyard spot. There's all this wonderful graffiti about the place, and there were a few occasions where I would arrive at the spot to find some new artwork or tags had appeared that weren't there yesterday. Some train tracks also lay only a few meters adjacent to this hideaway and it has always been an interesting challenge to maintain meditative focus amidst the sound of a nutso loud train horn.
Unfortunately, the proximity and density of this patch of nature comes at a cost. While I spent most of the fall, winter, and early spring meditating here, recently the local insectery have been a bit on the abundant side. Now I can handle a couple of ants crawling on me, the occasional passing honeybee, even the garter snakes lvining there don't pose any issue, but the line gets drawn when on a particulary warm day after sitting motionless in the grass I awaken to find multiple ticks crawling on my clothes. The following few days consisted of fear-based tick research, and compuslive paranoid body scanning tick checks. I haven't returned to meditate in The Hideaway since. I'm not FUCKIN AROUND when it comes to LYME DISEASE. As of writing this piece I have yet to find another safe quiet (and comforatable) spot to sit during my lunch break, opting for a more nomadic approach of just sitting on various pieces of metal stock and wood pallets behind dumpsters, which tend to move locations a lot. I still go back here sometimes to pee and look at birds, but it saddens me to think such a pretty spot is off-limits now.