Behind the Scenes

While it seems I've been laying low, I have been busy doing stuff in support of Buddhism, and busy procrastinating from doing that stuff with many hours of tivo. (Tivo is going crazy with all sorts of suggestions since Steve upgraded our box.)

Most noteworthy, I'm working to enable the development of a Buddhist support network for ex-prisoners. My sangha, Dharma Rain, wants to have this happen as a natural outflow of its fifteen year involvement inside the prisons. My BPF chapter wants to help this happen as a piece of its effort to increase cross-sangha engaged practices. I want to see this happen as something that could be the seed of my community organizing idea. There wasn't much enthusiasm for the idea of a challenge, but this beginning could allow for an organic process that builds into an Engaged Buddhist Consortium, or Collaboration, or something like that.

I've also arranged the next BPF meeting. We're going to do our one "business" meeting of the year (at least it seems to have become that) in which we reflect on how we do things and how that's working for us.

I also finished my articles for the NW Dharma News. It is now an online newsletter, no longer printed. You can check out the last one here. I will only have two little news stories in the next one, including one on the collaborative effort for ex-prisoners. (The stories that I'm involved with are the most difficult to write.) While this issue is freely available, the next one will supposedly be available only for members. I'm not sure how well that will work out for the NW Dharma Association. I think it should be free to all, and people will reward the Association by becoming members. I think if the Newsletter is openly available on the web, people will find it via Google searches for specific local Buddhist news. If the access is password protected, how will strangers find it?

I keep advocating, and things are still in flux. They just launched the rest of the website redo. It could still happen.

On other fronts, I'm a terrible housekeeper. Non-perishable groceries still sit on the kitchen table, waiting to be put away. I'll spare you the rest of the kitchen details.

But I've also been reading a lot. I joined GoodReads, recommended by mmkeekah. I've listed books there, but have yet to write the reviews. As the backlog piles up, I find yet more reasons to procrastinate.

my 'recently-read' shelf: