Deer Park Monastery, Escondido, CA
I would like to start including some daily schedules as well as happinesses of the day in this blog, once I can get more disciplined and focused about them.

5:35 – woke up
5:52 – morning sitting
6:45 – Touching the Earth (prostrations)
7:00 – morning exercise: jogging around the Meditation Hall.
7:30 – walking meditation down to Clarity Hamlet for Day of Mindfulness
8:00 – breakfast in Clarity
8:30 – walked back up to Solidity Hamlet with J*ost, Robin, Sarah, and Eric to have coffee in the tea room and wait for Eric to pack up and to see him off.
9:30 – Skipped the first Dharma Talk in Clarity waiting for Eric.
10:15 – Bid farewell to Eric, and afterwards continued reading in the tea room. Chatted with Norman, paid for three weeks worth of staying here, and put a package in the mail.
11:00 – walked down to Clarity to catch the second Dharma Talk, only to arrive at the very end of it.
12:30 – informal lunch at Clarity
1:15 – returned to Solidity Hamlet to read and nap in the tea room.
2:30 – arrived late at the laypeople Dharma sharing outside the big Meditation Hall. Contributed a bit about death (someone else brought it up and no one else was responding to it, so I did).
3:35 – went for a walk which turned into a hike into an unknown area, triggering my personal emergency alert rating system, which I use to gauge the level I should be panicking, since I don’t naturally panic very well. It reached level one, and almost reached level two before I reached a safe area.
5:35 – returned to monastery
6:07 – dinner (spaghetti! Yay!)
Rest of the evening: hang out in tea room and socialized with guest Dustin, a professional speed skater/cyclist from Calgary.

Happinesses of the Day:
- During the hike, getting to the top of a climb, standing on the topmost rocks and seeing the trail on the other side that I needed to see to start feeling I wasn’t going to be lost or stuck for hours on the dark, cold desert mountain until the moon rose. It was a huge relief, but it was definitely ebullient happiness, too, even though I wasn’t completely out of the woods yet.
- Spaghetti for dinner! (food here is mostly Vietnamese, so spaghetti is a treat)
- Feeling of Winter in the night air. It’s cold, just not freezing. The feeling is one of beautiful emptiness and loneliness.

At the top of the climb, although I was worried about getting to familiar ground before dark, I still had the lack of sense to appreciate the scenery.