Deer Park Monastery, Escondido, CA

It's official, I'm leaving the monastery to go back to New Jersey before traveling in Taiwan. My head is spinning because the plan happened so fast, thanks to my psycho-freaky mother. Another analysis of mother's ulterior motive in pushing me to go to Taiwan before starting monastic training is simple control, even randomly exercised. That's why when I mentioned I might be up for traveling in Taiwan, just to call her bluff, she jumped on it and had my flight reservations within a few days. I didn't have to lift a finger, not even a glance at orbitz.com.

I'm not sure what to think of leaving, which I'm doing on January 10, the day after the monastics leave for Vietnam. Suddenly it's just a little over a week away. Suddenly I'm just another guest here with days counting down until my departure. On one hand I'm looking forward to leaving because of all the frustrations that have come up, and traveling in Taiwan might allow me to look at other practices just to get things in perspective about how good this practice is. On the other hand, I'm feeling I shouldn't leave because of how scattered these frustrations are leaving me, and I'm not sure it has anything to do with the practice. It might just be me. I might just be running away.

I'm afraid of losing the foothold I have with the community now, the comfort zone I've reached. I'm expecting to come back, I've told them to expect me to come back, but I'm sure they've seen this all before, and they know if a person is not here practicing or training, all that means is that they are not here practicing or training. It's just as easily possible that they'll never see me again. On the other hand, one of the brothers suggested that as long as I'm in Taiwan, it might be easy for me to fly over to Vietnam and meet up with them on their tour for a week. He also mentioned there are practitioners and contacts in Taiwan that I might get in touch with, so they seem interested in keeping my interest.

I'm just going with the flow. I'm making headway in my practice while having frustrations and disillusionment festering. That's the way it's supposed to be, because this is me, and that's the reality I create out of my life.

I'm doing well with the New Years Retreat crowd, keeping my anti-social at bay. I did another Rotation of the Earth Sutra on New Years Eve with posting New Years around the world on the board in the dining hall. Every hour I would write where in the world it was midnight, starting with Tokyo at like 7 in the morning, courtesy of my world time watch. People were amused, but I don't think they got the part where I was trying to get people to think about the world turning, and this progression of midnights leading into the new year. It ended at Caracas at 8:00 P.M., before New York City, because that's when we began our own excrutiatingly long ceremony and candlelight procession.