I'm reading.... more like studying the Eckhart Tolle book, A New Earth. It's the first Oprah book I've read while everyone else is reading it. I'm also following the Monday night class that Eckhart and Oprah are conducting. I listen to the podcast on Tuesdays. This week will be chapter 8.

Tolle also wrote the "The Power of Now" which I never read. I imagine that this in a continuation of the same principle, BE HERE NOW. Easy to say, Easy to think, but not so easy to practice. He says be in every moment while it is happening and you will connect with "your true purpose" in life, which as far as I can tell is to be here now.

The picture is where I was not five minutes ago. The first sunny truly warm Saturday of the season. We ate breakfast and lunch on the back porch and I washed windows and put in screens then took a nap in that very hammock.

While I was laying there I thought about a story I heard or read about a super Monk that was talking one day to his students after a meal. He asked them why he should wash the dishes? (why there were dishes I don't know I thought monks were only suppose to have a bowl and a spork) They answered-" to get them clean, so they could move on to something else, so the dishes would be ready for the next say", etc. "No" the Monk said, "I wash the dishes, to wash the dishes".
This story has always really irritated me in a teenage eye rolling heavy sigh kind of way.

But reading A New Earth in combination with where I am in my life, head, heart I think the super Monk is the same thing Tolle is and damn it I think I get it. Be where you are, when you are. Otherwise you miss huge chunks of your day/life.