a day's hiatus
Yesterday afternoon, after several years' worth of accompanying me across the San Francisco peninsula, marking loci of emblematic depth or shallow seeing, the thread of the mala that Sonam Tsering gave me finally frayed beyond holding, and I eventually found I'd lost five (!!) beads to the City... after first recovering a couple that had fallen to the sidewalk and some more inside my backpack's side-pouch where the Samādhi of Lay Sacraments rides along on my daily constitutionals; the survivors of which I'd counted carefully when I arrived back home at my 3-mat hut, the number always getting to 103, less 5 of the canonical 108.
In the tableau above, the 2 small heart-stones seem to be saying to each other, as they huddle nearby the loupe and its observenants [yeah, neolog.]: "...what happened there? where are the other beads?" ::chuckle::
A bit later, in a conversation with Claude, I asked where in the City could I find a Tibetan artifact shop for a new mala (there are many); but better yet, perhaps where I could find one that could mend the old one. To my slight surprise, C pointed to one not far from me on Union Street in Cow Hollow.
Tibetan Golden Lotus is a family-owned store ran by the mother-and-daughter team of Pachen and Sonam Selotsang. Sonam was there when I arrived mid-afternoon.
I walked in and introduced myself to the young/ageless Tibetan woman sitting behind the counter (she could have easily passed as a 20-ish person, or one through her early 30s), and for all I know Sonam is closer in age to me.
She listened kindly to my brief story of malic provenance and rupture. ;-) And when I asked her if she could repair it, she said it was her mom Pachen who could do it... but who wasn’t in, and would be back on Monday. I asked her how much it would cost, and she asked me to wait a moment while she called her mom. Meanwhile, I went to the part of the counter nearby where a clutch of malas, all beautiful, some affordable, others quite expensive, coiled strung around a dark wooden pedestal.
After her call Sonam said Pachen would do it for free, finding the 5 additional beads to complete the strand (I mentioned they didn’t have to be red, like my original beads). And she asked for my phone number so she can let me know when it’s done. With words and eye of much gratitude, I left my ungarlanded mala with Sonam, and my number as well.
The universe heals in so many ways, with small miracles to be found where unexpected.
Then I walked to the nearby Golden Gate Valley branch of the SFPL on Green Street to see if they had any books on Tibetan Buddhism generally, and artifacts specifically. ::chuckle:: Not much of a selection in the 200s section which was just a couple of shelves, but I did find these to consider borrowing...
...and I chose the one less likely to stun an ox (per Laurie Anderson's "Let X = X" in her album Big Science) because I had many kilometers left to go in my afternoon constitutional, a number of them uphill and down of course. (The Goodman was a dense and bovid-stunning tome of 600+ pages printed on thick paper and my backpack was already laden with a book [Rebecca Solnit's Wanderlust], a MacBook, a phone charger slab, a jacket, and various necessary accoutrements.)
All told, it was a good afternoon, and a good and necessary pause from the mythic writing notions of the past week or so. ;-)