You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.

— Annie Dillard, An Expedition to the Pole

So what have I been doing with myself lately? I’ve built a few internal applications for Dan’s Chocolates in the past months that have rocked it hard – very clean apps, with a minimal UI and killer workflow. I don’t think it would work in any other context, but for the task I wrote it for, it’s without equal. I’ve done a few site designs and refreshes. I’ve programmed a really amazing Flash site for a friend which should be launching in the next or two.

Up in the near future are a few fun things, and a big project. There’s a portion of it that’s going to be done in Flex, which is more or less Enterprise Flash. I picked up a copy of it last week and started going through some tutorials. Over the weekend I rewrote my portfolio site completely from scratch in Flex. Even as a beginner it took me about 1/4th the time, and the result is much more, er, flexible. All the content is controlled by XML files, which means I can add new projects without touching the code.

I’ll continue ramping up on the platform over the next few weeks, and then it’ll be time to get crunching. I’m very happy to be really doing Flash/Flex stuff, as it stretches me a bit and is a good compliment to the more barebones web programming I’ve been doing as of late.

I went to King Richard’s Faire today.

There were gypsies:

And knights:

And more knights:

And of course, King Richard:

Six years! It’s bewildering in many ways.

Let’s keep writing and see where this takes us.

I got about 3 hours of sleep last night, and found myself awake and programming at 1, which continued until my normal waking time. I was crazy productive. There’s always more code to write, but there seems to be a surplus of it right now, and despite the extreme exhaustion it feels very good to have made so much progress. The last 36 hours have been nothing but flow.

I spent the weekend at the monastery, being introduced to the Daoist Bear and Crane animal frolics. It’s my first time studying Qigong with a teacher, and it was a good retreat, if a bit physically demanding. I fool myself that I’m in shape sometimes, and it’s good to be periodically disabused of that notion.

The monastery is only a few decades old in its incarnation as a Zen temple, but it is an old place. You can practically feel the thousands hands that have gone into maintaining, improving, polishing and preserving the place. It’s a living thing, an organism much larger than any of us.

Last week I quickly absorbed Neal Stephenson’s newest novel, Anathem – perhaps his best yet. A little poking on his web site led me to The Long Now, a group dedicated to “long-term thinking and responsibility.” I couldn’t help of thinking of the monastery, and of Buddhism in general, but in all senses long-term responsibility is a good idea, one that’s sorely lacking.

I mentioned Merlin Mann just a few days ago, and since then I’ve discovered a post of his that does a good job articulating a good deal of what’s been rattling around in my brain.

What worries me are the consequences of a diet comprised mostly of fake-connectedness, makebelieve insight, and unedited first drafts of everything. I think it’s making us small. I know that whenever I become aware of it, I realize how small it can make me. So, I’ve come to despise it.

Like junk food, this kind of diet gives us a hit in the short term, but is not nourishing. What struck me was this line – “I think it’s making us small.” What is it that makes us small, and what keeps us from growing?

I’ve been reading a commentary on a Buddhist sutra that talks about waking up from delusion in the metaphor of dreams. So much of what we perceive to be reality is no more real than “yesterday’s dream.” Sheng Yen’s commentary astutely points out that nobody initially wants to wake up from a good dream, but once the underlying reality has been seen and the drive to wake up has established itself, it’s still a hard thing to do (very Matrix, I know, I know). He speaks of “a man who has woken from a dream and is afraid because he knows he will fall into the same dream again and again.”

Even if we know what we need to do, even if we know that what we do is making us small, moving beyond that is not always easy. But growing takes time and energy, and it doesn’t happen if we don’t start in the first place.

My next door neighbor is an excellent gardener.

Time is the most precious thing we have. Attention is judicious use of that time, being where we want to be when we want to be. Obviously, the universe doesn’t always give us the hand we want (I don’t know many people who would choose to be stuck in stop-and-go traffic or waiting for a late airplane), but there are many other instances when we have much more control.

The two biggest places I seem to suffer with attention are in the car and in front of the computer. In the car, it’s not that I’m not aware of the road; it’s more of an inattention to my emotional state. As I said to someone last month, when I get in the car, for some reason everyone else turns into a jerk. Thich Nhat Hahn wrote that we are like a TV with 10,000 channels, and it’s up to us which channel we’re on at any given time. It seems that in the car, I tend to flip over to the “Jeffrey is incredibly impatient and judgmental” channel without even thinking it. Lingering car karma?

The computer is the other problem, and potentials are greater. My computer can be an incredibly productive tool or a distraction, or a mix of both. It can be a creative instrument, a means of communication, and a major procrastination tool. It is the device with which I make my living and much of my art. It is what I want it to be. So why do I find myself slipping so often into a mindless pattern when I’m using the computer? Marking time and circling (my dad would call it dillydicking) instead of creating? It makes me sad when I catch myself, because there’s so much great stuff out there to be made.

Merlin Mann has a great series of articles on making better use of time, which I recommend. It’s a good mix of Big Ideas and little things you can do to help that slide into inattention. His new habit of setting a start page to open up to “Is this really what you want to be doing right now?” in giant letters reminds me a little of the evening gatha: life is short, opportunity is lost. Don’t waste your life. Time is the most precious thing we have.

V and I spent the weekend with friends in Maine on a whitewater rafting adventure. Having not been rafting in any form since Boy Scouts, a day paddling on the Kennebec river was a great re-introduction to the pursuit. Despite much effort, no moose were seen in Maine.

Here’s a snapshot of the Dead river, flowing next to our lodge.

And nearby Moxie Falls, a rather impressive waterfall.