Practising alone for the next three months

M. just sent her last text from the plane before heading off to Rome. A couple of hours there then she'll hop on a connecting flight back home to Japan. The plan is for her to find work, somewhere for us to live, then I can apply for my spouse visa and join her hopefully at the end of May. House seems bigger, emptier and a little colder already.

My Job is to empty the house, sell what I can, give away what I can't and bring over the barest minimum.

Crack open the Japanese books too.

To ship or not to ship, we keep going back and forth between the two. Last time, when we came here ten years ago, we shipped a whole pallet over, mostly books. Nietzsche, our Chinchilla, came over with M. and spent six months in quarantine with us visiting a couple of times a week. Sadly he's no longer with us but his ashes will be coming back with me when I go.

Nietzsche in quarantine ten years ago

All these books, OK I can let go of a lot of them, I have a philosophy reference library on HD now but my Heidegger can't bare to give up on them yet.

English books, I'll be teaching again, I should probably take a little trade craft, it's been a while.

And then the yoga books, I seem to have accumulated a small library, a lot of it can go but what I'd like to keep still amounts to another box.

What comes with me what stays behind???

Attachments....

OK, so just the Primary Heidegger texts, couple of much loved cookbooks, the rarer yoga books, couple of English books that I'm sure to use, M's Buddhist discourses.... can probably get that down to three small boxes sent surface. One small bookshelf in a tatami room, go minimalist

But then what about my goban, my three manduka mats, my sword.... the set of club's M.s Dad gave me,  the few remaining bits of much loved crockery that has somehow managed to survive the last ten perhaps even twenty years....... my Nespresso machine!

Yeah I know, Attachments.....

Still, I can focus on practice more than ever, can go to bed earlier and thus get up earlier for a longer practice in the morning as well as a decent practice in the evening, be nice not to feel I'm rushing one or more of my asana, pranayama or meditation practices.

I just have to worry about food for myself, looking forward to getting more disciplined in my eating again, eat less and simpler... that said M made me a huge vat of Japanese curry before she left.

I'm tempted to quit social media for the next three months, drop out of Facebook altogether and leave the blog to tick over on it's own. On reflection though M. has always liked reading my posts, probably because she was working so much and it was the only way she got to hear what I was up to. So I guess I'll blog, short posts about practice just like the old days.