Ram Dass and tea

I sure have been bad at keeping my blogging current. So, we do what we can to do it better.

Do the best you can with what you have. MS or not, this is a good basic way to live, it seems...

The first teaching for the "way of tea," the Japanese path of Zen tea-making, is beautiful and simple:

Make the best cup of tea you can.

Not "the best cup of tea that has ever been made," just simply: the best cup of tea that YOU can make, here and now, with what you have.

This is very much a reminder to me of the ongoing gift of MS: whatever it is, dealing with the bladder catheter, transferring from whatever to the chair or the chair to whatever, typing something like these with whatever eye-muscle "cooperation" may be happening at the time, putting on a jacket so the air outside on the back veranda is tolerable, brushing my teeth using a teeth-brushing bowl that I got in the hospital because the basic "use the sink" techniques are no longer available to me... the list goes on. But it comes back to the same thing: do the best you can, today, with what you have and how you are, here and now.

Ram Dass and the tea ceremony... unrelated, yet somehow, the same.

What time is it? Now. Where are you? Here.

Just be here now.