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“Not thinking about anything is zen. Once you know this, walking, standing, sitting, or lying down, everything you do is zen. To know that the mind is empty is to see the Buddha…Using the mind to look for reality is delusion. Not using the mind to look for reality is awareness. Freeing oneself from words is liberation.”

-Bodhidharma

Maybe I’ve lost the blogging juju, but I don’t have much to say online lately. Every once in a while something I read (like the quote above) hits me like a particle dropped into a supersaturated solution, crystallizing words from my supersaturated mind into my blog. I cannot remember the last time I thought to myself, “I should blog this later.” I cannot remember the last time I was experiencing something and opened a backchannel in my brain that composed a blog post as I was experiencing it. Don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing. It just is.

So that’s my lame excuse for the lack of kids stories. Lately when I’m with my kids I’m with my kids – no bandwidth reserved for logging and archive. If you asked me how the kids are today, I’d probably say “fine” and not think to tell you of Petunia’s pixie smile and how she’s becoming the world’s youngest clothes horse and fashion maven. Each outfit we dress her in is a product of fierce and spirited negotiation. I couldn’t find the words to tell you of Fresh’s Lion’s Heart and his full-crash dive into life. I might mention how Girlzilla is now in her teens, but I couldn’t quite describe to you how I am proud of her normalness, her decency, her stability in spite of her occasional drama queen mien. Would you even care that they’re into Curious George lately? Or that Fresh has discovered at age five the wonderful hypnotic world of video games? Can I describe how I envy Olivia her first steps, each one being an arms-wide-open declaration of trust and hope in controlled free-fall? (A model for faithful living if there ever was one!) Maybe. But if you asked me in conversation, I’d likely just quip that Olivia has released Walking 1.0 into Beta and is relying on her user community to help her work out the bugs.

So you see, that’s why I can’t think of much to say about my kids – or life – lately. Too much Zen, I guess.As a younger man, I believed that the unexamined life was not worth living. Later I believed that too much examining keeps you from truly living. It is a balance I struggle with.

I encountered something last night that confirmed that I have an addictive personality. I played Literati oline for the first time and it is like the word game version of crack. Literati is like speed Scrabble. Speed. Scrabble. Two concepts that seriously belong together y’all.

I lost my first two games because I did not know how to handle the clock, which ticks down from four minutes and gives you a measly 21 seconds back with each word you play. I had to change my whole playing paradigm, because searching for the best possible play took too much time. I beat this one guy who was more than a hundred points ahead of me, playing better words, by using the clock. I got to where I’d play words as quickly as possible, any word, to give him no free time to think. He was 130 points ahead of me when he ran out of clock and I won. The Quick and the Dead, indeed.

Yeah, I’ve seen Bookworm and Text Twist and What Word and those all look fun. But Literati sates my appetitie for competition, fuels my desire to crush an opponent with my superior knowledge of two letter words. After six games I had to force myself to back away from the keyboard.

I will probably play again someday. But it’ll be in a weak moment. A moment when i’m craving some word game crack.

For best results, put the toothpaste on your electric toothbrush before you turn it on.