As I spent a few days in the village below the mountain, I noticed that chimney swallows were nesting in my chimney again. At first it was just the noisy squawking of chicks waiting to be fed.Then it happened. Thum—pinggggg. Something had fallen and hit the draft plate of the stove connected to the chimney. Over the next few days, I let the mother birds out of the stove periodically (a couple times a day) to fly out an open window to return to search for food as they continued to try to feed the chicks in the nest that rested inaccessibly in the stove hardware. Going that deep into the stove to feed the chicks left them unable to find their way out the open chimney.

Sometimes life is the pits. The dragon is sometimes a Buddhist symbol of enlightenment, but for the ordinary Buddhist, it’s sometimes hard to distinguish between dragons and snakes in the shadowy depressions. (Yeah. I know. Flames and legs are clues IF you can see them. But sometimes life just has this scaly feeling.)

This category is for the occasional “life sucks” type posting.