A confluence of things leads to a pretty sober conclusion...

• Yoga is really, really popular.  It's so popular that the NY Times has to go all Judith Miller about the whole thing.  It also requires conveniently very little overhead and capital investment relative to many other enterprises. (Would you get sued for Warm Yoga?)
• An iOS app on meditation is selling well.  I mean, it's very popular.
• The economy, and its effects especially on younger people.

 The fish don't see the water in which they swim...I read that in Dogen somewhere, so it must be true. Now  I'm mashing up critics of Dogen with Sarah Silverman now. Go figure.

No seriously, my point is it's amazing how many people with influence in the world are not quite devoting ourselves to making real, tangible things, and all the skills that flow from that; even in the Zen-inflected sub-culture in which we live.  I mean, my whole career has been directed toward the monetezation of ideas...though in my case the do wind up in products that make the other stuff possible.  But it seems we're not quite aware of that odd position in which we find ourselves, kind of like city-dwellers of ancient times who'd forgotten how to hunt.

"Somebody else" is doing the farming, the tool-making, the hunting, the defense, the medicine prescription and administration, the educating of the young and the whole host of other things that actually make life feasible in this world as we know it.  Or at least that seems to be the case, if you'd read what is generally considered in the Buddhist blogosphere.  It's not overall true of course, but umm...living the way is not 80% of what you find written and talked about in the Buddhist blogosphere.  It's there in bits and pieces, though...military Buddhist bloggers, Barbara's occasional forays into everyday living as a Buddhist, Shokai's exploits,  etc.  But like I said, what's written about is largely what's not lived and done and made: the expression of being born as suffering, growing is suffering, growing old is suffering, dying is suffering, and there's a cause to all that suffering, and its transcendence and its way of transcendence.

Forgive my impudence, but I think there's no app for that.

I don't know if that's winter blues talking, but it's interesting to me that the dearth of opportunity itself in the economy and our unwillingness to discuss it is manifesting itself this way that removes the real everyday from the agenda for discussion.

 I'm no survivalist by any means, but I think it's important that people know how to do some basic things: like cook and clean, teach their kid math and science and some kind of art (I am woefully inadequate and fall short in the art department), how to take care of their body, etc., and perhaps even to make tangible things, and grow vegetables or something like that.  

Everything of course can be taken away, and will be eventually, but even so, given the resources we have, maybe we as a society are becoming too dependent on stuff other people make.  I mean, somewhere in that is the "Right Livelihood" ethic, right?