the mala, unthreaded

[ a brief hiatus from the writing of the past handful of days; the 5th and last of which as of this evening is still in process... ] Yesterday afternoon, after several years' worth of accompanying me across the San Francisco peninsula, marking loci of emblematic depth or shallow seeing, the thread of the mala that Sonam Tsering gave me finally frayed beyond holding, and I eventually found I'd lost five (!!) beads to the City... after first recovering a couple that had fallen to the sidewalk and some more inside my backpack's side-pouch where the Samādhi of Lay Sacraments rides along on my daily constitutionals; the survivors of which I'd counted carefully when I arrived back home at my 3-mat hut, the number always getting to 103, less 5 of the canonical 108. In the tableau above, the 2 small heart-stones seem to be saying to each other, as they huddle nearby the loupe and its observenants [yeah, neolog.]: "...what happened there? where are the other beads?" ::chuckle:: A bit later, in…