A. Month of April

Play as Being officially begain on April 1, 2008 at 7:00 am SLT with five participants who remain anonymous. Storm was present at the 13:00 pm session with Pema and two others. The 19:00 included Maxine, Friedrich, Dakini, Bunun and Pema. Unsurprisingly the main topic of these sessions was the 9-second approach and maintaining a log fo the results. At the end of the evening session, Maxine predicted:

Maxine Walden: I can see hanging around here will really widen my horizons :-)

The second day began the posting of the full log for the session and a discussion of blogs. There is a great amount of enthusiasm among the first attendees and many were keeping logs or writing blogs. Some of the people attending these first sessions came into Second Life to come to the group so some discusssion touches on how to do things. Storm was a great source of information. Dakini had been very gracious in inviting the group into the teahouse and the group is first a bit tentative in its usage. Dakini put them at ease. On the fourth day it is surprising to see Pema wonder about how this experiment will turn out:

Pema Pera: no idea where this is going to
Pema Pera: in the long run
Pema Pera: we’ll see!

Throughout the month of April, PaB met three times a day and Pema was the guardian for almost all of them.

On the 5th day came this gem which I could not resist:

Storm Nordwind: My contribution is… splunge
Storm Nordwind: Which is an old Monty Python term

Storm Nordwind: It means. Not yes, not no, and I’m not being indecisive
Storm Nordwind: Truly insightful i always thought
Bunan Bosatsu: A good Zen answer!

Bunan Bosatsu: In the Chinese/MP dictionary Mu! = Splunge!

 The Hall of Appearance was born on April 7. The plan was to use one of the smaller room for sessions and move into the large hall when there were many visitors. Pema noted the following about his name for the building:

The background is formed by a favorite sentence of mine: “appreciate the presence of appearance as a presentation by Being” — appearance as what appears, raw, direct, before turning it into ex-perience, by a subject of an object.

On April 28, Pema sent out an email to seven of the regular attendees, inviting each of them to be guardian at one session a week. All seven accepted. The original seven were Storm, Dakini, Sky, Genesis, Caledonia, Solobill and Maxine. Each would take one day a week starting on Monday May 5.

That afternoon, some of us got together an hour early, in preparation for the new schedule, starting next week. The idea was to spread out from three to four meetings a day, now including the night shift as well. Given that I would be awake during the SLT night, while in Japan, it would be natural for me to take the 1 am, 7 am, and 7 pm shifts. The afternoon shift, at 1 pm, would be at 5 am in Japan, so I will happily leave that to others.

To fill the afternoon slot, seven regular participants had volunteered to each take responsibility for one day of the week. During that day the person responsible would act as a kind of greeter, making sure no one would come to an empty tea house between 1:00 pm and 1:30 pm, SLT. And instead of greeter, we had dreamt up a better term: guardian, guarding the mid-day time in the heat house. Each guardian had agreed to either be there on his or her day, or else to make sure someone else would be there, in case he or she would have a conflicting schedule.

Storm had come up with a few alternative naming for the days, depending on who would be on duty, and I added a few more names to the list, so that we wound up with the following new names for the seven days of the week, starting with Monday (our new schedule will start on Monday, 5/5): Skyday, Genday, Calday, Stormday, Soloday, Dakday and Maxday.

The new google group was created on April 30.

Stim Morane also joined as a guardian at the end of the month.