David Siskind | Sunday, 16 August 2026
I heard from my meditation teacher this week. He’s decided to discontinue leading our Sangha which has been meeting weekly, then monthly, for practice and dharma talks for 15 years. The enterprise is running out of energy. Dan was having a difficult time mining the sutras and the zeitgeist for fresh material. I get it. The turning point was probably more than six years ago now, the beginning of the pandemic. I’m not sure whether it was the loss of face-to-face contact or just the passage of time - members grew old, dropped out, and in one case passed. Maybe it was neither. The nature of the practice may have seeded its own demise. Jason Siff traveled to Sri Lanka in the 80s returning with a new practice he called Recollective Awareness - expanding attention to the moment to include recollection of the entire meditative experience. RA is atypical and did not easily attract new acolytes. It’s also a little exhausting. I’m not sure how the group will wind down but I think I’ll lose touch with the members and I’ll miss them.
While enlightenment is beyond my grasp, I know I owe a lot to RA and all of the other practices I dabbled in. Ultimately my disciplined sittings became less so and have largely been supplanted by casting practices. I should have seen it coming. The inaugural Sexyloops TV Video showed me the way but I wonder if it’s enough. I remain at sixes and sevens about how to do more for my posterity in this crappy time. But until I figure it out, “for me it’s flyfishing.”
I’ve got some excellent fishing adventures lined up. Stripers, blues and albies in September, reds in October, dorado in November, and I’m trying to schedule snakehead in December. And I’ll be back on the beach in LA when I get home in 10 days or so. But I fear the world is falling apart and It’s hard to believe that I’ll be able to blithely travel and fish irrespective of events at large. For some reason we (the US) just won’t walk away from Iran, won’t restrain Israel (I feel it’s too late to save them from themselves), and won’t slow our headlong rush into climate disaster. While it all feels like slow motion, I think that’s just a matter of too much exposure slowing our sense of time. Why can’t we come down off the high of surviving WWII, alone undamaged, and then a generation later, “winning” the cold war - whatever that means? Francis Fukuyama's “end of history.” It should feel like retirement - a relief. It’s time to let go. But Trump and his buds are past the point of no return. They’ve done so much evil and criminal shit that their only play is to double down and stick it out. So many others either enabled or profited off all of this that there’s no way to reverse the process. There’s going to be ugly accountability or worse, none at all. The war, renaming the Kennedy Center, the Reflecting Pool, the Ballroom, all point to the same gilded age crap afflicting us all, threatening to immiserate more and more people as wealth continues to concentrate and powerful, stupid people continue to lie, plunder and murder abroad and at home. When Ayn Rand wrote of takers and makers she got backward who was who.
A Random Casting Note: Since the fly leg carries ALL of the momentum of the cast at the point of release. It's a product of the mass of the carried line and its velocity. Momentum is conserved as the cast rolls out and diminished by the skin drag of the line in air and its form drag created by the wind resistance of the fly, the loop and unintentional waves imparted by overpowering and rebound. The form drag is proportional to the square of its velocity of the fly and incidental waves so has a huge impact. Bottom line - practice keeping things smooth. No bumps no humps.
Cheers all,
David Siskind