Month: August 2004

  • The Friday Five
    1. What’s a song you’d enjoy screaming along to as you drove down the highway?
    Stopped screaming some years back when fear of apoplexy set in, but I do crank the CD player sometimes and sing along in the car. A song – oh how about Dimming of the Day by any of the several folks who sing it.
    2. What is your favorite place/type of environment
    to relax?
    Home alone in my garden. At the beach if I could ever get there with anyone I love. Hiking in the woods with my grandchildren if I could ever get them there.
    3. What are the best kind of dreams?
    Daydreams of peace followed by waking moments of acting upon them.
    4. What do you look for in a mate?
    I’ve tried just about every concoction made and learned that love just happens, you can’t create a recipe for it. You do have to be willing to work to keep it alive.
    5. If you were a crayon color, what color would you be and why?
    I just happen to have a tonload of crayons at hand and these are the names of some of my favorite colors in the purple family – cerulean, plum, violet, indigo, blue violet, royal purple. My garden has a majority of purple flowers in it. My whole life has been purple.
    Deep Thought: If you’re ever giving a speech, when you start out, act nervous and get mixed up a little bit. Then, as you go along, get better and better. Then, at the end, give off a white, glowing light and have rays shoot out of you.
    Today I am grateful for: Finding my way home each day
    BLOGGING FORWARD TO: bkeller49 who is many good things, but most of all, and best of all, a mensch.
    End of Day – 8:18 pm
    + = Kerry and Bush both came and spoke to enthusiastic crowds and nobody blew up the city.
    - = West Nile virus finally arrived in Oregon (though far away from Portland).

  • 7 Paths to God

    I was browsing in Barnes & Noble while waiting for a friend when I spotted this tiny book by Joan Borysenko. Not really a coincidence. Honing my own spiritual path has been much on my mind of late. Most of my life a painting of my idea of the purpose of my soul could have been accomplished with a splattergun. From childhood on a farm with radical leftwing political parents, to checking out a few churches in high school, to flowerchildhood exploration of world faiths plus charming New Age hobbies, to experiencing the world through chemical lenses, to the surrender to a higher power of my recovery, and finally to a rounding up and review of all I’ve learned and used, I have yet to really buckle down. So titles like this one catch my eye. Turns out to be a little primer of a number of kinds of spiritualities and encourages choosing two of them, one primary and one secondary, upon which to focus. And these are in a nutshell:
    1. Earth and Home – Those who see god in nature, who give food and shelter and nurturing of everyday needs, who have a strong sense of place, and who take care of the environment and all its creatures.
    2. Creativity – Those who are blessed to receive the gifts of art, music, writing, etc. and who enjoy giving them to others and nurturing these gifts in others.
    3. Service – Like Dylan said, “you gotta serve somebody.” These are the people who find a vision and follow it with passion in the effort to serve others. Example – Martin Luther King, Jr.
    4. Heart – The practice of loving god by loving one’s neighbor as oneself and both as god, valuing goodness enough to meditate and pray for it regularly, valuing lovingkindness and forgiveness, and finding a devotional practice.
    5. Discipline – Following a particular spiritual practice and its precepts to the letter – the 10 commandments, the Buddhist precepts, the Torah and the Talmud, etc.
    6. Contemplation and Transformation – Deep meditation, mindfulness, contemplation and prayer as a vocation – like in a monastery. Having a teacher, attending retreats.
    7.Nonattachment – The path of the bodhisattva who has achieved a state of grace, universalizing faith and nonattachment , who can see the beauty in all traditions and paths.
    Gives me plenty to ruminate about. Hope I haven’t freaked anybody out. Have a sweet sweet day.
    Deep Thought: Someday I would like to make a movie that makes people laugh and makes people cry, and then makes them leave the theater in a quick and orderly manner so that others may come in.
    Today I am grateful for: Dental insurance
    End of Day – 9:04 pm
    + = Kerry and Bush both in Portland tomorrow. Stay tuned.
    - = Found out I have to have back to back root canals on side by side teeth and the freaking dentist can’t get me in for 3 weeks!

  • Leopard

    The leopard hovers,
    shining,
    in the bush.
    The wind shifts.
    His hunger waits,
    ahead of him,
    upon the veld.

    Deep Thought: I think the most beautiful sunset I ever saw was on page 4 and 5 of The Book of Sunsets.

    Today I am grateful for: An air-conditioned workplace to go to

    End of Day: 8:15 pm
    + = Called off trying to go for an outing with my gaggle of women friends tomorrow afternoon because we’re still have Hot Weather and on top of it now a Smog Alert.
    - = Another day of Brain Melt.

  • But wait there’s MORE.

  • Electoral Vote

    Save this nifty little item to your sidebar for future reference and have a hopeful day. (click on picture – there may be more to the code behind that little XML link at the bottom of the page. I’ll check it when I get to work.)
    Deep Thought: They were a proud people. In fact, some said they were too proud. If you asked them whey they were so proud, they’d just laugh and say, “We’re not even going to answer that.”
    Today I am grateful for: Late night talk shows
    End of Day: 8:44 pm
    + = Found someone at work to help me with this shopping cart web site thing I’m trying to build. You wouldn’t believe the hoops I have to jump through.
    - = Endless Way Too Hot. Prediction two upcoming days of smog alert on top of it. Guess I’ll go lay in the dark and sweat now.

  • Grace and Grit

    I finally got my own copy of this book so I can underline and mark it up, because it is truly a book to learn from. Originally suggested to me by thedavidwang, it is the story of Treya Killam Wilber as told by her husband, Ken Wilber, a psychologist who has written many books in the area of psychology, philosophy, and healing. Treya Wilber, who was also involved in the healing professions, died of breast cancer diagnosed shortly after their marriage. The book is a description of their five-year battle together and what they learned. While there is no cancer in my immediate family that I’m aware of, I think almost everyone has in their peripheral vision the scenario of how they would deal with a life-threatening illness, what kind of depths would their courage have if it was needed. Ken Wilber explores not only the illness itself, but all the forms of treatment, as well as spiritual paths in general. I’ve begun to read the book and will share bits and pieces as I go along, starting with this:

    …the first thing you learn about cancer information is: basically, none of it is true….In any disease, a person is confronted with two very different entities. One, the person is faced with the actual disease process itself…Call this aspect of disease “illness.” …But two, the person is also faced with how his or her society or culture deals with that illness–with all the judgments, fears, hopes, myths, stories, values, and meanings that a particular society hangs on each illness. Call this aspect of disease “sickness.” …If a culture treats a particular illness with compassion and enlightened understanding, then sickness can be seen as a challenge, as a healing crisis and opportunity…When sickness is viewed positively and in supportive terms, then illness has a much better chance to heal, with the concomitant result that the entire person may grow and be enriched in the process….Most disturbing is the fact that when society judges a sickness to be “bad,” when it judges a sickness negatively, it almost always does so exclusively out of fear and ignorance….Now cancer is an illness about which very little is actually known (and there is virtually nothing known about how to cure it). And therefore, cancer is a disease around which an enormous number of myths and stories have grown up. As an illness, cancer is poorly understood. As a sickness, it has assumed awesome proportions. And as difficult as the illness of cancer is, the sickness of cancer is absolutely overwhelming.
    Deep Thought: The old pool shooter had won many a game in his life. But now it was time to hang up the cue. When he did, all the other cues came crashing to the floor. “Sorry,” he said with a smile.
    Today I am grateful for: Weather forecasts

  • The Bird

    No one knew whence the strange bird came.
    Possibly the last hurricane had swept it
    from an unknown island or from some gulf;
    or it was born of gigantic seaweeds,
    or it fell from another atmosphere,
    from another world, another mystery.
    Old sailors had never seen it among the ice,
    nor had any wanderer ever met up with it:
    man-shaped it was, like an angel, and silent
    like any poet.
    At first it hovered over the great dome of the temple;
    but the high priest drove it away, as one would drive
    a malign spirit.
    In the same night it lit on the summit of the light-
    house,
    and the keeper drove it thence, lest it mislead the
    ships.
    No one offered it a morsel of bread
    or the kindly shelter of a resting place.
    Someone said: This is one of those evil birds that
    devour the flocks.
    And another: This bird is no doubt a hungry demon.
    When with outstretched wings it sheltered weary
    children,
    the mothers themselves stoned the mysterious,
    persecuted and unresting bird.
    It had fled, perhaps, from a silent peak among the
    clouds
    or had lost its mate by an arrow.
    The bird was man-shaped, like an angel,
    and solitary as any poet.
    And it seemed to desire the companionship of men
    who drove it from them as one would drive a malign
    spirit.
    When the accustomed flood overwhelmed the wheat-
    fields, someone said:
    The bird ate the lambs.
    And since all the fountains denied it water,
    the bird fell upon the earth like a Samson deprived of
    life.
    Then a humble fisherman gathered up the soft body
    and said:
    I found the body of a great gentle bird.
    And someone remembered that the bird used to
    carry eggs to the hermits.
    A beggar told how the bird often sheltered him from
    the cold.
    And a naked man said: The bird gave me feathers for a coat.
    And the leader of the people: It was the king of the
    birds and we knew it not…..
    (Jorge de Lima, Brazilian – born 1983)

  • THINGS THAT REFRESH MY SOUL
    (previous segments)

    Vocabulary

    Well, when I clapped my Sunday morning Gratitude Hat firmly on my head and began to try to think of something starting with V, I realized it was going to be hard like K was. After rejecting vacuum cleaning, vampires, velvet, violence, vested interests, vortex, varsity, and vast open spaces, I finally turned in desperation to the Random House dictionary which appropriately offered up Vocabulary. So obvious. I don’t know if that “sides-of-the-brain” theory is true, but it does seem like I’ve been a word lover all my life and it only gets more so as my vocabulary has expanded into old age. I kind of hope I won’t end up like my Dad doing crossword puzzles, but I think maybe he was trying to fend off the Alzheimer’s that finally overpowered him. Once you’ve been hooked on lines like these – No one knew from whence the strange bird came. Possibly the last hurricane had swept it from an unknown island or from some gulf; or it was born of gigantic seaweeds, or it fell from another atmosphere, from another world, another mystery. Old sailors had never seen it among the ice, nor had any wanderer ever met up with it: man-shaped it was, like an angel, and silent like any poet. – you are just not the same. Then you begin to see the world in this new way where you can turn it in the light and examine it from different angles and reshape it to take the ugliness away – or perhaps to point it out. You can even try other languages to see how the words reflect the culture that uses them and how they translate into your own. You can use words to describe complexities and words to make things simple. Words can get you through doors to magical places and words can bring you calamity and grief. Words can carry you through the night and lead you through the day. And you can learn from them the gift of “the learn’d astronomer” that there are times to rest from words, to “look up in perfect silence at the stars.”
    Deep Thought: There used to be this bully who would demand my lunch money every day. Since I was smaller, I would give it to him. But then I decided to fight back. I started taking karate lessons. But then the karate lesson guy said I had to start paying him five dollars a lesson. So I just went back to paying the bully. Before I paid him, though, I would go into my karate stance, because that’s all I learned before I got kicked out.
    Today I am grateful for: Anyone who tries to write anything
    End of Day – 8:42 pm
    + = Heard that the little lint-looking speck I keep seeing in my right eye that won’t go away for 2 weeks now is probably a “floater” and hopefully nothing serious though I haven’t really looked that up yet.
    - = Got talked into seeing the movie The Notebook which is a serious 12-hanky flick and made my right eye sore trying not to boohoo at all the tearjerking.

  • Names to the Count

    I was going to post about something completely different, but I read on tbird36‘s blog about a 19-year-old who left her class to go to the war and was never heard from again. It occurred to me to wonder if the names of those killed and wounded in Iraq were posted anywhere on the web so if you wanted to reassure yourself someone was still alive you could go there and look. It turns out there are quite a few sites that do this – though with somewhat different approaches – and here is one.

    It seems to me like it’s important to know the count and the names – not just of our dead but of the Iraqi dead. The news doesn’t mention names unless it’s your hometown news and it’s a funeral being planned. And have you ever seen an interview with an Iraqi family who has lost say, a child, in the war? It’s pretty much all photos from a distance of smoke rising over various cities where people just like us were living and working and raising their families. I guess in order to free them from ruthless dictatorship we have to kill them first and destroy their country. Now, if they were a poor country like Sudan in a hideous situation with people starving and dying by internal wars but with no oil, what would we do? Oh, I don’t know, nothing, I guess….
    Deep Thought: I don’t think I can be hypnotized. This hypnotist tried to hypnotize me one time, but he couldn’t. And I tell him that each time I go over to wash his car, which is every Wednesday.
    Today I am grateful for: The freedom I have today to protest a government which may take it away tomorrow
    End of Day – 8:47 pm
    + = The perfect weather day, just wafting us in its arms here in PDX.
    - = Discovered Diet Ice Botanicals drinks have Splenda in them.

  • the friday five

    1. What is your favorite childhood memory?
    When I was about 7, I was wandering by myself on our 200-acre farm, as usual, as far from my house as I could be, in a dried up slough in the summer, when I suddenly realized I was in the middle of a large swarm of bees visiting the center of the same beautiful gathering of wild flowers. It was a moment at once terrifying and exultant. It required maneuvering with absolute invisibility and concentration to get to safety without being stung.
    2. If you could be reincarnated as anything besides human, who would you want to be?
    “Who” seems to imply a specific being. We don’t called planets “who”, for example. Something fictional, perhaps, so I could live on. How about the Cowardly Lion who turned out to have a brave heart?
    3. If you had to start your life all over, what are three things you would change?
    I would have siblings. My parents would love each other dearly and treat each other with tenderness and kindness and never be angry. Is a world without war too much to ask?
    4. If you had to forget everything in your life, except one thing, what would it be?
    That my family (parents and children), including me, may have (had) flaws but we are all extraordinary.
    5. Do you have a lucky charm?
    No. I’m not that interested in magic. I do believe in synchronicity.
    Deep Thought: It’s funny how two simple words, “I promise,” will stall people for a while.
    Today I am grateful for: Anthropomorphism
    BLOGGING FORWARD TO: thedavidwang who gives me hope for a better saner future.
    End of Day – 8:20 pm
    + = My grandson (13) completed a week of OMSI Science Camp (Architecture & Cities) funded by me where a gaggle of 6-8 graders (mostly boys) built all kinds of stuff with legos every day, including castles and trebuchets and other neat stuff. He was bummed to have to break for recess he was having so much fun. It was held on the Reed College campus ( part of a plot I have for him to go there one day), and this afternoon he asked what do you have to do to get a scholarship to go there. I just about died and went to heaven.
    - = Ate too much today.