Stepping in for Amy Cunningham this week is the amazing Marisa Lowenstein, an NYC-based writer whose work has appeared in Natural Health, Travel + Leisure Family and Lime.com.
Mercury is always in retrograde. It’s probably retrograding right now. At least it seems that way. While the fickle nature of the gray planet is an excellent justification for a bad hair day or a bad day at the office or simply a bad attitude, the whole astrology thing is getting tired. Or maybe it’s me that’s tired. You see, I’m a Sagittarius sun-Libra moon-Virgo rising believer in astrology, but I’m starting to lose faith.
I built my understanding of the stars on the bible of astrology, Bernard Fitzwalter’s “The Complete Sun Sign Guide” [currently out of print]. (Note: everyone seems to have his or her own version of an astrology bible, Bernard just happens to have written mine.) Handed to me by a new friend during the first week of my first year of college, the Guide led me through the complications of a Scorpio-Sagittarius love affair (he’s introverted and lusty, I’m easily bored and playful) and explained why a Virgo mother (mine) and Sagittarius daughter (me) will most likely never get along.
Take that book and add to it 10 years of skimming the weekly horoscope in my city’s local magazine and you’ve got a guaranteed recipe for astrological disaster. I’m convinced that I’ve allowed what now seems like nothing more than self-fulfilling prophecy to talk me out of signing important contracts, rearranging my home, and snuggling with my loved one. There have been weeks when my horoscope was accurate—times when I’ve looked up and asked, “how can she possibly know that I’ve been seeking out change and excitement?” or “yes, I am planning a distant trip,” but they do not outnumber the days that I’ve spent fighting a nagging worry that the astrologer’s bad news may actually come true.
According to Bernard, Sagittarius is ruled by Jupiter, which pushes me to seek out wider horizons. So I’m doing just that. Moving on past astrology. Onto brighter pastures. Maybe I’ll look into numerology.
Do you believe in astrology? Does your horoscope affect your day?
My moments of gratitude may come just before sleep, but for others gratitude often finds a different time to take over. Take CM reader Daria, who sinks into thankfulness while swimming her morning laps. The physical act of pushing through water motivates her not only to appreciate her arms, legs, and lungs, but also the lifeguards that keep her safe and the car that transports her to the pool.
“I find nothing so colors my day than saying "thank you", before an endless stream of wants and needs barges in,” she writes.
For that, I thank you, Daria.
posted by Chattering Mind @ 12:43 PM | Permalink |
In my ongoing battle to introduce my fiancé to the bliss of healthy eating, I am occasionally granted a small victory. The Superfoods Rx Salad is one of them. Incredibly simple to assemble, this dish is also one of the few culinary items that P and I agree on. In fact, I’m convinced that this salad actually makes our relationship better--it’s couples’ therapy in a bowl.
I think P digs the Rx because it has some fat (avocado, olive oil), and I dig it because I can stab up to six vegetables with one forkful (see recipe below). I recommend eating a variation of this salad every day. It’ll take care of all of your vegetable needs and may possibly save your relationship:
Include as much or as little of each ingredient as you see fit. You can’t go wrong. Check out the source of the salad for more incredible superfood recipes.
Spinach Romaine lettuce Shredded red cabbage Sliced red bell pepper Chopped tomato Chickpeas Grated carrot Cubed avocado Olive oil Balsamic vinegar A nice sprinkle of sea salt Fresh-ground pepper
Optional: a handful of chopped herbs (basil works great), a bit of Parmigiano cheese or some nuts or seeds. Yum.
Is there a meal that brings you closer to your mate?
Halfway through last night’s viewing of "The New Medicine", I wondered if the producers at PBS had chosen the best title for this documentary about mind-body health. Introduced by the heroic (and now angelic) Dana Reeve, "New Medicine" covers the growing field of integrative medicine, focusing specifically on ways that the mind can influence the body’s ability to heal. Although modern medicine tends to treat patients' bodies without addressing what's on their minds, the doc shows how people have had an intuitive sense of the connection between emotions and health for centuries--it's why we get "sick with worry" and our "hearts" get "broken."
One particularly striking example of this connection is the role stress can play in the healing process. In one study, two different groups--caregivers, a profession known for its high stress levels, and a relatively stress-free group--were given the same pencil eraser-sized wounds on their arms. The non-caregiver's wounds healed 20 percent faster.
But what I really liked was how the show highlighted the concept of hope. There needs to be more talk of hope. As Reeve elegantly puts it in the introduction: "For years, my husband and I lived on, and because of, hope. Hope continues to give me the mental strength to carry on, but also, I am convinced, hope very directly influences my physical health."
Though her words have an eerie resonance since her death, the hope they’re talking about here is not a panacea, it’s not false hope or even optimism, but rather a trust in a larger sense of safety. Here’s hoping this indeed helped Reeve in her final days.
Many of the medical experts called upon to document the existence of a new medicine referenced hope. Take Jerome Groopman, M.D., of Harvard Medical School: "Hope is central in the experience of illness and the path to healing," he explained.
How have stress or other emotional challenges have affected your health?
My hands are in prayer position. They start at my third eye, graze my nose, pausing at my mouth before landing in front of my heart. Then I place my palms on the floor in front of my feet and bring my knees and forehead down to meet them. After forty rounds of this prostration (as this yoga sequence is called) I’m sweating. Hard. And I’m feeling more connected than I have all day—connected to my body, my spirit, the earth, and just about everyone who inhabits it. Pretty major stuff for a bunch of yoga poses.
There’s something about actually placing my body on the ground that seems to announce my humility. It’s the emotional and spiritual opposite of doing a pose in which I’m standing with my arms open above my head. In that position it’s like I’m shouting: “I surrender! It’s all OK! I’ve let go!” While prostrating, though, it’s like I’m whispering “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
My yoga teacher often opens her class with a vigorous round of prostration, but it’s easy to try an easy, effortless version anywhere, even within eyeshot of an entire office: bow your head and close your eyes. Really feel the power of that motion.
I use a simple one-two-three, one-two-three, while P’s more of the slow-quick-quick-slow type. We’re taking dance lessons. We’re working on a fox trot/swing combo. We’re supposed to dazzle the wedding guests with our grace and agility.
But as of yesterday—lesson three—we still look like two stiff weeble-wobbles on an awkward first date.
Like curing hiccups, everyone’s got something to say about learning to dance: don’t look at your feet, just feel the rhythm, keep your knees loose and your head high. It all means nothing when your hands are sweating, you can’t hear the music over the pounding of your heart, and you’re mumbling “one-two-three, one-two-three” like some all-powerful mantra.
Learning to dance as an adult is an incredibly humbling exercise in ego-destruction—especially when two 10-year-olds twirl by you in a seamless tango worthy of old-time Buenos Aires. It’s like my fundamental concept of movement is being leveled. I remind myself that the 10-year-olds have been training since they were five. And I remind myself to breathe. When I focus on sinking into my heart with each inhale and sliding out of my mind with each exhale my steps are magically lighter.
When I get home I read this, and it all makes sense:
“The impetus for movement comes from a source other than the thinking mind’s control over the voluntary skeletal muscles . . .[it is an] experience of not striving or “efforting.” Muscles contract and the body exerts, but the overall felt sense is of relaxing and letting go.”
Depending on the day, I’m slightly to extremely obsessed with Thailand. The first three months of 2006 have been dedicated to the Land of Smiles--I’m all about curries and rice noodles and creamy Thai iced teas. I even bought a Thailand-made bust of Buddha and Thai fisherman’s pants have become my favorite leisure apparel. Oooh, and the massage, but I’ll get to that later.
I was always interested in Southeast Asia, but I held my curiosity until I had an excuse to visit. Now a honeymoon has given me a solid reason to drool over guidebook images of temples at sunset, meditating monks, and the flat green sea of the Gulf coast. We’ll travel to Bangkok in June--the hottest time of year--and seek peace of mind and pad Thai and simultaneous massages, but probably not in that order. After 21 hours of travel and a time change that will have deprived us of an entire day, we’ll be more than ready to sink into the hands of a Thai massage practitioner. Unlike Swedish massage, which kneads the knots and tension out of muscles, Thai massage opens the body’s blocked energy channels--when executed with the right combo of determination and ease, the results can be extraordinary.
Our friend K recently returned from two months of studying Thai massage in Chiang Mai [note: friends living in Thailand add to Thai obsession]. He returned with dreadlocks, mind-blowing massage skills, and an otherworldly calm that I hope to find there too.
Buy a box of Entenmann’s assorted doughnuts (powdered, plain, chocolate). Place them on your counter. Watch what happens.
Humans are magnetically attracted to doughnuts. Especially when they’re in a blue-and-white box that reminds us of childhood. P dropped them in our shopping cart this weekend, and I asked if he was kidding. I’ve been on a mission to shift his diet from burgers and ice cream to something lighter--like kale, perhaps. Doughnuts with a 10-year shelf life are definitely not on the menu.
Which reminded me of a vegan chef I recently interviewed. When I asked her to reveal a few flavor secrets, she said that there are none--whole foods are already flavorful. But our American palates are so acclimated to the clamor of sugary and salty processed foods, she added, that they miss the subtle nuttiness of millet or the green sweetness of curly kale. The trick is resensitize our taste buds. (Told ya, P).
Back to the Entenmann’s. Nobody can resist that box. P’s already eaten four. My neighbor who lives on sardines and spinach salad had two. Even my friend who exists on parsley juice and seaweed flakes had three significant bites as she read the offending ingredient list: “hydrogenated palm kernel oil, refined sugar, white flour.” I watched them as I slurped down nonfat yogurt and a cup of green tea. “Doughnuts are poison,” I mumbled under my breath. Am I drawing too hard of a line? What do YOU think?
“How do you feel about using the word ‘God’ in your ceremony of marriage?”
I had successfully avoided the question--buried in the 10-page survey that our officiant had us fill out--for a full week.
The answer was so obvious and at the same time so unclear, that I couldn’t bring myself to address it. P and I want a spiritually minded ceremony for our June wedding--for us love is inherently linked to something higher. But we’re also connected to our families: mine non-practicing Italian Catholic/Jewish and his non-practicing, but big-talking Irish Catholic. In choosing the person to marry us, we wondered (read: worried) if it would be possible to create a ceremony that would embrace a spiritual sensibility cultivated through yoga, meditation, and devotional practice without alienating mostly agnostic family members.
P suggested a light-hearted Catholic priest. I nixed him as too mono-religious. I suggested a friend who teaches meditation and practices South American shamanism. His vote: “Too out there.” After weeks of searching for a person who falls somewhere between rabbi and Buddhist nun (I’ve always dreamed of being married by Pema Chödrön), one morning I suggested we have a judge marry us. “I refuse to be married by anyone who also sends people to jail,” he said without looking up from his cereal.
Then we found Norma. An ordained wedding officiant and a reverend, she’s also a spiritual counselor, a mother of kids our age, and just plain cool. On her card she promises to design “creative, personalized ceremonies that reflect the essence of the love you are celebrating,” and she’s even better in person. Funny and sassy, she’s willing to help us strike a balance between our spiritual lives and the family members who ask, “You still doing that yoga stuff?”
I eventually answered the question: Yes, I’m comfortable with the word “God.” Even if rest of the family might not be.
"The cure to combat the three S’s--stress, strain and speed--can be found in the three W’s--the work of devoted practice, the wisdom that comes from understanding the self and the world and worship. Because ultimately surrendering what we cannot control allows the ego to relax and lose the anxiety of its own infinitesimally small self in the infinitude of the divine."
I try to make a daily gratitude list. Sometimes I call it a gratitude prayer. Requiring no pen or paper, it's just a conscious ticking off of the people or things or moments for which I am thankful today. I usually make it in that space between climbing into bed and falling asleep--right after P has said his last goodnight and I am sinking into the mattress with my thoughts.
I know that tonight, nestled among the renewed adoration of my childhood best friend (we’ve been pals since we were 10), this afternoon’s sunny, spring-like weather, and perfectly sautéed Brussels sprouts (cut them in half and toss in a pan with a bit of olive oil, garlic, salt and pepper) will be this opportunity to share my words with the Chattering Mind community. While I’m dishing out the gratitude, I also send many thanks to Amy Cunningham and Beliefnet.
"Freud is Not Dead" reads the March 27th cover story of Newsweek. Actually, I don't want to contemplate whether Freud's thinking is dead or alive, in or out. What I'd like to behold with you is that couch, the couch, and the antiquities that surround it––as pictured next to Newsweek's table of contents. Freud had a passion for sacred symbols, religious artifacts and relics with spiritual significance––even though he was an intellectual, nonobservant Jew who broke with Carl Jung over religious and paranormal differences; Freud was the more secular of the two.
Let's reflect upon the following description of the artwork and artifacts that Freud kept beside him, from antiquities collector Stephen Beiner. I'm captivated by the multi-faith mix.
Freud’s antiquities collection has no single unifying theme; rather it is the culmination of a wide-ranging curiosity and an omnivorous mind. He owned Greek vessels and funerary reliefs, fragments of Pompeian wall paintings, Egyptian sarcophagus lids and engraved stelae, and Burmese Buddhas. A fifth century BCE South Italian winged Sphinx sat in a cabinet behind Freud’s desk... Freud’s collection was the spoils of an armchair traveler, obtained from archeologists and antiquity dealers as he continued his lifelong expedition into the human psyche and man’s ancient past. As Freud’s patients relaxed on his famous couch, freely associating, they were watched over by exotic remnants of lost worlds. A plaster cast of a Roman bas relief known as the Gravdiva (the original now hangs in the Vatican) depicting the daughter of the mythical king of Attica as a young woman forever caught in mid-stride, hung over Freud’s couch, together with a 19th century colored print depicting the Egyptian temple of Ramesses II at Abu Simbel. One patient remarked that 'there was always a feeling of sacred peace and quiet' in Freud’s consulting room.
In such a spot, on such a couch, wouldn't you tell the old man everything on your mind (and beyond it), detailing every face, voice, cloud, landscape? A friend who spent a long time (and a lot of money) in heavy-duty analysis once told me that when you cry big tears reclined on a couch like this, the water runs down your cheeks and accumulates in your ears. Can't you imagine standing up after a long Freudian session, feeling water-logged, having submerged yourself in, and then risen above, the shiny, sacred pool of your own memory?
We were talking about affirmations earlier this week, those little uplifting phrases you say to yourself throughout the day. The reigning queen of this practice is Louise Hay, a self-help teacher famous for assigning affirmations to any problem and helping folks find their spiritual way. Hay's growing radio network, Hay House Radio, has a website that can connect you to teachers like Wayne Dyer, Marianne Williamson and Caroline Myss. Which means your work day can have a new, inspiring soundtrack in the form of talk-radio style downloads.
posted by Chattering Mind @ 12:45 PM | Permalink |
"Mommy, what if heaven is all a dream?" my younger son asked Thursday night, knowing that I was going away Friday to be with my 91-year-old father who has been hospitalized again.
"Yes, and what if life is all a dream?" I answered, hugging him. He looked up at me as if to say "You're smart." But then his face changed to express, "Then again, you might be crazy."
An hour before, he'd actually watched our elderly male parakeet die at the bottom of its cage--as if worrying about Grandpa was not enough--and cried hard about the loss of his pet. Finally, my son found solace in the act of turning a bank check box into an Egyptian sarcophagus with a Star of David on the bottom.
It's a good time for me to take a break. I'll be with my father and siblings, my first break since November. Beliefnet will have the wonderful Marisa Lowenstein blogging for me next week. I am so grateful that she can fill in on short notice. I'll be back in April, "the cruelest month." And I know we'll transcend it together.
posted by Chattering Mind @ 11:51 AM | Permalink |
Mystical experiences are a universal, spiritually revelatory phenomenon with all kinds of individual textures––time suddenly comes to a glorious halt, or the world becomes one breathing, whole organism, or the entire cosmos and your place in it immediately make soul-shaking sense. While before you could only hope to stumble upon a passage in someone's memoir about such an experience, I came across an amazing trove of them at bodysoulandspirit.net.
Judging by this archive, it's clear that someone else has been reading the autobiographies of the famous for us, underlining––and typing in––the juicy, mystical stuff. You'll find fascinating descriptions of brushes with the divine by a wide range of authors from Carl Jung (who had "sick bed visions") to Jane Goodall (who feels supreme joy in the Notre Dame Cathedral) to Virginia Woolf, who wrote: "I am only the container of the feeling of ecstasy, of the feeling of rapture" while alone on a beach.
There's also a space to record your own mystical experience for others to savor.
posted by Chattering Mind @ 11:14 PM | Permalink |
"Spring cleaning is a time to release what we are hiding. The room such things take robs us of new life. Now is the time to gather the old from under those sneaky bushes where things tend to hide. Now is the time to throw the worn into the compost pile. Now is the time to turn the soil, to be open to renewal. Now is the time to ask for new leaves."
Yesterday Salon posted Steve Paulson's wonderfully readable interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard professor Edward O. Wilson, founder of sociobiology and author of "On Human Nature." Wilson may not say what you want to hear about God's existence--he’s not so sure he buys it--but he is open to the possibility that a larger, cosmic force started the universe before moving on to other things. Here's an excerpt, but be sure to click over and read the whole thing:
It's fascinating because everything you've said up until now suggests that you should be an atheist. Why hold out the specter that maybe there was some divine presence that got the whole thing going?
Well, because there's a possibility that a god or gods--I don't think it would resemble anything of the Judeo-Christian variety--or a super-intelligent force came along and started the universe with a big bang and moved on to the next universe. I can't discount that.
Let's just play this out for a minute. If there was this creative ... whatever you want to call it...
Intelligence.
This intelligence that got our universe going, what happened to that intelligence? Did it go off to the next universe?
That's what I mean. That's exactly what I said. (Laughs)
Thirteen billion years ago, it left and went somewhere else?
Well, they are now either lurking on the outer reaches of the universe, watching with some amusement as the eons passed, to see how the experiment worked out, or they moved on. Who can say?
posted by Chattering Mind @ 10:52 PM | Permalink |
One CM reader sides with Mr. Chattering in believing that morning people are born, not made. In fact, Rebecca T. (who ruminates on all kinds of smart things here) says true night people have trouble adjusting in a world that equates productivity and well-being with bouncing out of bed before 7 a.m.:
Actually, many people are born night people and it runs in families. If you look up "delayed sleep onset disorder" you can find information about it (although in fairness, it's not actually a disorder, just a scheduling issue)... Being wired as a night person is a big enough struggle in our early-to-rise world without having our supposed spiritual inferiority heaped on us as well. Throughout my life, I have been most likely to encounter God in intense ways in the quiet, dark blanket of night, while morning is just a fog that does nothing but give my spirit one more thing to struggle with. This is how God made me and I refuse to accept that He made me inferior just because my sleep-wake cycle doesn't have me up at the crack of dawn!
"The best reappraisals are born in the worst crisis. It has happened to all of us in relative degrees. Be glad for it and don't be afraid of being afraid."
--from Marlon Brando to ex-lover Marilyn Monroe in a telegram on February 1961, after she had been hospitalized for nervous collapse and breakdown.
posted by Chattering Mind @ 11:26 AM | Permalink |
Last Sunday the Chattering clan gathered at my in-laws’ suburban home to celebrate the birthday of Mr. Chattering’s father Martin. Near the table was a vat of caffeine-free, sugar-free Diet Coke. As our eleven-year-old son lunged for that bottle like a man stranded on a desert isle, I calmly asked my mother-in-law what else she had to drink. At this, my son looked at me as if to say, "You are soooo MEAN!" In fact, he might have said as much.
My mother-in-law had juice, milk and seltzer in her fridge, but she also had Classic Coke. "Give him the Real Thing," I told her. We were celebrating, after all. At that, our boy gleefully poured himself a large glass.
Mr. Chattering turned to me and said, "I do not understand your world view. You'd prefer the caffeine and sugar of real Coke to..."
"To something artificially sweetened? Yes!" I said. But now I'm wondering what you, my holistically spiritual readers, would have done had you been in my place. Would you have announced that no product of Coca-Cola’s would ever brush the pristine lips of your offspring? Or would you have allowed your son to chug the Aspartame? I used to police everything my kids ingested. As they get older, though, I let them grapple with choices. Artificially sweetened drinks, however, are still on my no-no list.
Why? The history of artificial sweeteners is so laden with financially-lucrative lab accidents, rushed decisions and seemingly bad white men who play golf, that I really can't support that industry in any way, even as it seeks "healthier" compounds, an oxymoron if there ever was. In my opinion, artificial sweeteners are especially harmful to perpetual dieters who constantly drink faux-sweet beverages instead of eight cleansing glasses of filtered water a day. (In most locales, I actually think tap water is okay, though I do balk at hotel taps; the words "old piping" often haunt me as I stand in the provided terry robe, thirsty and torn.)
Oh dear, I'm up on a soapbox, chattering away. Here's Whole Foods' explanation of why it doesn’t stock products containing the artificial sweetener Sucralose. Here's a more scientific history of the search for artificial sweeteners. And here's a nice, detailed paper on healthier options (stevia, barley malt, fruit juice, etc.), that says it's best to rotate sweeteners, instead of relying on one thing all the time.
posted by Chattering Mind @ 10:28 PM | Permalink |
"I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority."
Are you a morning person? I pretty much am, which is to say I wake up hungry, filled with curiosity about the weather, eager to roll up the blinds. Mr. Chattering and I have a running disagreement over whether people who are not morning people are born that way and forever stuck needing coffee OR whether they are actually out of physical/spiritual alignment (Chattering Mind's obnoxious argument).
Do you need a good laugh? In response to my blog item about drugs and kids getting high, a reader named Robert reminds us that laughter triggers healthy, euphoria-inducing chemicals in the body. "Laughter is, in my opinion, the best high there is,” he writes. “We need another Dean Martin or Bob Hope to get the ball rolling."
My best suggestion is to glance through the vast offerings at Laugh.com, a website launched by comic George Carlin who has preserved many vintage comedy albums that might otherwise have been lost. I'm confident that Robert will find everything he needs here, and more. The Chattering family has recently been listening to Bill Cosby's great old routines about childhood. Comedy albums from all eras are also ideal gifts for anyone recovering from an illness or surgery or doing a stint in a hospital.
There's a "smarmy Stuart Smalley" quality to the affirmations I posted yesterday, writes faithful reader Pacific231. As an antidote, she or he suggests discussing Buddhist "pith" teachings. Great idea. A pith saying is a distilled lesson, a gist, a bit of wisdom boiled down to its essence. In the same way that “pith" can also refer to a flower's central artery, a pith teaching is a realization central to growth. Like the affirmations I linked to yesterday, these sayings can be repeated aloud or silently, or posted somewhere you'll see them regularly. To get you started, some samples from an article on pith by Lama Surya Das:
Everything is pure and spontaneously accomplished from the outset.
Speaking of that smarmy Stuart Smalley, did you know that years ago, Al Franken wrote a hilarious book based on his classically nasal, co-dependent, self-help group-addicted SNL character? As the King of Affirmations, in I'm Good Enough, I'm Smart Enough, and Doggone It, People Like Me!, “Smalley” recommends repeating slogans like:
When I go home to visit my family, I will stay in a motel.
I am entitled to file for an extension on my income taxes!
Do your chattering thoughts tear you down? Do negative memories become your life's story? You need some affirmations then, little sayings that you can repeat to yourself as you walk or meditate. You can also post them on your bathroom mirror or automobile dash. Dr. Kathleen Hall of The Stress Institute offers a menu of useful affirmations on her website. Here are some examples:
I am always protected and guided.
I choose to create happiness.
I choose to create love in my life.
I love and accept my self.
All is well in my life.
Click here and scroll down to survey many other affirmations.
Several years ago, my family celebrated with a very simple but effective ritual, based on the ceremony suggested by Nancy Brady Cunningham in "Feeding the Spirit." Each person chose a seed or bulb that was meaningful to them. We blessed the seeds with a prayer from Campanelli: "Now is the dark half of the year passing, Now do the days grow light, and the Earth grows warm. I summon the spirit of these seeds which have slept in darkness. Awaken, stir, and swell! Soon you will be planted in the earth to grow and bring forth new fruit. Blessed be!" We sat quietly and visualized our plants in full bloom. Then we invoked each of the four elements necessary for the plants' growth. We placed the seeds in a pot of soil and patted down the earth, poured water on it, breathed on it to represent air and held the pot over a candle (or up to the sun, if outside) to represent the element fire (the warmth of the sun).
Add another layer of meaning to this ceremony by choosing seeds that represent the things you want to grow during the new year--wisdom, understanding, patience, etc. Visualize those qualities coming into full bloom in your life as you plant your seeds.
"Mom, Mom, it's that shadow guy!" the kids said, jumping with excitement. After reading about him in The New York Times a few months ago, the kids and I bumped into Ellis Gallagher yesterday. Actually, we almost fell over him. Gallagher was tracing with a thick piece of chalk the late-afternoon shadows on the Brooklyn sidewalk. Here's an online photo of his work. Amazing.
We stood there and watched the former graffiti artist draw on the pavement the contours of a newspaper vending box, then the shadow of a street light. He has to work fast because by the time he finishes defining his shadowy subjects, the sun has inevitably moved a degree, causing the actual shadows to be longer, wider, different. But the lines on the sidewalk remain, for a while at least. This kind of art is so fragile and fleeting. Time's passage causes it to lose its power almost immediately, and then the rain washes it away.
The boys asked Gallagher for his autograph, which seemed to flatter him. We watched him some more, got distracted, turned around and then--poof!--the man who calls attention to the unseen and unacknowledged had vanished.
You may have seen Tibetan sand paintings. The amount of work there is greater, but the outcome is the same. Days of work are blown away in the end. Just like that. There's no need to possess or frame this kind of beauty. If you take it in, as I think the boys did with Gallagher today, you have all you need.
"Yoga practice should not conflict with our life but contribute to it. Whatever connects us to our essence is our practice. Whatever clears our head so we can see what is important is our practice. Once we get clear that we are practicing to live, not living to practice, we can bring the concept of formal practice into perspective. If our formal practice is utterly disassociated from our everyday lives, no amount of time on the mat will bring us peace of mind."
After several pleasant days in the mid- to upper-fifties, and one in the sunny mid-sixties, it is cold again here in New York. An inch of snow may arrive by Friday. The coming of Spring reminds me of a labyrinth walk. There's a point at the beginning of the walking meditation on the labyrinth modeled after the one at Chartres, where you walk very near the center. You feel close to a "destination." You are virtually--and happily--there. But then, the walk swings wide to the outside. You realize you are so far away from where you're "headed" that your mind chatters: "Oh, all is lost. I'll never get to where I want to be." And you hadn't even realized that you wanted to get anywhere as badly as you apparently do! You're just walking, after all. You're not supposed to worry about where you end up. That's the meditation.
With this weather, it's the same thing. I know that the real Spring will come but that it needs more time to gather its strength, and I must walk on, gathering patience.
Here's an online labyrinth you can actually "walk" with your computer's cursor if you want to experience what I'm describing.
"God is not a being; God is Being. For those who have found God, his presence shows in honesty, kindness, carefully chosen words, and an absence of shame about the past. The pain may still be there, though quieted, but the grandiosity and false ego that insists on either secrecy or great sinnerhood is burned out and gone."
Thanks to reader Alana Perrault who wrote this fond remembrance of her Ukrainian egg decorating (pysanky) sessions with her loving, multi-generational household.
Pysanky nights sent us into "perfect child" mold, finishing our homework and chores in record time so we could get down to business. All the men would retire to the TV room while the females commandered the kitchen. The kids set out the supplies: farm fresh eggs, mason jars ready to be filled with dyes, smelly vinegar, candles, matches, beeswax, kistka (stylus), spoons, drying racks and all manner of design guides, from pencils and rubber bands to toothpicks. All night long we drew and dyed and chatted about this-and-that, three generations of family and friends together. By the end of the night we had the beginnings of the final product: intricately decorated Easter eggs covered in symbolic designs and colors. On these nights I remember going to bed feeling exhausted and happy. I couldn't wait to get up the next day and get through school and homework and dinner so I could get back to the pysanky again.
For another few nights we'd do the same thing, until we had dozens of decorated eggs, the wax now removed and each egg shellacked to a glossy finish. We stored the eggs in their cardboard cartons, Cinderellas all. Every day we'd check on them, opening the cartons slowly, peeking inside, surpised every time by the beauty we found.
The "fancy eggs" became the finishing touch for the Easter basket, laid prominently on top of the kielbasa, ham, kolachi, custard and sweet cream butter, all of which was blessed at the church on Holy Saturday. On Easter Sunday, the best pysanky were given as gifts to friends and relatives. For us kids, it was an HONOR to have our eggs selected (and they always were) and to be praised by the recipients.
I can still smell the beeswax, the vinegar and the Cashmere Bouquet powder of the grey-haired ladies. In the next few weeks my family will carry on this tradition, only now the boys join in.
This year marks the 100th birthday of my favorite children's book on Spring. Actually, "The Story of the Root-Children" is my favorite young children's book of all time (much as I also love Margaret Wise Brown's "Goodnight Moon").
I think I've given "Root Children" to new mom friends twenty or more times. It's the story of how the souls of the plants (drawn as cherubic baby spirits) are awakened from underground naps by Mother Nature and instructed to sew new, festive clothes for themselves so they can rise up out of the earth as flowers and parade in the most endearing way as soon as the sun warms the earth. This wasn't a book I knew as a girl; I came upon it through Rudolf Steiner websites when my boys were tots. All the works of author Sibylle von Olfers are favorites at Steiner schools, and once you see this one, you'll understand why. "You love that sort of book much more than the kids do," Mr. Chattering says (worn out after being dragged to too many Steiner school open houses). Perhaps so. But if a book uplifts the mother's spirit while also amusing the children, so much the better. In fact, I say, "Hallelujah!"
"Sibylle von Olfers was born in Methgeten Castle in East Prussia in 1881 and died in Lübeck in 1916," according to this German book website. "At an early age she had art lessons and was supported in her interest in art by her aunt, the painter and writer Marie von Olfers. At the age of 24 she became a nun in the Order of St. Elizabeth and continued her artistic training there." Her work has a spiritual understanding of the earth and its cycles that I know you'll appreciate.
I got abundant mail on the item I posted last week about clutter. Some of you have minimized your CD stress and mess by downloading onto your iPod your entire CD collection. ("Is such a thing possible?" I've asked friends and relations. "Yes," they all say dryly, surprised that Chattering Mind is so out of touch.) Other folks who posted are ruthless in their ability to toss out what is no longer needed. It's good to know that Freecycle has a website that can help you find unneeded belongings a new home.
There's a lot of interest among you in Feng Shui, the practice of rearranging your environment for maximum health and stability (the actual translation of the words is "wind" and "water"). My study of this subject has helped me greatly, and if you ever came to my house, you'd notice crystals and windchimes hanging in odd places (a big 50mm crystal hangs from the ceiling above me right now). One personal Feng Shui problem on my list of things to resolve this week is that a left-hand rear corner window of our old house has slipped and is allowing cold air to leak in--a FS disaster, since any instability in this corner (which is said to govern family finances) means you are throwing money out the window. The woman who sold this house to us was so broke that, at closing, a harried, semi-unpleasant man was waiting for his piece of her profit in the lobby of our lawyer's office. One principle of Feng Shui is that you inherit from your home the poverty of your predecessor if you don't shore up the house's flaws in financial areas.
Beliefnet.com has tackled Feng Shui from different angles, and if you are interested, you'll find good information on how to fix up your kitchen and bedroom for maximum prosperity and happiness. Additionally, here's a link to a funny article I wrote several years ago about improving our office "chi" at Beliefnet. Happily, our editorial and advertising offices are soon to undergo a total remodeling since we've become a thriving concern that employs 50 people now (and we're budgeted to gain as many as 25 more staffers in the next two years).
With all that said, the most significant Feng Shui article we've published was on the subject of spatial memory, karma, and the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. It's called "Do Walls Have Memory?" Excellent stuff. You'll want to check it out.
The folks who run the HearthSong Catalog knocked themselves out this year, it seems, to present a large and offbeat collection of egg-decorating kits for the celebration of Easter or Spring Equinox. And they're all under $20. So if you're an egg-decorating sort of person, here's your heads-up. Some of these kits produce eggs so pretty, you won't want to hide them.
If the moon fascinates you and you would like to meditate upon its ceaseless changes, here's a Moon Circles newsletter link that will lead you to wonderful information and smart articles.
The drug counselors are back at our school. They come as a privately-hired group to discuss the hazards of drugs with the 4th through 8th-grade kids.
"They told us not to eat anything in the medicine cabinet," says the younger Chattering.
"Yeah, but they haven't said anything yet on the really interesting drugs like marijuana, cocaine, and heroin," says the older boy, seeming glum.
"A-huh," I say, pleased he didn't mention Ecstasy.
Here are my chattering thoughts: while it's important to teach our children how to manage peer pressure, it's even more important to teach children how to identify and change consciousness and mood. It's not good for a parent to say, "I need this glass of wine to relax, honey." That's awful, in fact. Look at the message: "I need to ingest this substance so I can get to a better place."
How beautiful the world would be if all parents showed children that going out for a walk or a run, having a period of stretching or meditation, can help one relax, expand awareness, and change the course of the day.
My thinking is influenced by Dr. Andrew Weil's first--perhaps greatest--book "The Natural Mind," now available in a revised edition. Weil essentially reminds us that the need to get "high" is in us all, it's part of human nature. Weil strengthens his argument by recalling how small children love to spin in small circles until they fall down. There's nothing wrong with feeling giddy or dizzy, or being in an altered reality, right?
How do you manage the occasional need to dissolve into your senses? Passionate sexual activity? Eating something marvelous? Going to the gym? These are all ways to change reality. The trick then is to help our children find healthy, productive methods to do the same thing. They shouldn't get into the habit of linking "fun" or "recreation" with mood-altering substances.
The other day, my older son had a friend over and the two of them played a game that involved seeing how long the other could hold a fistful of extremely sour candies in his mouth. They found this hilarious. They were rolling on the floor, holding their sides. Their eyes were popping out.
"Oh boy," thought chattering I. "There it is."
Team and individual sports are wonderful in part because they help kids develop an awareness of the body's sensory system as well as the breath. Since my chattering guys are a tad bookish--well, more than just a tad--Mr. C. and I have to think up ways to get them moving and breathing hard. "Run to the end of the block and back, honey," I tell my older boy almost daily. "Inhale, inhale. Exhale, exhale. Go!"
He looks at me as though he's not especially fond of me in that moment. But then off he usually goes. When he comes back fully winded, I say, "It's cool, right? You feel different."
I know there's more to come, we've got a long way to go. I'm trying to develop a system through which I could get the whole family meditating. More on that later.
I don't want to be East-Coast-centric, but the Omega Institute holds an important conference March 31 through April 2 in New York City called "Being Fearless." Click here for details. Among the speakers: Caroline Myss, Malcolm Gladwell, Wayne Dyer, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Byron Katie, Dennis Genpo Merzel, Martha Beck, and James Van Praagh.
"Obviously, facing adversity and extreme conditions gives rise to our fears, and we are forced to face them. Less obvious, however, is how much fear informs our everday world," says Skip Backus, Omega's Executive Director and someone who once had kidney cancer. "I am newly aware of how much we all struggle with the reality of being a vulnerable human being."
I love these gatherings and benefit greatly from them. Keep me alerted to big events in your area, or write me with your own workshop reviews and experiences.
Oprah's O Magazine got Anne Lamott to write about aging, radiance, and beauty for the April issue (which was just squeezed through my mail slot). Here's an excerpt, but get your hands on the whole thing. It's a fabulous essay.
"When Jesus was asked about beauty, he pointed to nature, to the lilies of the field. Behold them, he said, and behold is a special word: It means to look upon something amazing or unexpected. Behold! It is an exhortation...He's saying, You are freely given each moment the opportunity to see through a different pair of glasses. "Behold the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin."
But that's only the minor chord. The major one follows, in his antianxiety discourse--which is the soul of this passage: that all striving after greater beauty and importance and greater greatness is foolishness. He's saying we have much to learn from lilies about giving up striving. He's saying that we could be aware of, filled with, and saved by the presence of holy beauty, rather than worshipping golden calves."
The whole foods publication "Macrobiotics Today" has a new Q&A column by someone calling herself Shiitake Jones. I am an instant fan of this fine and funny food writer (who is also a yoga teacher), but the people coming to her for advice have such refined and specific problems that I find myself captivated by them too. They are such healthy eaters that it's hard to go mainstream, apparently. And they always struggle with guilt when they eat something on the macrobiotic "forbidden" list. Here's one plea for Shiitake Jones' great wisdom from the March/April 2006 issue:
Dear Shiitake,
How do you handle going to potlucks? We went to one last night, and...[everything] there had something in it that I've been avoiding...I opted to eat a small bowl of food. I blessed it and hoped somehow these foods would nourish rather than harm me. I avoided the truly unhealthy items and went for the best. It was yummy. I usually don't have nutmeg pesto lasagna, garlic mashed potatoes, and salad with honey in the dressing--not to mention the little truffle afterwards! Yes, I am feeling guilty. But despite a little tummy ache this morning and the knowledge that I may be more sensitive today, I feel pretty good. I'm definitely enjoying my miso soup and barley cardamon porridge with a few raisins and a touch of brown rice syrup. Wondering how you deal with these gatherings? Thanks.
--Lysia from North Carolina
Jones reminds her reader to step back, grasp the big picture, and never food obsess. After a splurge, she says, you can always "come back to earth with some soothing bancha tea." She has a newly-launched website where you, the reader, can be a companion on various dining and dating experiences. Funny!
You know, I've been so taken with Fly Lady's belief that it's better to spend fifteen minutes every day de-cluttering than it is to spend half your Saturday doing the same. I've managed to lighten up our house by maybe two hundred pounds in recent weeks, sorting through books, newspaper clips and magazines for a quarter hour every day. Fly Lady says it's best to clock your decluttering sessions with a kitchen timer so you don't run over. But I get so lonely cleaning up, and filing bills and papers--gosh, what is it with me?--I just can't manage it sometimes. I blame my eyes for this mostly. Every time it's time to put something away in its proper place, I can't seem to find my reading glasses. It's the strangest thing. And then when I find my glasses, I notice a good magazine I haven't yet read, and then, well, I have to read it before recycling it, right?
So this morning, I got an idea: why not, in addition to what I'm already doing, insist upon a rocking family sorting/cleaning/purging festival for thirty minutes every weekend, say, after Saturday's breakfast? The four of us could play loud music, sing as we work, and really put some muscle into several of our troubling, cluttered hot spots. There's been a sad stack of abandonned salad bowls, board games, and candle decorating supplies in the corner of our dining room since Christmas. What's the deal there? It needs to go. We have another family hang-up: it's called putting CDs back in their plastic cases. Why is that so hard?
Mindfulness. When you really confront our general lack of it, the whole morass of our living circumstance becomes painful to contemplate. Our minds are chattering so fast that it is hard to do the right thing, make the calm choice, find clarity. We will end up chasing our tails if we don't meditate, take a breath, and find the sanity that's always there and available to us. And our kids! How will they learn from us if we're still struggling to keep our heads above the bills and magazines?
I am interested in hearing any other ideas from you about how you successfully manage these kinds of difficulties, or fail to. True confessions time!
We are in our school's entrance hallway at 8:15 in the morning. I am carrying two large bags of books we no longer need. The younger Chattering and I culled through these books last night. We are excited because our school will donate these books to needy school libraries.
I am so close to the book drop. I have twenty yards to go when--oh drat!--the pre-teen Chattering son becomes alert to what is happening and says, "Hey wait, which books are you giving away?"
"Oh, just books we don't need anymore."
He kneels to examine them. "But Mom, this is the first book on the human body I ever had. I had this book as a kid!"
"Umm, yes. That's right."
He digs out another, and then looks at me as though I have committed the most heinous murder. "You're giving away my book on THE CELTS??!!"
"Honey, that's the least of your books on the Celts. You have others. Look, we are doing a good thing. When you give something up, you make space for something new."
He is not convinced. All told, he salvages six or seven of the thirty books I was about to donate, and he staggers up the school stairs with them.
I feel wicked. Highly imperfect. But I am also filled with love for him. How's he going to fit all those books into his locker, I wonder? Then I walk out the door. Spring seems around the corner.
The Dharma Seed Catalog now has the most fantastic online resource of audio meditations and teachings. I am so happy to link you to this exciting find! And everything is free (though Dharma Seed asks you to send a contribution if you can). Here, you'll find "Internet access to the oral tradition of Buddha's teachings" through the presentations of noted teachers you'd ordinarily have to travel miles to hear. Sylvia Boorstein, Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield, and Sharon Salzberg can be with you in minutes.
Dharma Seed began in the basement of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, when Bill Hamilton began archiving and distributing tapes of the society's workshops. Today, their collection of 750 lectures given by 91 teachers at eight different retreat centers form a distinguished library and history of Buddhist thought in the West. Here's a link to a fascinating photographic slide show that tells the story of this important center's history.
This month's "Health" magazine mentions a yoga website called AliveYoga.com, where you can purchase audio files of great yoga classes for $9 each. After purchase, they live in your hard drive, and you can re-use them whenever you like! Cool. All you need now is loose-fitting clothing, floor space, and a computer that sustains its connection to you when you are upside down.
Don't sign important documents, or initiate large-scale projects for the next three weeks! Vedic astrologer James Kelleher has this to say in his newsletter about the Mercury Retrograde period we will remain in through March 25th. Interesting that this period encompasses a big chunk of Lent!
"In this particular case, Mercury will spend nearly all of its transit in the constellation of Purva Bhadrapada...This constellation is symbolized by a funeral cot and is associated with various negative events related to death. On the other hand, its shakti is the power to elevate spiritual awareness, so it is also one of the most spiritually-inclined of all the nakshatras."
In other words:
"This period is an excellent time for looking inward and contemplating your mortality. Although this may sound a bit morbid, various religions, such as Buddhism and Jainism recommend the contemplation of death to their adherents for the simple reason that it makes you remember that life is both short and fragile. Part of the contemplation involves a reassessment of what is important in life. When you think about it, our time on planet earth is really very brief, so it is only common sense that we periodically reevaluate how we are using our time. Combined with the Solar Eclipse in Uttara Bhadrapada on March 29, Mercury’s retrograde phase becomes a powerful one for promoting spiritual awareness. It is also an excellent time for taking action to relieve human suffering through acts of charity and through prayer."
Giving up white flour and refined sugar for Lent hasn't been that rough, though I am reminded daily of just how frequently those two ingredients appear in almost everything desirable. One nice re-discovery: millet bread (it contains millet and brown rice flour). You can find it in the freezer case of most whole foods stores. I toast in a few smidges of organic butter and find it sinfully delicious.
Deepening Lent for me this year is Beliefnet.com's interactive Lenten calendar (click here and look for its headline on our Catholic page). It gives you daily assignments from speaking warmly to a homeless person to praying for others.
When I blogged about psychics yesterday, I neglected to mention that wonderful bundle of articles on psychic phenomena ran here, on Beliefnet.com, last year. Good psychcs don't really fortune tell, they can reveal to you what you already know, but may not be admitting. In that way, they can be totally legitimate and highly useful. What you've got to figure out is how to tell the "Good" psychics from those who should be doing something else with their time.
Here's another article I like--it's called "How Buddhism Helps One Professional Psychic See the Bigger Picture."
I hope you don't mind when I break out into a Beliefnet.com promotional announcement. It's just that the site has a tremendous amount of material archived, and I want to help folks who didn't see it the first time to find it.
Over the weekend, while making a creamy scallop soup for the family, I watched several episodes of "The Andy Griffith Show," which aired as part of a tribute to actor Don Knotts, who died this past February 25th.
Here are my chattering thoughts: First, while this long-running program never did enough to foster the Civil Rights Movement (which raged in the streets of the South as Andy and Opie went fishin' and rocked on the porch), I'd still argue this television series was the greatest of all time. What do you think?
"All in the Family" was perhaps more truthful and historic. "Seinfeld" made us laugh. The saga offered in "The Sopranos" is epic, but to most of us, alien. All the while, do-gooder Sheriff Taylor and the delicate, goofy Barney Fife aligned themselves deeply with our nation's best intentions. I have a Southern side of my family, so the program's small-town locals still feel like good friends to me. My skinny granddad from Texas loved Barney Fife ferociously. I remember curling up on the couch with him as a nine-year-old in the summer of 1964 with a big bowl of popcorn we'd share as we watched. There are times I wish I could go back to that moment, that place, feeling transported by that whistling theme song. My grandfather died the next year.
There are numerous quirky, kitschy religious connections to "The Andy Griffith Show" I thought I'd review here quickly. There are complete Christian lesson plans geared to various "Andy" episodes and a book by Joey Fann called "The Way Back to Mayberry: Lessons from a Simpler Time." Beliefnet ran this article about how "Andy" episodes were getting linked to legitimate Bible school study plans. Here's a more academic analysis of the program's assets and failings. And here's a sweet Don Knotts memorial page, as well as a link to a recording I actually own of Andy Griffith singing really old-time, down-home Christian hymns. A great gift for most Christians older than 70, or any avid Andy lover.
Yesterday's "New York Times" alerted me to the existence of a website and online support network for people addicted to psychics and their alluring, expensive forecasts. Founded by Sarah Lassez, an actress who was, at her worst, spending $1000 a month on psychic consulations, PsychicJunkie.net is filled with advice for the many who just can't "wait and see." They gotta know, if you know what I mean.
Lassez has also written a book that sounds fun--it's called "Psychic Junkie: A Memoir." Aiding others has bolstered her own recovery.
I never had a psychic habit, but I did enjoy a productive visit with a professional oracle after a hiatus from my dating relationship with Mr. Chattering many years ago, when he was far too youthful for serious commitment. If you must know, he was 23 when I met him. And I was a worldly 31. Oh! Oh! Readers, this was painful! I was rolling the I Ching like crazy! Finally I got a roll that said something like "Cautious, watchful, waiting will render a family." And the psychic I ran to agreed: she said Chattering was a stellar, thoughtful person hurrying to get ready for me, but that he needed more time. True enough, it was five more years before we pulled up to the altar, relieved, happy, and completely exhausted.
It's a story fit for a suspense movie: In 2001, two book dealers in Glasgow find on the dusty shelves of a rare book shop a set of nineteen perfectly preserved watercolors by poet/artist William Blake.
They are painted visions of the spirit world, and of human beings managing momentous passages. They have titles like "Death's Door," "The Day of Judgment," "Death of the Strong Wicked Man," and "The Soul Hovering Over the Body Reluctantly Parting with Life." They are alive with sacred energy.
Blake was a visionary mystic who had his first visions of spirits as a very young child. This particular watercolor set was painted to illustrate a poem in 1805. Many would kill for the whole folio. Thus, lawsuits followed its discovery. A private dealer finally bought it. But no museum seems to be able to afford the beauties, as together they are valued between $12 and $17 million. And now--here's the part no screenwriter would much like--they are due to be divided like children torn from a loving family and sold individually on the auction block in May at Sotheby's in New York. Just like that. They may never be together again.
I guess we should be happy the watercolors are alive and well at all, reminding us of the work and the vision of this wonderful artist. Have a look. You'll hear more about this, I'm sure.
Beliefnet assembled a beautiful package on the work of William Blake in June 2001 when the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York staged a large and impressive showing of his work.
Thanks to Terry Gross of NPR, whose program Fresh Air reminded me of the Harlem-based Addicts Rehabilitation Choir. Directed by former heroin addict James Allen, this is a gospel choir with a passionate repertoire of inspirational hymns appealing to anyone recovering from anything. Every singer in the group was once addicted to drugs or alcohol. Here's where to learn more about their work, listen to their music , and buy their CDs and tapes.
Have you ever gotten so mad at your children that you've pinched or scratched or hurt them in the process of trying to behave "properly" and hold your emotions in?
Brian Doyle, the editor of Portland Magazine, has a piece in this month's Utne Reader about the shame parents feel when they get so frustrated with a child's behavior that they face their own shadow fully and see their true animal fury. This happens to everybody, but the shame of recognition in the conscientious parent is paralyzing and severe. It almost makes you feel that ye olde days of spanking were superior, but of course, they were not. Doyle opens his essay, which is called "A Sin," like this:
"Committed a sin yesterday, in the hallway, at noon. I roared at my son, I grabbed him by the shirt collar, I frightened him so badly that he cowered and wept, and when he turned to run I grabbed him by the arm so roughly that he flinched, and it was that flicker of fear and pain across his face, the bright eager holy riveting face I have loved for 10 years, that stopped me then and haunts me this morning; for I am the father of his fear, I sent it snarling into his heart, and I can never get it out now, which torments me."
The boy had consistently neglected warnings and picked on his brother, but Doyle writes that his own livid reaction made him ashamed "down to the bottom" of his bones. He goes on to write--
"I do not know how sins can be forgiven. I grasp the concept, I admire the genius of the idea, I suspect it to be the seed of all real peace, I savor the Tutus and Gandhis who have the mad courage to live by it, but I do not understand how foul can be made fair."
In the end, he does find forgiveness and he apologizes to his son as they sit in the woods together near their house. The essay is masterfully written, all on one page.
I am grateful that the Utne Reader publishes beautiful things like this, articles that otherwise would have been missed.
The Reverend Tony Campolo, one of the most spunky and passionate representatives for what is being called the "Christian Evangelical Left," was on "The Colbert Report" a few nights ago speaking about how the teachings of Jesus transcend party politics. Have a look.
No frills. Great prices. The Vedanta Society of Southern California publishes a Vedanta Catalog with all manner of meditation books and tapes. I've just ordered a rare taped lecture of Aldous Huxley speaking on "Knowledge and Understanding." Seventy-eight minutes long for $9.95.
"...I still instinctively tighten my grip when things feel out of my control. But that's okay. I'm used to the drill: Something I didn't want to happen, happens. I feel the resistance build within. I feel the pressure to control what is obviously out of my control. I become aware of what I'm doing--I become aware of the choice either to break down or to break open. I take a deep breath, uncoil my body, and stretch out on the river of change. Once again, I accept that life is uncertain--that the goal is not to become more certain about anything but to relax more into the mystery of not knowing what will come next. And then, miracle of miracles, out there in the deep and uncertain water, I come into a peaceful knowing--a faithful wisdom that surpasses control and certainty."
Had Anne Frank lived, she would have turned seventy-seven this year. But this month marks the 61st anniversary of her death, of typhus, at Bergen-Belsen, the concentration camp where she was sent in the final months of World War II. She missed the camp's liberation by only six weeks.
I've found a wonderful website--really, one of the most remarkable websites I've ever encountered--on the short life and the diary of this gifted young writer, who, as you know, hid from the Nazis with her family for more than two years in a secret annex of an apartment in Amsterdam.
"It's a fairy tale to think that once we have attained deep faith, or have had some great enlightenment experience, our whole life will be one joyous delight after another and all sadness will be swept away, so that all we can see is paradise. Living a life of true reality, experiencing an ongoing restlessness with alternate moments of joy and sadness, there has to be a settling into one's life in a much deeper place, where you face whatever comes up. Likewise, true religious teaching is not a denial or our day-to-day predicaments; it is not cleverly glossing over reality, or feigning happiness. On the contrary, true religious teaching has to be able to show us how we can swim through one wave at a time--that is, those waves of laughter, tears, prosperity, or adversity."
--Kosho Uchiyama Roshi, in an essay he wrote in the late 1960s on his life as a Zen beggar, republished in the Spring 2006 issue of Buddhadharma.
posted by Chattering Mind @ 11:49 AM | Permalink |
Ladies, we've advanced through yet another phase of the women's liberation movement. Another woman's good looks are no longer what other women desire most. Nor do women in huge numbers envy other women's partners or careers. Today, the thing the greatest number of women envy about other women is their organizational style, according to this poll published by Parenting magazine.
posted by Chattering Mind @ 11:36 AM | Permalink |
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Over the weekend, while making a creamy scallop soup for the family, I watched several episodes of "The Andy Griffith Show," which aired as part of a tribute to actor Don Knotts, 
