Posts in the “personal” category

“When you need an answer, look over your left shoulder and ask your death.”

~ Carlos Castaneda

I haven’t seen the movie Smoke Signals in many years, but I remember liking it. I was just reminded of it when I saw Irene Bedard’s name go by on a Facebook news story. Adam Beach is a good actor, and most people will know him for movies like Windtalkers, but I’ll always remember him for an excellent Dead Zone episode named “Shaman”.

While starting my own walk today I came across a dog who was starting on his own walk. That dog was so happy to be going for a walk, his tail was wagging like crazy, and he was looking around and smelling everything. It didn’t matter that he only had three legs, he was going for a walk and he was excited!

I aim to be that way. Alive and happy, no matter how many parts the doctors remove.

Nothing like a hug from a wolf, that’s what I always say. I came across a wolf that looked a lot like this in Canada one time. This photo is from the Lakota Wolf Preserve page on Facebook.

I don’t know if this is true, but I saw this story on someone’s Facebook timeline. (I can’t link to the story because they re-posted an image, and said it comes from a private group named In The Company of Wolves, who I don’t follow. There are also multiple Facebook accounts with that name.)

“Do you hear the sound of your heartbeat?”

“No.”

“Do you hear the grasshopper at your feet?”

(Pause)

“Old man, how is it that you hear these things?”

“Young man, how is it that you do not?”

This won’t mean anything to anyone else, but while cleaning stuff off of my phone just now I ran across this photo of a house I once called home.

“From a Hindu perspective, you are born as what you need to deal with, and if you just try and push it away, whatever it is, it’s got you.”

~ Ram Dass

“I recommend almost dying to everybody. It’s character building. You get a much clearer perspective of what’s important and what isn’t, the preciousness and beauty of life.”

~ Carl Sagan, Astronomer, Philosopher

“A man dies when ...”

The words shown in this image come from this speech by Martin Luther King Jr.

A post from 2017:

For everyone who is upset by the actions of the current president and other political leaders, I urge you to take action. By “action” I don’t mean posting things on social networks. I mean writing your senators and congressmen. I mean peacefully marching and demonstrating. I mean supporting others who are marching and demonstrating. Every time you think about sharing a post, send a check to the ACLU and other organizations that are fighting against hate, oppression, destruction of the environment, etc. Otherwise, it’s just a lot of people preaching to the choir.

Back on this day (May 30th) in 2012, I turned myself in to the police in Virginia Beach. What happened was that I accidentally ran a red light the day before — and I mean it was really, really red — the day before. I was trying to figure out how to get to a grocery store and I was looking at everything but the traffic light.

I was about to leave town and didn’t want to deal with this after I left Virginia, so I called the police and told them I ran such and such a light at approximately such and such time, and I’d like to pay my fine before I left town. They had cameras on all four corners so I figured I was screwed. The woman I spoke to worked for a little while, then came back on the phone and said I was fine, they had no record of it.

This is a picture of me as a pitcher in high school. I don’t want to say that we were poor growing up, but I wore a large outfielder’s glove while pitching because I was afraid to ask my dad for a new glove, and the shoe on my right foot — the one way up in the air — was cracked in the middle.

(Many thanks to Dwayne Heidtbrink for the photo way back when.)

Working with yoga is often interesting. You stretch and twist and focus, trying to be very conscious of your movements, and then one day in the middle of a twisting pose you see your left foot coming out from behind your right ear. At first that’s a real surprise, a shock. You think, “Well, that can’t be my foot over there,” and then you realize it is your foot, and with that comes a strong sense of accomplishment, and maybe a little smile.

Then you do the same pose in the opposition direction, but twist and stretch as you might, your right foot doesn’t come out from behind your left ear. You know you can’t push it any more, at least not while doing the pose properly, so you realize there’s a bit of an imbalance. You accept that there’s still more work to do, but it’s a good thing, so you push on.

I think life is like that too, or can be like that. If you enjoy the struggle, if it’s a worthy struggle — a path with heart — the effort comes willingly, and with its own rewards.

(a facebook post from this date in 2013)

Working with yoga is often interesting. You stretch and twist and focus, trying to be very conscious and aware of your movements, and then one day in the middle of a twisting pose you see your left foot coming out from behind your right ear. At first that’s a real surprise, a shock. You think, “Well, that can’t be my foot over there”, and then you realize it is your foot, and with that comes a strong sense of accomplishment, and maybe a little smile.

Then you do the same pose in the opposition direction, but twist and stretch as you might, your right foot doesn’t come out from behind your left ear. You know you can’t push it any more, at least not while doing the pose properly, so you realize you have a little imbalance. You accept that you have some work to do, but it’s a good thing, so you push on.

I think life is like that too, or can be like that. If you enjoy the struggle, if it’s a worthy struggle — Castaneda’s “a path with heart” — the effort comes willingly, and with its own rewards.

My phone says I have 18 songs by the Cranberries and Dolores O’Riordan. Some of the favorites are Zombie, Linger, Dreams, Electric Blue, and War Child. RIP, Ms. O’Riordan.

~ January 15, 2018

In other blog posts I've mentioned that I think meditation can be a great tool for improving your concentration, so I thought I'd take a few moments here to explain how to meditate. It comes very naturally to me these days, but if you've never meditated before you may not know how to get started, so I thought I'd share this very simple technique here.

How to meditate

This is the very simple technique I learned when I first started meditating. Even in Zen schools, meditation is very simple. The secret is in the daily practice, the repetition that builds the new neural connections in your brain.

I like to listen to audiobooks when I drive around the country, and on my last drive back and forth to New Mexico I listened to the Pema Chodron audiobook, When Pain is the Doorway.

At some point in the book she talks about the storylines that constantly run around in our heads. I can’t remember if she was talking about a specific painful experience or just about storylines in general, but when I got to my hotel I made these notes about what she said: “Go beneath the story ... that takes a while, and meditation is the tool for that, to let go of inner dialog and come back to the direct experience.”

“Low self-esteem is the root cause of practically all the pain and misery in the world. It’s what drives war, and torture, and genocide. It’s what evil is. Do you think Hitler liked himself? Or Cortez? We hate others because we hate ourselves.”

~ Leonard, on Northern Exposure

The prettiest song I’ve heard in quite a while: Love at the Five & Dime, by Nanci Griffith.

(I thought maybe I knew this song from the 1970s, but it wasn’t released until 1986, so maybe it was a Texas thing.)