Walking the Wall

I had left the book “The Wasteland & other poems” by T.S. Eliot in my bathroom for awhile after I finished it as I would find myself returning to “The Hollow Men” time and again for its haunting quality.

My daughter (15) came to me the other day and said she had also been reading and re-reading it, not sure what it meant but being drawn to it. Then yesterday I was getting ready and thinking about doing a post on the Hollow Men and she brought this drawing in to me–obviously the poem is still on her mind. We talked a little about what we thought it meant and plan to go through it and break it down; certainly it is not an easy poem to grasp.

I guess for me it is about fatal non-action. That if all we do is talk or whisper about injustice–we are part of the problem. That no, maybe we aren’t the lost, violent souls, but we are hollow. I’m especially drawn to section V that deals with the shadow that lies between.  That in between thinking and doing–is the shadow, and the many people get trapped in the shadowlands, essentially living out a hollow life. It is that idea of people sleep walking through life and not really being awake.

I know there is a lot more to the poem than that, but at the moment that is the essential message that I’m getting out of it. Apparantly a Switchfoot song called Meant to Live is based of of the poem (my daughter loves Switchfoot) and in the song he writes: “we were meant for so much more, we were meant to live.”

Last night I was tired, we have spent the last few days at the hospital with my dad who just got his hip replaced Monday. Thankfully, he came home yesterday and we came home later after getting him settled in for home recovery. While I was cleaning up the kitchen and getting my husband’s lunch ready, my son was whistling loud and cheery back and forth with his birds who had missed him all day and were very happy to see him. I yelled for him to please stop until I could leave the kitchen—but he didn’t understand me and came out to ask what I had said. I caught myself upright and instead shifted and told him he had a beautiful whistle that reminded me of my grandfather, which lead to a conversation with him about my grandfather (who died when I was eight) and how much he would have loved to have met my son.

Understanding how mental states color our reality is so important as they completely create our reality—so if I am tired and edgy and not being mindful and my son is whistling loudly to his birds, the sound is irritating and I snap at him to be quiet, please! If I’m calm and mindful of my son’s beautiful gift, when I hear that same exact whistling it is a beautiful sound that is precious for the very gift of breath he has to whistle. I had read a chapter about this the night before, which is why I caught myself. This was a very good lesson for me in how much our mental state colors how we react to experience and how much being mindful of them and shifting from unhealthy to healthy mental states can change the way we experience life.

This is exactly what Jack Kornfield writes about, very well, in the fourth chapter of his book, The Wise Heart: A Guide to the Universal Teachings of Buddhist Psychology. I’ve been reading through this book more slowly than normal because it is not a book to skim through, but to read and meditate on and practice. In fact, at the end of each chapter, he offers a suggestion on how to practice what he just talked about. I find this very helpful because it takes the ideology and words into actions. I have the tendency to gain a lot of head knowledge but then struggle to apply those things towards active, mindful living.

Anyway, in this chapter, Kornfield starts out with the basic understanding that in Western culture we tend to think about achieving happiness by “changing our external environment to fit our wishes” (49). This doesn’t work because no matter what we do in our life, pain comes with pleasure, loss comes with gain, and blame comes with praise. He also sets up the the understanding that our experience of life is less about actual experiences than about the “states of mind with which we meet it”. Now this got my attention because this is a big part of my personal ideology—we cannot usually control the things that happen to us, so we are really only responsible for how we react to them.

The gist of it is that we are responsible for becoming aware of what our current mental state is and shifting it away from worry, fear, envy, closed-mindedness and etc. that arise from the unhealthy states to the healthy states of wisdom, love, and generosity. In doing so, we open ourselves up to more honest and real experiences that are easier to deal with than through our buildup of a lifetime of conditioned responses.

Anyway, I wrote this essay as a way to process and really solidify the teachings and if you are interested in the more summary aspects of the chapter–click on the “continue” that follows.

Continue reading ‘Colorings’

I hope all of you in America had a lovely 4th of July spent with family and/or friends. We spent ours with family and friends; you can see the rest of the photos here on Flickr.

I forget to look under the flowers when photographing them sometimes, they really are beautiful from below as well and “imperfections” simply add to that beauty.

I’ve been interested in Bento lunch packing for a year or so just, to be honest, because of all the neat little accessories. Then the other day I stumbled on a couple great sites when I was researching balanced lunches. I had decided this week that I was going to pack up all our lunches the night before even though other than my husband, we all stay home. Staying home, though, is a deceptive phrase because we acutally run around a lot to family, friends, park, zoo, etc. Which means we tend to grab fast food much more than we should, or skip lunch, or just snag a pop tart or something on the run. All of the above is unhealthy and needs to stop. So, a little searching and I end up being sucked into hours of LunchinaBox.com. Who knew looking at preschool bento boxes would be so interesting! She has a great guide to how bento size works and how they correlate to calories. I’ve only just scratched the surface of JustBento, which has a lot of information about using the compact lunch qualities of Bento making as well as the balanced meal concepts it enforces for loosing weight and learning portion control–another thing most people, and certainly my family (other than my son), needs to relearn. She also has a great post about why someone like me, who works at home during the week, should still make a bento lunch.

Not having any large Asian stores around locally, I just bought four Fit & Fresh lunch to go boxes that have coldpack inserts. This is large, comparitively, for use as a bento box, but good for sandwiches in the bottom portion. I’d like to get a few traditional sized bento boxes but am doing some research and finding out what I want first. For my first packing, despite the size of the box, I was only at about 550 calories. Now, this is by no means a balanced meal as the protein is about missing entirely from this, I’ll add a hard boiled egg for that which puts the whole lunch at 625 calories, close to my 600 calorie goal–but not very good in terms of carbs and processed foods. Next stop, shooting for the balanced aspect of packing a bento lunch.

[ETA: Definitely too much food, ate 1/2 the sandwich and 3/4 of the pasta, same with the kids, we def. got a lesson in how little portions of a variety of food "feels" more filling.]

A friend of mine sent me a quote: “Those who think life is so gloomy have clearly never danced in the rain,” though I have also heard it as “Anyone who says sunshine brings happiness has never danced in the rain,” and yet another variation I particularly like: “Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass, it’s about learning to dance in the rain.”

I went to a huge outdoor disco party Friday night with three other friends to dance the night away for a Make-A-Wish fundraiser. The Make-A-Wish organization came to our home and asked my son what his wish might be about 7 years ago and fulfilled it in a way he’ll never forget. We went last year and certainly couldn’t pass it up this year and I’m glad we didn’t. We danced until my feet and knees were on fire and then felt drops of rain, kept dancing, and then it RAINed and we got more than a little wet before the rain blew by. I have to say I think that was the best part of the night. A lot of people left the dance floor but I think that was their loss because there is nothing quite like putting your face up to the rain and just dancing!

I remember as a kid there was nothing better than summer rain fall when it is warm enough to just run out in the rain and play in the puddles. Part of the small street I lived on dipped down and would flood during big rainstorms and I remember splashing in that with abandon. There is something so far removed from children in the rain as adults dashing on the sidewalks trying to avoid the drops or huddled under umbrellas and muttering “rain, rain, go away” under their breaths. A few years ago I made a pact with myself that I wouldn’t drop my head and shoulders in the “rain hunch,” but keep it up, face to the sky. I’ve gotten out of that habit and dancing in the rain reminded me of why I’d promised myself that.

As I have said before, I love to dance, but I am not good at it, enthusiastic, but not good at it. This video (thank you, Jason, for showing it) makes me smile, laugh, get weepy…I think it’s great and going to his website (whereinthehellismatt.com) you can find a lot more interesting things to read and watch about the whole process–along with a better quality version of the video. This is the third incarnation and he just put it up 5 days ago. It just shows the connection around the world, we’re all people, we are all capable of standing up and dancing like dorks and getting a kick out of it. As a side note, I was also happy to find out that all the video was captured with a Canon Powershot (the camera I just bought): ETA, the two earlier videos were, I think this one was actually shot in HD).

The lyrics of the song were taken from Stream of Life by Rabndranath Tagore, (the song Praan, is composed by Gary Scyman):

Stream of Life

The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day

runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.

It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth

in numberless blades of grass

and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.

It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth

and of death, in ebb and in flow.

I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life.

And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.

“I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas: they’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind.”
~Emily Bronte, Catherine in Wuthering Heights (p120)

I bought a new camera today. I couldn’t stand it any longer since my daughter accidentally broke the screen on my Sony Cybershot DSC-W50 camera I have been trying to be patient. The truth is, I was trying to wait until the Fall for my birthday or Winter for Christmas to get a higher quality camera. I couldn’t do it, I can’t stand not having a camera. We couldn’t afford to replace the camera for the same one as just coming off of a new iPod and a new MacBook in the space of this spring; it just wasn’t in the budget to spend $400 on a camera. I figured I’d pick up a cheaper camera until Christmas and then let the kids use the cheaper camera when I got a nicer one. First, I picked up a Nikon Coolpix S51 on clearance and took it back the next day–today. I needed to go cheap but this one just didn’t do it for me: it took pretty good pictures, but it didn’t feel heavy enough in hand, it couldn’t do macros (very important to me, more important than zoom) well, and had a terrible lag to it–it just didn’t work for me.  Now, I love Sony Cybershots, I have had two of them and loved both of them. But the Cybershot that would be in the price range I could afford didn’t have great reviews. I found a camera review site called Digital Camera Resource Page that gave very thorough reviews and even had a suggestion section by price range. That was where I got to the review on a Canon Powershot SD1100 IS that came highly recommended for it’s size and price range. So today on the way to my friend’s birthday lunch I returned the Nikon and took a look at the Powershot–it felt good, the couple macros I took in the store were very promising, no big lag issues, and it was on a good sale. I bought the Chocolate brown on a whim (you can see a picture of it here on Flickr, it’s not mine), I’ve had silver cameras for the last two and just liked the look of the brown although my kids aren’t too impressed with the color. I got a good deal for it on sale, popped the small SD card it came packaged in, stuck in the battery (which had a nice charge to get me through the party), threw it into the hard case I bought to avoid a repeat of my Sony’s broken screen, and off to the party I went.

We were in a small, private room in the restaurant so there was no natural lighting and it all had a yellow cast and yet despite that, I felt like it took great pictures. I snapped some other shots when I got home and put a 2gig SD card in (which says it can take 900+ on the screen which can’t be right), though it was getting dark and yet despite the lower lighting it took a nice macro shot of this small flower and a couple nice ones of one of our dogs who never stays still. I didn’t play with any settings yet, this is just out of the box. So far, I’m very impressed and don’t (as yet) feel like I’ve lost too much. I haven’t tried taking a movie yet. More testing to come tomorrow, but for tonight I’m just relieved to have a camera again!