Stars at Elbow and Foot

I started meditating again. The last time I had seriously meditated was before the kids were born, and that was not a Zazen meditation, but something new and not that productive. Let's stop with the vaguries. It was imaginative, but nothing real nor good came from it. So I'm back up to 15 minute sessions of sitting in Zazen or mantra medtitation. For a while I made it a game, but that was diluting the process. I've taken a more gentle and traditional aproach to medtitating. I set my iPhone's timer to 15 minutes and sit, concentrating on my breathing or a mantra. I have this afterglow from meditating.  After meditating I am the happiest and most calm and clear that I am all day, but this lasts for a few hours and fades. The pitfalls of life and work stream back in and slowly chip away at my ability to remain calm and accepting. So there's improvement, and there's more improvements to be made.  I need to sit and do the work, probably longer and at least twice a da...

      Hi, Old Friend. It's been a long time since we talked. Too long. I've been trying to make something out of myself, but it seems that what I've made is not what I'd intended. There was supposed to be creativity and prose involved, not business emails and revenue watching. How did this happen? Slowly at first, and then all at once.       There are actual living beings dependent on me for survival, so I do what I do and my family survives- even flourishes! I don't feel like I'm flourishing. I feel like I'm jumping through other people's hoops for prizes and acceptance. I'm more comfortable financially now, probably the most comfortable I've ever been, but something had to be sacrificed for that to happen. There was a price that had to be payed. The death of a dream, maybe.       You get older and you watch things fade. Eyesight. Speed. Dreams. I'm not the dreamer anymore. Now my kids are the dreamers, and I help facilitate t...

Why do people not reply to our hellos and goodbyes?  What brought my attention to this was a trip to Paris. Before my trip, I had read that people over there are very big on being polite and on saying hello and goodbye. Once I was over there, I tried to practice this and I noticed that I started having a greater awareness of others. I thought that it was a beautiful thing that an entire city of people seemed to encourage this awareness and respect of other people. Since that trip over five years ago, I have kept practicing this. It is amazing how many people would rather treat you like an inanimate object than acknowledge that you are someone alive and worthy of mutual respect. I once read that one of the biggest problems in African countries where war and killing was a commonplace thing was that children would just walk right up to the bodies of the dead and poke and beat them with sticks and further defile the bodies. There was a loss of the importance ...

Have you seen Terence Malick's Tree of Life?  It speaks about the way of nature and the way of grace, a conflict within man and the very world we inhabit. It seems that there seems to be a lot more of the way of nature and less of the way of grace now.

via One Surrealist a Day Sunday Dalí: Phantasmagoria, 1930. Oil on panel, 69 x... : Sunday Dalí: Phantasmagoria , 1930. Oil on panel, 69 x 44 cm. Property of Jack Nicholson, Beverly Hills, CA. The keys on the stand that support the image of Dalí’s mother-as-recepticle suggest that ...

Chaos Cinema Part 1 on Vimeo This is the long Now of entertainment; jump cuts, shaky cam, disorientation. Hail Chaos Cinema and its prophet, Michael Bay!

via Ignatian Spirituality: