If I could add another 30 or even 60 days to my mindfulness project, perhaps I could grab complete control over the distracting beeps, bleeps and burps. Maybe. Maybe not. The calendar and life-responsibilities, however, won’t give me those extra 30 to 60 days.
So I decided to wrap the final days with a contemplative retreat at a nearby monastery where retreatants vow to not speak during their stay.
Both Cruz and I savored this holy show, yet we each harbored a sadness knowing full well, that our seas are not healthy. It brought us to a conversation about our mutual experiences with faith, religious devotion, and honoring our earth.
The bargain juicer literally exploded while I juiced grapes! A centrifugal juicer, the juicer’s strainer basket/shredder disk dislocated itself, blasted through the plastic top cover like a terrorist’s bomb. Then the shredder disk rocketed into the air, spun like a UFO, landing 20 feet into the living room. Grape remnants stuck to the kitchen ceiling, the dining room chandelier and cabinets—about 10-feet west—and some plastered the TV screen in a protective cabinet.
…the moistened soil–autumn-sun warmed–seduced dormant seeds awake. A resurrection of green slipped through the layer of fallen leaves and dried grasses. By morning a thunderous roar filled the canyon. The Kaweah River no longer struggled to trickle through plump gray boulders.
But something went terribly wrong. On Tuesday morning, September 11, 2001, horror stuck America. I asked, “Should I cancel the fundraiser?” The resounding reply was, “No! If ever we needed to do something good, and enjoy our country’s harvest, we need a day in your orchard. Keep the event!”
The free market, however, is, now, just another quaint and misused phrase funded by uber-billionaires that care-less for you, me, or the woman struggling to feed her family by making and selling popsicles after they took her job and sent it to Pakistan. She’s inconsequential, as are the men, women and children in Pakistan’s sweat factories earning poverty wages making stuff to sell in America and elsewhere.
Plastics are in everything—including our personal care products like toothpaste, facial scrubs, shaving cream, shower gels, and toilet bowl cleaners. Up to 10% of these products can contain polypropylene microbeads for the “scrubbing” effect.
The tiny, often not visible microbeads are meant to wash down the drain, which eventually winds up in the ocean.
Yes, I am cherry picking words from the recently published Apostolic Exhortation by Pope Francis. I can’t slow dance with every statement in the document–I guess I’m too independent. Yet, when it comes to the well-being of humanity, I can not quit sloshing about in my happy dance upon hearing a person of immense influence speak against the loud vocalizations of what I must term as the politically far right. Years back, when I first heard the bellowing of the likes of Limbaugh, […]
A landmark birthday nears and I’m not as ambivalent as with other landmark birthdays: 40, 50, and 60. Reflection is like a mirror that won’t break and leave my presence. Some memories delight me and others can bring the flow of tears. I see the young faces of those who died in their youth. They remain young forever. No gray hair. No limps. No lumps. Bright eyes. Smooth skin. Abundant dreams–albeit unfulfilled. When a mirror captures me, I spin away so as […]
It’s not that I can’t be stubborn and hot-headed. I am far from human perfection. In my defense, I’ve developed my enabling spirit into a negotiating spirit. There are always two-sides to every whole. The question remains, however, what if one of those sides is so badly injured and toxic that a cure is unlikely—at least in the present?
