Have you ever paused to notice?
if your mouth is closed
when you breath in
and when you breath out?

Have you ever considered?
if your mouth is OPEN
while you walk in silence
and have you wondered why?

Have you ever paid attention?
to the soft touch of top on bottom lip
and noticed the wonder of it
in your toes?

Have you ever paused to ponder?
if mouth open or closed
while breathing through your day
matters?

A friend pointed out the merits of nose breathing, when ever possible, as against mouth breathing.

Why wander the world panting? Surely life is not one long emergency.
Is it?

Here are my hosts of the last two days moving towards Chichester Cathedral.

We walked around the old walls of Chichester this morning. There's Greyfriers where William Blake was tried for....? Following the thread of interest (and curiosity) Wikipedia gave us the answer.

He (William Blake) rejected all forms of imposed authority; indeed, he was charged with assault and uttering seditious and treasonable expressions against the King in 1803, though he later was cleared in the Chichester assizes of the charges. The charges were brought by a soldier called John Schofield after Blake had bodily removed him from his garden, allegedly exclaiming, "Damn the king. The soldiers are all slaves."[17] According to a report in the Sussex county paper, "The invented character of [the evidence] was ... so obvious that an acquittal resulted."[18] Schofield was later depicted wearing "mind forged manacles" in an illustration to Jerusalem.[19]
Wikipedia entry for William Blake.

Blake lived in Sussex as do my hosts. At the renewal of their marriage vows they had the following piece of Blake read out. After some research we found the quote is from J.B.Priestly's *Time and the Conways and not Auguries of Innocence.

Every night and every morn
Some to misery are born;
Every morn and every night;
Some are born to sweet delight;
Some are born to sweet delight;
Some are born to endless night.
Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine;
Under every grief and pine
Runs a joy with silken twine.
It is right it should be so:
Man was made for joy and woe;
And when this we rightly know
Safely through the world we go.

The play (Time and the Conways)emerged out of Priestley's reading of J. W. Dunne's book An Experiment with Time in which Dunne posits that all Time is happening simultaneously ie that past, present, future are one and that linear Time is only the way in which human consciousness is able to perceive this.

Nothing like following a thread of thought and interest leading back to here and now. I think this post is about creativity.

Photographer unknown, great picture.

Whoops! It is time for me to leave Reading Buddhist Priory and be on my way further south. There is not much more south to England and after that there is an island just off the south coast. That's where I'll be, the Isle of Wight, for most of March with the intention of resting before flying to North America in late April or early May.

My thought today is about balance, balance in all matters. Balance matters.

Thanks to the blog reader who just walked into the priory with a card and a dana offering. I've been talking about your blog this week-end during the retreat! he said.

In this moment there is nothing
which comes to be.
In this moment there is nothing
which ceases to be.
Thus, in this moment there is no birth
and death to be brought to an end.
Thus, there is absolute peace in this
present moment,
Although it is just this moment,
there is not limit to this moment.
And herein is eternal delight.
Hui Neng

Sitting and working in the priors office at Reading Buddhist Priory near London. It is getting late, I'm attempting to catch up on a weeks worth of unanswered emails. This quote popped out at me from her notice board earlier in the day. Now it can be on yours.

The photograph? Taken in the Chilterns north of Reading on Friday.

What is it? Not at all sure.

Wet and windy driving conditions (North West of England), endless long strait roads over flat fens (Norfolk), my favourite service station temporally rendered a building site (southbound Westmorland Services) all pale into insignificance in the face of a FAST INTERNET CONNECTION. Oh Joy, indeed.

But the subject on my mind this evening is memory, short term memory and the loss of it which comes with advancing years. I visited an elderly woman this afternoon who struggled to remember what she had just said and what she wanted to say right now. This happens to the best of us however at a certain point in ones life I can see how very frightening this can be. The question I am left with now is how much we/society equate loss of short term memory with dementia, especially in the elderly. Just a thought, a thought with a ladle full of compassion along with it.

Many thanks to Chris and his wife in Preston Lancashire where I'm staying before going on to Manchester tomorrow for a day retreat in the center of town. Hopefully by the end of Sunday I'll be back in Northumberland again attempting to reconnect with tasks as yet not tackled. These involve activating long term memory, which I don't have a problem with!

Spore capsules of a moss plant carefully testing the temperature above the ice. Victor Bos

I went out for a walk today in blizzard like conditions with the intention of taking some photographs. Unfortunately when the moment came my camera told me it's batteries were exhausted! I was fine though.

To make up for the lost snow pictures here is a photograph which came in a New Year greeting from a Dutch reader. What a brilliant picture. There are more on the web site of Victor Bos. (I've downloaded the Google Toolbar, which has a translation button, just so I can read his blog.)

I'd like to take the opportunity to applaud my Dutch friend who is undergoing major surgery on the 16th of this month. She is one brave woman, and such fun too!

Along with the life saving ColdFX capsules from Edmonton (thanks Mike) were a couple of clippings from Canadian Geographic. I'd heard Mike tell of the ice roads in the Northwest Territories, and beyond into Nunavut which reaches into the Arctic Circle. Each spring in late January or early February Mike dispatches truck loads of supplies to the diamond and gold mines in the far north. It is a big eye opener to see what is going on in an area of the world we could be forgiven for thinking is uninhabited and uninhabitable.

The Tibbitt to Contwoyto Winter Road runs for 360 miles. Driving speed is 22 mph or less, trucks go out in convoys of three at a time, the ice has to be 40 ft thick to take the weight of the largest trucks. There always has to be two up in a truck and apparently drivers wave the seat belt rule to give themselves needed seconds to jump clear of their vehicle if the ice breaks. If I were up in Lac de Gras at -31c I'd have second thoughts about the wisdom of being there.

At the start of our feast today we recited the customary meal time verse, the Five Thoughts. The second thought is 'we must consider our merit when accepting it'. One can understand this in a number of ways, for me it is a right now consideration. Eating a meal is not a life threatening activity however in terms of practice there is ultimately no room for past or future. I guess that must be the same for those truckers out on the ice.

Be careful out there!

[This isn't one of Rev. Mugo's pictures but I couldn't resist adding him onto to the end of this series. He lives on the wall of a factory on a Japanese industrial estate. Actually he's just starting to draw another picture but it always feels to me like he's doing his daily meditation. - Iain]