Category Archives: Daily Life

Practical Advice for Parents + Everybody Else

Advice for parents and grandparents. And everybody else!

3. Practice seeing your children (partner, neighbour, co worker etc.) as perfect just the way they are. Work at accepting them as they are when it is hardest for you to do so.

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Free Day?

That’s what my diary told me today was going to be. A Free Day! And it has been a free day, a freewheeling kind of day. Ending now with the Jade blank page which I’ve not been filling for the last few days. Sorry about that.

Sunday found me with a group in Hebden Bridge for a day of sitting together. I’m not sure what happened to time though. The day seemed so spacious with more sittings and gathering times than there would normally be on a day retreat. There even seemed to be time to spare. Anyway….

There was an altar in the room where we sat. And as is customary there was a vase with flowers. They were three daffodils. A bud. An opening bud. A fully opened blossom. Showing the step-by-step, unfolding, aspect of practice within sequential time, simultaneously with the all-together aspect. The not bound by time. Perhaps it was the teaching of the flowers that had the day so oddly spacious. Anyway…..

On the altar, as well as the flowers there was a Buddha image. I remember it was white/cream and highly detailed. Earlier in the day this image came in an email. Hojyo Taashi is a well known paper folder and I hope she or he will not mind me publishing this image. It has to be the very best example of this Origami project. I wish I could say I’d be folding one of these on my next free day, but I’ll most likely be doing what I did today. Free wheeling. Anyway……

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Origami Buddha on a lotus by Hojyo Takashi

You can download previously published articles on Home Altars on the Obc Journal website.

Thanks to those who made Sunday a memorable one. Thank you for your generosity.

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Julie’s Story

I was sent the link to The Julie Project a week or more ago and had half decided not to post on it. Then as the days went by the images and the story kept coming back to me. Disturbing images of a woman going down, down and down. And images of her children too. As Darcy Padilla says below, I hope you can’t stop thinking about Julie’s story. In my case her work has succeeded.

The purpose of the project is to take the disparate arguments about welfare, poverty,family rights, AIDS, drug and sexual abuse by looking at one person’s life, Julie.

Julie’s story matters and should make a difference to us the viewer in our
understanding of the fractured world that many poor people struggle to exist in.

As a friend said, “I realize this type of story plays out constantly in the world for many, many families. The pieces slip away or no one cares to remember the details. We see the summation of cause and effect in a homeless face on the street every day. It can be too complicated, uncomfortable and painful to ask why.”

I hope you can’t stop thinking about Julie’s story, I hope it makes you feel.
I hope it makes you look at the world differently.

The Julie Project.

Thanks to J for the link.

The Guardian On-Line Review of Darcy Padilla’s Julie Project – when photography becomes humanitarian.

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With Confidence – Speak!

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If they could speak what stories they might tell. Confidences on sunny day walks. Tears and laughter – children playing – adults booted and gloved, gossiping. Soft clouds of vapour issuing forth on a chilly afternoon. Words harsh, whispers and shouts enter alike the walls ancient ear.
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Moss holding a secret spoken in confidence, last century perhaps. Don’t breath a word of this, she whispered. And the moss grew in a spiral and the wall remained still. And silent.
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If walls had eyes! Peeping out through elegant moss-lashes. Watching the passing by. Fashions change. Sheep and cows have been ever thus. But we know walls don’t have eyes. Right?
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On the field side, unconcerned. Indifferent sheep feed. What they say is anybodies guess! The wall has heard it all before…many times.
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At the end of the day what’s the message in this whimsy post? Well I have been thinking lots about confidence, and confidences and confidentiality. All linked together. And in the end my thoughts on this subject tend to alight on two old fashioned words, honour and respect. Here is my favorite quote on the matter.

‘Respect for others begins by not ignoring their words.’
Elias Canneti
From: ‘The Torch in My Ear’

And I continue that quote thus;

Honour others by not repeating their words. Thoughtlessly.

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Pains In The Head

After much tapping and poking and asking Does this hurt? Or THIS! and (oddly) sticking her little fingers in my ears? she said, Well Reverend my best advice is an extraction! Right there in the chair with nowhere to run, nowhere to hide and in no time the troublesome tooth was out and away. That was yesterday. Today? Less pain.

Over the past couple of weeks or so I’ve fallen under the spell of wandering jaw, tooth and sinus pains. With dentists off duty for the holidays I’ve just had to grin and bear with it. But with it came diminished brain function which, because of diminished brain function, I didn’t fully realize! The truth of it is gradually dawning on me as I rise out of the fog of pain.

Thinking is still quite a struggle. Thinking what to say now. Goodness! How very much we rely on our ability to sequence thoughts. Our ability to think straight. Interesting though, to see or know, that the reflective capacity remains intact in the midst of, for me, relatively mild difficult mind states.

Somebody asked me recently why it is that some people take up a reflective/spiritual practice, and some do not. If I had had my wits about me I’d have said something like, It’s the people who know they hurt badly enough, and believe they can do something about it, who take up a reflective practice. But I stumbled and rambled on about how I find it difficult to distinguish between those who do and those who do not have a practice. Even in extremity the capacity to reflect and act remains, to a greater or lesser amount, in tact. I feel that capacity is common to all.

Thanks to the people sitting in Hebden Bridge who sat through my somewhat disjointed speaking the other evening.

This post is for those who are in real extremity. Especially mental/emotional extremity. And for those wonderful individuals who help them. Real treasures.

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