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.

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……

Buddha__Hojyo_Takashi_.jpg
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.

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.

When Making And Taking A Phone Call

When I am about to make a phone call I pause. Sometimes I dial and sometimes I don’t. I don’t because I get the decided sense that now is not the time or the urgency of the call simply passes. What ever the prompt I follow it, for the most part. At other times I’ll find myself drawn as if by a magnet to phone somebody. Unplanned and with no apparent reason, I phone them. Quite often I’ll catch the person I’m calling at a really good time, which is always gratifying. Or perhaps that person was about to phone me! This method is not universally applicable nor 100% reliable.

So communicating by phone, even just the matter of to dial or not to dial is something of an art and a matter of divining if it is good to do. Calling for train times and other utilitarian reasons for using the phone is obviously straight forward. Or so one might think.

In hospitals for example there are many high value calls. Utilitarian ones. This is nurse X, patient B has moved to ward 67. Impacted Nurse, in his blog post Phone etiquette for medical staff there is advice on making and taking calls in hospitals. The basic etiquette can be applied anywhere.

I am proud to see that Ian of Impacted Nurse still lists Jade Mountains, under Non Medical.

Zen – The Movie

Zen tells the story, the film version anyway, of Dogen Zenji. I watched it several times while in the US last summer. It is worth a watch. I understand it’s been hard to find copies so I’m glad to point you to a site where Zen, the movie, can be bought.

Zen is an elegant and fascinating look into the life and times of 13th-century monk Dogen, founder of the Soto sect in Zen Buddhism. Offering a fairly faithful depiction of what is known of the monk’s life, the film follows Dogen, handsomely portrayed by kabuki actor Nakamura Kantaro, from an orphan child inspired by his mother’s dying words to a young monk wandering in China where he experiences his awakening. After reaching enlightenment, he returns to Kyoto to spread his teachings of silent meditation, attracting both dedicated followers and fierce detractors who cast him as a heretic. In his travels and teachings, Dogen encounters many different people. Some guide him, some follow him, and some test him, but all become crucial figures in his spiritual journey of peace and meditation.

Thanks go to Rod in Canada for the link.