Gladly I bumped into this video with its charming line drawings and gentle and rather good instructions. It is a skillful teaching to do with understanding that meditation is every moment. The instruction given in the video is to start with a purposeful one minute of meditation. Through practicing that you get to know what moment-to-moment meditations is. It is an interesting approach to making this point.
Hat tip to Mia for linking to this video.
See also on Impacted Nurse….always good to go to Australia from time to time to see what Ian is talking about. If you visit, be prepared to stay for a couple of hours…!
Mud mud glorious mud! There is a lot of it about. In the woodlands, fields and paths where I walk each morning there’s lots of mud and much opportunity. Mud and wet paths can be an opportunity to complain, to struggle through and long for drier weather. Complaining at ones lot and wishing it to be otherwise is a very common habit. Bending my knees, camera in hand, to view the path from a different angle it was transformed. The sky reflected in the puddles, the texture and the going on-ness of the path. Now I am wondering how it would be viewed from above. But no! I am not going to climb trees to find out.
It is hard to conceive when life seems to be doing it to us in harsh and mucky ways that how we view life is a choice. And choice changes with conditions, over time.
Here is somebody reflecting on what she does and finding beauty in it.
The job I am doing at the moment allows me to express in abundance kindness, gentleness, tenderness, compassion in a way that my ‘career’ job never did (or at least made very difficult.) And the spin off for me is huge. It feels as if what I am able to express comes directly back to me in some sort of circle of energy. I have the privilege, for a couple of hours a day, of caring for a lady who is close to death, supporting her and her husband, washing her, sitting with her while he goes out, talking with her about anything and everything, including her dying, sitting quietly beside her while she sleeps, holding the cup while she drinks tea, smoothing cream into her body, massaging her feet. It’s sad and moving, but it is also almost unbearably lovely and an incredible privilege.
After getting caught up in a blizzard last year I’d promised myself I’d not attempt the Hartside route if there was any chance of snow. I broke my promise.
The passing of Eve Arnold should not go unmarked here on Jade Mountains. I found this tribute to her this afternoon; Bidisha’s thought for the day: Eve Arnold. The thoughts echo my own.