Wombat and Dingbat Fix the World Come. Heal.
Living With Distance
Here is an extract from a readers question

Living With Distance

Like snacks? My body likes snacks. (human)

Yes, snacks, but also things like putting on lotion and taking a hot bath and drinking tea and dancing in the living room. Not with the tea. (Wombat and/or Dingbat response)

Note: Such sage advice but this blog is dog centred. You have been warned cat people.
And just in case you are not convinced here below their bio.

We are Wombat and Dingbat, two Australian Shepherds of exceptional wit and ability. With our human, Lynn Ungar, we’ve made a study of the art and science of behavior modification. (If you called it dog training you would be missing all the ways we’ve trained our human.) We’re totally down for all the tricks and stuff, but it’s come to our attention that you humans are, generally speaking, in a bit of a pickle. We’re here to help. Just let us know in the form below what you need. Kid won’t take a bath? People keep shooting up schools? Whatever your human-type problems, large or small, let us know and we’ll use the power of behavior science to set you in the right direction.

early yesterday morning

sitting on an old wooden bench
by the river bank at Kirkstall Abbey
feeling the water of compassion
flowing
everywhere

And
all around
nature’s awakening
from
winters of deep sleep

Thank you, dear reader, in Leeds Yorkshire.

What a rash of creative activity hitting our locked-in lives and the monastery is not lagging behind either.

Today we recorded and posted a video of Morning Service on the Throssel Hole Buddhist Abbey website. It lasts a fraction under 20 mins and for those who are familiar with this ceremony I hope you will sing and bow along with the community. Regularly.

This evening as I took a brief walk I pondered on how ‘we all’ are responding to being confined. Of course it’s not all singing and jolly creative fun. Homes and households are getting seriously frayed. Lives lost and physical damage to persons and property is happening. Tragically.

Let our hearts break with the ‘Enormousness’ and move on through this to touch and know that which our heart desires. I’ll leave that thought with you. Creatively.

Here is a stone seat at the top of the field put together by somebody in memory of their mother. A merit bench.

This lunch time I sat up there looking out across the valley. Warm enough to go without hat and coat, sun shining. How fortunate to have open space.

I like to think sitting quietly on this bench invites merit, spiritual merit, to circulate in the world.

Maybe you have a ‘merit bench’; in a park, woodland, bus stop, at home?

Here is a piece by Kitty O’Meara. I thought now is the right time and day to publish here. Many of you may have read this already as I understand it has been circulated widely over the last days and weeks.

And the people stayed home. And read books, and listened, and rested, and exercised, and made art, and played games, and learned new ways of being, and were still.

And listened more deeply. Some meditated, some prayed, some danced. Some met their shadows.

And the people began to think differently.

And the people healed. And, in the absence of people living in ignorant, dangerous, mindless, and heartless ways, the earth began to heal.

And when the danger passed, and the people joined together again, they grieved their losses, and made new choices, and dreamed new images, and created new ways to live and heal the earth fully, as they had been healed.

Very many thanks to Julius for sending me the link to this.