Leaving the Cushion At Home

Part of our walks sometimes turns out to be finding a nice place to sit for meditation. It's lovely, and adds a wonderful dimension of mindfulness to the practice.

One day we stopped on the patio of a banquet hall (which was closed at the time):


Another day we sat on some old steps, carved into the stone, leading down to the sea:


One of the most interesting aspects of sitting outside is making all the sounds into part of the meditation. At the banquet hall, we heard wind and leaves--interspersed with gunshots (it's hunting season). As for the sea... well, here's a taste:

Musings

Near the end of Russell Hoban's Turtle Diary, Neaera H. writes:

I was waiting for something now, and the waiting was pleasant. I was waiting for the self inside me to come forward to the boundaries from which it had long ago withdrawn. Life would be less quiet and more dangerous, life is risky on the borders. ...


Come, I said to the self inside me. Come out and take your chance.



(The picture of the sea turtle is from the Nature's Crusaders website.)

Maritime Moments

Wow! Once you decide to take it easy, life can certainly get exciting!

Bruce and I went for a walk on Friday to check out his brand-new walking backpack and our shiny new real-Thermos-brand-not-cheap-knock-offs vacuum flasks, all of which performed wonderfully. We walked west from our apartment along the sea front, all the way to the end of the Roman salt pans. There was a very strong wind from the west, so it was pretty good exercise! Once we got to the end of the salt pans we took shelter in the lee of a stone building to have our picnic. It was really pleasant to sit in the shade and watch the tremendous swells of the ocean:


--but the wind shifted just a little and started blowing sand all over us, which we took as a sign it was Time To Leave.

On the way back (we made good time with a terrific tail wind blowing us along!), we noticed that the sea was blowing farther inland than it had been when we set out.


In fact, the strong winds and swells kept up all through Saturday, and when we went down to our village on Sunday morning there was quite a bit of damage. Several of the (sturdy) seaside benches had been wrecked,


and the sea had managed to find a crack under the concrete surface of the quay and had pushed and pushed until...


When you live by the sea, you don't really need a tsunami to show you just how powerful it can be. There was sand from the beach, and rocks as big as my head, in the village streets 100 feet up from the seafront. They've cleaned it all up now, they always clean it up, but it will happen again. And again. You just live with it. The sea is like that.

And Now For Something Completely Different

It's been a long time since I posted anything of much substance on this blog. The summer turned out to be much busier than I expected. I got a contract with Routledge, a major academic publisher, to produce a revised version of my doctoral thesis; this is great, but meant a lot of work rewriting and--mostly--reformatting a huge document and that took a lot of time. Doing this kind of work in the summer, when it's really, really hot and humid on Gozo, is a special kind of purgatory, and it absorbed most of my energy.

Then I had to take time off to write two conference papers for my trip to the UK, which took up most of September and involved attendance at three conferences and a seminar, travelling all over the country (since most of my academic interests are in the area of death and dying, I chose this little guy, above, from www.clipartheaven.com, as the mascot for this post). It was tremendously exciting, invigorating, inspiring--I reconnected with many friends and colleagues, got lots of good ideas, met new people, saw new places...

Then I came back to Gozo and put in some more time finishing off the manuscript, which finally got sent off to the publishers two weeks ago. It will resurface in about three months for me to check the proofs and make an index, but I have breathing space now.

And I've been using that breathing space to reassess what I'm doing with my time, and what I want to be doing with it. I could just continue with academic research and writing--I have lots of ideas, lots of contacts, I know how to do this and indeed I'm good at it. But I don't think that's enough.

So the books have been put away--at least the academic books; they've been replaced by works of fiction and poetry, and books on creativity and imaginal work (much influenced by Dr. Marie Angelo and her imaginal studies work--I had the great pleasure of meeting Marie when I was in the UK, it was a most inspirational afternoon) and also, importantly, by pens, pencils, paints, paper, knitting needles, fabric, thread, wool, spinning wheel, meditation cushion, walking shoes, camera, a journal which needs wrecking, and a general determination to get out into the beauties of Gozo and just enjoy being present in the moment.

I've spent the past six years in my study, working hard. It's been good, and I'm glad I did it. But it's time for a change.

Stay tuned!

Sand Animation

This is amazing. A friend sent it to me and I just had to share it. The context is a weekly Ukrainian talent contest. The artist is working on a light table, and what she's doing is being projected on a big screen behind her. She's telling the story of one of the aerial bombings of Kiev during World War II.

One Day

I'm swamped with work at the moment so don't have time to post much. But here's something I really liked--a song by Matisyahu, a Hasidic Jewish rapper...



Courtesy of The Buddhist Blog, where I found this, here are the words:

sometimes in my tears I drown
but I never let it get me down
so when negativity surrounds
I know some day it'll all turn around
because
all my live I've been waiting for
I've been praying for
for the people to say
that we don't wanna fight no more
they'll be no more wars and our children will play
one day

it's not about
win or lose
because we all lose when they feed on the souls of the innocent blood drenched pavement
keep on moving though the waters stay raging
in this maze you can lose your way (your way)
it might drive you crazy but dont let it faze you no way (no way)

one day this all will change
treat people the same
stop with the violence
down with the hate
one day we'll all be free
and proud to be under the same sun
singing songs of freedom

Five Ways to Misery

Thanks to the Wake Up To Your Life--Colombus Ohio group for finding this video and posting it on the Unfettered Mind ning.