One-Armed Writer & An Experiment With Voice Recognition!

Poor pinky...so dramatic!

So, I'm here in the garden taking a bit of forced R and R. Last week I took a  tumble on my mountain bike, causing a severe break to poor pinky. Surgery followed resulting in pins, and now my writing hand is sufficiently bound and casted. Six days taking it easy, elevating my hand, icing and taking ibuprofen has me ready to figure out the next four weeks of one armed life!  

Thus proceeds an experiment in voice recognition! I've verbally prepared an email to myself, which I then copied and pasted into this blog article. It's a great practice in mindful speech. Please excuse the punctuation :)

With all this pondering time I've been thinking about the Four Noble Truths discovered by the Buddha:

1) There is suffering.
2) There is a path leading to suffering.
3) There  is happiness.
4) There is a path leading to happiness.

A natural tendency was to go over the course of events leading up to the accident and identify bad choices made and the domino effect these now have on my livelihood, my clients and my husband (who is my left-hand man) for the next four weeks. Indeed, there is ill-being and there was a path (quite literally) leading to ill being. 

Ah, but there is also wellbeing...writing is one of my paths to happiness, as is physical exercise and the work that I do. All require my dominant hand! The next four weeks is an experiment in the beauties and adaptations of a one handed world. 

How are we to practice the Four Noble Truths--to recognize suffering and the path of suffering and become more skillful at choosing a path of happiness and wellbeing?  Well, darling, that there is the stuff of life and the school of hard knocks!

The answer to such an exquisite question brings us to the Noble Eightfold path--see you in a couple days to explore these gems....

Fruit of Independence Day!

Happy July 4th everyone! As I type, I'm kicking it in the backyard sanctuary with Martin Luther King Jr's book, "Stride Toward Freedom," on my left and my journal on my right, and bloggin' it up in the middle! It's a good 4th so far. July's theme was the suggestion--fruit. This theme came up after we went on a wildflower walking meditation as a community. The flower fruit was popping and we were fortunate enough to soak it up in that moment in time. Brainstorming this theme of fruit, I'm pondering two aspects:

1) Fruit happens when natural order guides it into being. Natural law is always in the director's seat--for instance, take our lovely wildflower friends, no one plants them, waters them, or cares for them in any way, shape or form except creation/natural order (wind, rain, soil, sunshine, insects, etc). There is a natural cycle to the bearing of fruit.

2) Fruit happens when conscious effort has been applied. Wait, didn't I just say creation rules? Yes, indeed, and we are agents that either help it along or hinder it. No rain? Go get the watering can! If within us, with diligence and effort, we move towards goals, be them material, personal, or spiritual, our thoughts, actions and words will precipitate the development of fruit. Take one of my favorite Freedom Series peeps, Martin Luther King, Jr., by his non-violent ethics and sheer determination to uphold these principles, a nation and its people were transformed. He had conviction the fruit would ripen, even though with his efforts it had only begun to take seed.

This is a deep theme, ya'll! Be heartened, for it's summer and we're going to pop whether we like it or not and yet...I'll be getting up and finding a watering can if someone is in need. It's my day of independence as I commit to look closely at what I'm allowing to ripen without interference and what I'm consciously helping along or arresting based on my thoughts, actions and words. I feel a blessing coming on...

~By Their Fruits
Plant the seed, watch it grow--
Poison Oak or
Sunflowers?