I have fallen off the meditation practice wagon lately, and was reminded by some tweets recently from someone I actually know from Zaadz/Gaia that it's something I value too much to let it slide the way I have been.  Through one of his posts I found this fascinating post on Chade-Meng Tan's blog about an in-house program at Google called SIY, and through that I found this awesome video presentation by Phillipe Goldin (who is at Stanford and also a longtime meditator) on the neuroscience of emotions with a lot of scientific information on the actual brain-changing effects of meditation. (Is that enough hyperlinks for you? Wait, there's another one coming, I can feel it.)
And now I have a little bit of a crush on Meng, by the way.
I'm also currently reading Train Your MInd, Change Your Brain (Sharon Begley) on the same subject and it's completely fascinating.

I listen to shakuhachi flute music a lot and when it's playing in the house the animals all get very calm and I find that it's easier to concentrate and things get done in a more fluid way than they otherwise would.

I don't play any musical instrument and I don't read music. It feels like a form of illiteracy to me but there you have it.

When I worked at a Waldorf school all the lower grade kids had pentatonic flutes, which sound good no matter what you do. I like forgiving instruments. And hand drums, and shakers. I like those a lot.

Also sometimes I like to listen to Brian Eno ambient stuff as background music - I think the music that's going on creates an affect (and an effect as well) in my life and it's so easy to discount how pervasive it is. If you've ever seen a movie with and without the music background you know what I mean here. How would you know those basement stairs are scary territory without the music? What if the soundtrack was circus music instead? (That would make it really funny when the zombies come out, wouldn't it?) Music has so much power. I kind of wish that in real life the scary music would start playing when I'm about to do something really stupid, but so far that hasn't been at all helpful. Dang.

Now see, here's where I run into a problem:  if I really wished I had more compassion then I wouldn't be so bitchy about certain things in the first place, now would I?

Here is an incomplete list of my compassion-free zone: bad drivers, drunk drivers, smokers, the morbidly obese, morbidly obese smoking drunk bad drivers, people who wear polyester clothing, and people who complain all the time. Just for starters. It's all I can do to keep myself from telling you why it's totally reasonable for me to feel this way so I think compassion is still a ways off.

One of the morbidly obese folks in my universe seems to eat nothing but pancakes and french toast. Another eats only junk food and fast food - and she smokes cigarettes. Both of them are constantly injured and ill, and when I say constantly, that is not an exaggeration. Even if I had started out feeling some compassion it would have run dry a while back.

I'm sure the Dalai Lama would not be so bitchy, but he's an exceptionally nice person. There you have it.

"Do you leap between major life changes every six months or so, or do your shifts happen on a longer cycle?"

Are you kidding?
Okay, I will just about only drive a stick shift, with the exception of Krissy's Prius which does not count as it is not a car but some kind of amusement park ride. I'm amazed I don't drive off the road looking at all the cool little displays. If I shouldn't talk on my cell while driving then Priuses (what's the plural of Prius? Prii?) should be illegal.
Anyway, the point here is that I shift gears regularly. Six months? Are you crazy Siona?
Last week our hot water heater did some crazy thing, of course in the middle of the night, and we woke up to burning plastic smell and spent half the night trying to figure out what was about to catch on fire and since then have had no hot water source.  It's not as bad as it seems like it would be. Think camping. Except we have places to shower that do in fact have hot water, just not at home. Heat water to wash dishes, miss washing my hands with warm water expecially now that it's getting chilly and the water is very cold, but no big deal. We're waiting to figure out what we're going to do, trying to decide between the most energy efficient electric replacement or solar but there are going to be some drawbacks in the winter with that or some other options Albert has suggested but for now we're just camping in our house.
(For  those of you who don't know me, Albert is our housemate. He is brilliant and crazy and hardly ever here. He used to blog here but has lately been absent. From Gaia I mean. Well, home too but that's his usual.)
Same week, after my computer blew a power supply, Krissy's computer blew out the vid card when the hot water heater did its thing. So now we are sharing just the laptop which I kind of like as the status quo. I haven't been gaming lately so a laptop is perfectly adequate and not having the other computers clears out a lot of space. My desk is gone now and I don't think I want it back.  Crisis/opportunity.
Does anyone know if that's a real thing, the crisis/opportunity story? What I've heard is that the chinese character for crisis is the same as for opportunity. But if it's just some myth that's okay, it's still true. I say it to myself everytime something blows up or stops working or gets in my way - crisis/opportunity. There is always an opportunity. Just shift gears.
And it doesn't take a crisis of course. I shift gears hundreds of times a day. I don't multitask. I don't think multitasking is actually possible, it's just barely paying attention to too many things, so I prefer to unitask and shift gears.
I think this is a good analogy to driving a car:  "How often do you shift gears?" Whenever you need to. Not before and not later. Just when you need to.
Oh, and don't ride the clutch.

Krissy's niece (does that make her my niece-in-law?) got in a bunch of trouble today. She's 14 and not allowed to "date" yet. Whatever that means, and as if you can prevent any part of that from occurring. So, her mom found these sexually explicit emails from a boy on a myspace account that mom told her she could only have if mom had access to it.
My first thoughts here are, you don't have to show an ID, you just have to say you're 18, so why in the world would you give your parent that kind of power? She seems like a bright girl, am I missing something? Does she actually need a worker?
And then my next thought is, is mom trying to train her to be sneakier and a better liar? Because, really, that is the only option.
I rarely give other people the opportunity to make decisions for me. Even when I was fourteen, I had figured that out. On the other hand, I don't want to make decisions for other people - I'm a control freak about my own life but not anyone else's. Once in a while those boundaries are fuzzy - if someone posts crappy pictures of you, are they yours or theirs? Well, obviously, if they don't like you or care how you feel, that's out of your control zone and you just have to let that go. What about medical care...how much research are you required to do to know what is really happening to you? For me, the answer is, as much as I can possibly do. Not something I'm trusting about.
There is some distinction between power over and empowerment, but basically - for me at least - personal power and empowerment hinges on self-responsibilty. If I screw that up or let it slip through my fingers, that's on me.

Are you kidding me? I don't have to walk miles every day with a bucket to haul unclean water back to my family. I don't have malaria. I have more than enough food - I have to be conscious of not eating too much! I have a washer and dryer and changes of clothes and electricity and a computer and high speed internet and a car and a bicycle. I have a great relationship with a wonderful partner. I have lovely (sometimes ornery) animals who live with us. I have a home. I have space for a garden. I have a dogwood tree in my backyard and daffodils that come out in the spring and moss grows on the ground all by itself and other than the poison ivy hedge growing along one of the fences, a great living space.
Fortunate implies some other option - for someone to be fortunate, there has to be a concept of unfortunate. Some people are truly unfortunate in their circumstances, others in their choices, and lots of people a combination of both. Some of the people who are walking miles for dirty water may be happier day to day than someone else living in the suburbs and shopping at Ikea. Not that the unhappy Ikea shoppers would cheer up if they switched places, but there is something a little subversive about having enough to want too much.
Some people just default to unhappy - like the grinch, their hearts are just a few sizes too small. That's an unfortunate circumstance, but also maybe a choice. Well, I hope it's a choice, because then they have options, right? I don't want to think that the unhappy people are stuck that way, like the way my mom said if I made a face it would stick. Except she was sort of right I think - if you hold your face the same way all the time, eventually it does stick. I think unhappiness is like that too: if you look at the faces of old people you can see who got stuck in unhappiness, in the idea that they are just unfortunate, who held their face that way for too long and it stuck, who hung on to their miseries.
I am fortunate that I kind of default to happy even in the worst times, and that I have this wonderful life, and that I refuse to take that for granted or cling to miseries. A good combination of choice and circumstance.

Sticks and rocks and bits of dirt. Lost objects, found objects, battered seashells, torn clothing. Trees with funny shapes. Weeds. Sounds of thunder and wind blowing hard through leaves and rain falling. The sound of kittens purring and that way that hounds kind of talk-bark themselves into a good howl. Grey hairs and soft skin and lips. I want a museum dedicated to juicy warm lips. And hands, ones with spidery long fingers and little short plump ones and some with wrinkles and all with warmth, hands that do massages and piano playing and hands playing guitars and hand drums and knitting...maybe that's it, a museum dedicated to hands. Or maybe it's eyes - looking into them, looking out of them, batting eyelashes over them, all the different colors of them, the tears that come out of them, maybe it should be a museum dedicated to eyes. No, I think it really is about the sticks and the rocks and the bits of dirt. And the ability to see them and love them. That's what it is.