Summer Solstice

I may do a ritual for Summer Solstice this year...which I don't believe I ever have. Let's see, just have a circle to represent the elements and directions (N,S,E and W.) Earth, air, fire, water. Easy to find in all my collections. I can set this up as an altar, a place to meditate upon as the longest day of the year offers all that sun-time! Music helps set the mood of reverence, probably some sunshine songs.

"Sunshine on My Shoulders" by John Denver (from the Wildlife Concert)

It's up to God

 Commodification of everything is the biggest problem of how things are run these days, in my humble opinion! 

For (Heraclitus), reality is not a constellation of things at all, but one of processes. The fundamental ‘stuff’ of the world is not material substance but volatile flux, namely 'fire,’ and all things are versions thereof (puros tropai). 

Process is fundamental: the river is not an object, but a continuing flow; the sun is not a thing, but an enduring fire. 

Everything is a matter of process, of activity, of change (panta rhei). Not stable things but fundamental forces and the varied and fluctuating activities they manifest constitute the world. 

We must at all costs avoid the fallacy of materializing nature.

—Nicholas Rescher

Thanks to Love is a Place blog.

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For me I've been considering how scientifically thinking people approach problems so differently than religiously thinking people.

My maintenance man put a new part in to replace the crumbling one in my air conditioner. I said but what about the cause of the problem? Can you fix the thing that made it crumble in the first place into rust particles?

He mentioned we live in a rain forest. He apologized for saying he was going to be religious (a nice touch.) And then he said it's up to God. 

I said it needed to be born again!

This is what it's like to live in a red community...a right wing Christian neighborhood, while many of my friends are Democratic liberals. I never realized it would extend to the approach to repairing things!

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So while looking at machines which fall apart and those who fix them just pray about it, I'm considering the process rather than the thing itself.

This process for me is cause and effects. Try this or that, if it works, then the way has been found. A process.

For my maintenance man, he only goes to the thing that works...just replace the broken part, and don't even think about what caused it. All causes in his mind are to a great force beyond all understanding, to which he prays, I'd imagine, regularly.

Which brings me to climate change.

Many neighbors have experienced some drastic events here in western North Carolina, with the hurricane last September changing the faces of many valleys and mountain-sides. Some of them just cope with what needs to be done (food, water, shelter) and say it's God's will. 

They actually find comfort when someone dies, has unfortunate circumstances, or even does something illegal...to say God is the answer to your questions...He wants this to happen this way.

I can't approach any of this in this manner, excuse me very much. I have too much faith in a scientific process, to figure out what things might be done by us to change the results of what's happening in nature, so we can still survive and maybe thrive, a few generations coming along. This also requires my owning responsibility for much of climate change...and looking at men (generic I mean) who have caused it.

So we're responsible. We're able. We can change our behaviors. We can support ideas that might offer solutions to problems. OK, I've gotten off on a tangent here.

But my concept of a divine force isn't that I can just let it do it's thing, and I don't have to do anything.

 Link to the following: 

Supracellular: A Meditation by Sophie Strand

“I want to think and feel and weep and grieve with my whole multispecies, polynucleated mind.”

Letting her consciousness slip from the confines of her brain into the long tubes of hyphae that make up the mycelial network beneath her feet, author Sophie Strand wonders how much better we might think if we involved the wide web of more-than-human beings around us. She challenges the idea that our minds are individual—like siloed cells resisting exchange with the outside world—and offers a practice of opening up to a “supracellular state” in which thinking is less bound to an organ and more a relational process that moves through the fungal, geological, microbial, vegetal, ancestral threads that connect us with our ecosystem. This exercise in embodied empathy enables Sophie to enter the minds of rivers, black bears, and chanterelles; and as the borders between physical matter dissolve, her self flows into a wider space of multiplicity. She feels in the extended web of her cognition both the wonder of the land’s otherness and the pain of its increasing disruption. This essay is the first in a series of four we are sharing over the next month in partnership with the Center for Humans and Nature.

Emergent divine feminine

 “The Goddess doesn't enter us from outside; she emerges from deep within. She is not held back by what happened in the past. She is conceived in consciousness, born in love, and nurtured by higher thinking. She is integrity and value, created and sustained by the hard work of personal growth and the discipline of a life lived actively in hope.”

~ Marianne Williamson

Stained glass, artist unknown

On thinking

 Evan Thompson describes:

Part of the problem, however, comes from thinking of the mind or meaning as being generated in the head. That’s like thinking that flight is inside the wings of a bird. A bird needs wings to fly, but flight isn’t in the wings, and the wings don’t generate flight; they generate lift, which facilitates flight. Flying is an action of the whole animal in its environment. Analogously, you need a brain to think, but thinking isn’t in the brain, and the brain doesn’t generate it; it facilitates it. The brain generates many things—neurons and their synaptic connections, ongoing rhythmic activity patterns, the constant dynamic coordination of sensory and motor activity—but none of these should be identified with thinking, though all of them crucially facilitate it. Thinking is an action of the whole person in its environment.

Evan Thompson, “Spring Forward or Fall Back: Changing Times for Neuroscience,”
Psychology Today, May 13, 2015, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/wakingdreaming-
being/201505/spring-forward-or-fall-back.

I quoted this from an article which I'll link tomorrow!

Meryl Streep - excellent philosophy

From  Midwives of the Soul, Facebook

 Meryl Streep once said: Let things fall apart — stop exhausting yourself trying to hold them together. Not everything is meant to last forever, and forcing what is already breaking will only drain you. Sometimes, the best thing you can do is let go.

Let people be upset. Let them misunderstand you. Let them criticize and judge. Their opinions are reflections of their own perceptions, not a measure of your worth. You do not need to explain yourself to those who are committed to misunderstanding you. You are not responsible for how others choose to see you or how they react to your truth.

Stop fearing the unknown. Stop asking, Where will I go? What will I do? as if the universe has not already carved a path for you. Loss can feel unbearable, but sometimes, it is simply clearing the way for something better. What is meant to leave will leave, no matter how desperately you try to hold on. What is meant to stay will find a way, no matter how uncertain things seem. Life always finds a way to balance itself, even when we can’t see how.

There is a rhythm to life, a natural order of endings and beginnings. When we resist that flow, we create suffering. We cling to what is breaking, fearing that nothing good will replace it. But this is an illusion. The universe is abundant, constantly unfolding new opportunities, new love, and new purpose. The only thing keeping you from it is your attachment to what no longer belongs to you.

And never, for a second, believe that the best is behind you. Life does not stop offering beauty just because you have endured hardship. The good has not run out. There is still more joy to experience, more love to receive, more peace to be found. But you must be willing to make room for it.

So, ask yourself—What am I holding onto that is holding me back? And when you find the answer, trust yourself enough to let it go. Something better is already on its way.

Image | Meryl Streep by Kurt Markus

Not so much inner life as just notes about life

 Got my COVID booster yesterday. Sort of rushed in between all kinds of other things. Picked up my box lunch and took it home to eat. Good rice, fish (maybe with parmesan on it - couldn't taste it.) Jello (orange!)

Hey yesterday was Gun Violence Awareness day, wear orange - I didn't have anything orange. Wore red (which used to be the color to wear.)

Definitely true...!

After tossing the lunch foam box into the bear-proof garbage bin outside, drove to CVS and as I arrived they sent a text canceling my COVID appointment. I asked the pharmacist if it was because I was 2 minutes late. No, he said, it was that a my insurance wouldn't cover it...did I have my Medicare card? I gave it to him, and the shot was covered that way. It was a Pfizer shot this time. I had had my last booster last fall, so was due for one. I just hope the one this fall will be including the latest strain.

I did as a nurse had shown me (being in line before me one time for a booster) and swung my arm around a bunch, hoping it would disperse the drug more. It was still sore that night and the next morning. Oh well. I didn't have to take a pain reliever at least.

I had a $4 coupon, and received another $2 coupon when I got there. So I had to find something to buy (that I might use!) I started with a folding camp chair (priced at $29.) By the time I paid for it somehow it was $14...less than half price with tax! I like to go up on the Blue Ridge Parkway and sit at one of the overlooks and just absorb the beauty - when they are open again, and when weather is ok too. Some of Parkway will be closed for a year I've heard.

Pain now is in my right hip, running on the outside of my hip down my leg. So walking activities have been canceled for today. I continue to do my early stretch each morning. After all, if cats do it... Some back stretches and some hamstring stretches. Yesterday I was proud of myself for doing 8 minutes of Qigong breathing exercises. Didn't help that much. Lots of coughing by evening, and even woke me up a few times.

I skipped the evening nebulizer treatment, just huffed a couple of times on the albuterol inhaler.

 Do Not Skip Nebulizer, Barb!

That's not my inner mother talking (I hope) but maybe the cheerleader or coach who wants me (really wants me) to win. Another day, another night.

So today add that 20 minutes before doing anything, and again before going to bed. My inner child really rebels at discipline. I do have a good book to read, so will give myself that reward.

My friends don't use behavioral modification to give themselves incentives.

I do, but don't know if it really works. But it's fun to look at chores and figure out a reward.

I didn't like the last person who cleaned for me. She would be a good "organizer" and take everything apart and put it together the way she likes, if I would let her.

So now when I mop the kitchen floor (which I did, seriously, all by myself) I call myself her name. And do I pay myself? You betcha! That's how I got the new book to read. I maybe mentioned it on another blog, 

Visual Learning by Temple Grandin. I am pretty sure I learn with visual cues - by my age I should know what works and  what doesn't. But I'm not sure I think with pictures. I  process a lot about verbalization but not by listening (particularly by writing so many thoughts down.) So I definitely do have a verbalization methodology. But I have an innate sense of my place in the world...in relation to where I'm standing, which way is north, how close I am to other people, and how noisy it is before I'm really uncomfortable.

I have an inner map, and can usually find my way back to where I started on most new trips...give me visual cues - not turn left, right 3 blocks etc. directions. These are visual thinker's methods.

It's playing with raining outside today. Perhaps some severe wind. We shall see. It rained quite a bit last night, waking me up a couple of times with it hitting against the window. I've finally dried out the air inside so I'm able to move about comfortably.

Off I go to nebulize saline solution and then inhale more albuterol! 

I hope whoever reads this can add their own opinions. Thanks to one person who does comment! I wonder if anyone else even reads here.

How many more years, months, days?

  I am quite busy looking back usually. Fifty years ago was probably my prime. Twenty years ago seems like yesterday. I investigate the lives of ancestors who lived hundreds of years ago!

But then I realize I don't have twenty more years ahead. That would make me 102...a count which I don't see is realistic.

Shock!

Do I have 10 more? At least 5 more? Geese, maybe just one? I'd better get busy!!

Thus I'm pushed back into today.

Those Zen folks knew what they were talking about.

If I had just one more day to live...what would it look like?

Well, I'm eating yogurt with blueberries. A bite must have both in it...the sudden squirt of blueberry juice between my teeth just is so grand. Then a bit of chewing in the soft yogurt through out my mouth kind of sticky since it's the thick kind. One berry has a stem on it too, do I eat it? Well why not...it disappears into becoming me. Just a bit more fiber there!

Oh wow, a bite with two berries in it.

OK, enough of breakfast, which includes a bit of bark in my coffee. Osho bark packed in honey, which is good for throat and lungs, I've been told. The coffee is French Roast, practically an espresso. what a medly of flavors, with French Vanilla creamer to take down the acidity.

I wondered if I were to lose my senses as I age (like it's still somewhere distant), which would be the easiest to live without. Smell. It's gradually gone. Taste comes and goes, with sweet remaining ever constant. I'm so grateful my eyes and ears work still. And touch - except for the shaky fingers. That is hard when I'm trying to center the cursor on something with the mouse. So far I can wiggle them up and down and type on the keyboard.

OK, enough about the physical beingness of myself.

Entertainment has been a free week of Brit Box. I'm also trying to live without YouTube TV...which affords me streaming live channels including seeing local news. I can finish binging Hawaii Five-0 soon. Do I want to switch to Brit Box (much cheaper per month actually!) Oh the movies they have! And old Agatha Christi...and new Brit murder mysteries! But I have to read the captions usually, which is a strain on the eyes.

Why not out in the woods you ask? Because the air has been full of Canadian wildfire smoke...but it rained most of yesterday, so it's only moderate this morning. Maybe later when the weather guys say it's good.

Off I go to write a birthday card to my daught-in-law, and get it in the mailbox going out to her!