I Probably Should Re-name The Blog

How about "Better Living Through Hippie Readings"? Because I'm sharing another one. (There may be one every day, if that's what it takes to  make it to the solstice.) 

Anyway, as part of the 3+2 Goals to "be happier [in my work, but really just in general]" and "be more compassionate," I bought The Book of Awakening, a year of readings and meditation prompts. This was today's: 

[Try to] honor each obstacle as something flowing in its own right in the Universal stream, to see ourselves and the obstacle as two limbs of the same tree drifting in the same river, bumping into each other, and even blocking on another for a moment...we must focus on our relationship to the stream and not to the things being carried alongside us.

December

If it's December, it's time for my favorite part of it: The Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar.

Today's image: Part of the Carina Nebula

It's also time to keep something in mind that my yoga teacher shared on Saturday: "The theme for December is forgiveness." That's taken from this page, and the metaphor of "moving houses" really touched me, as did this:

This is the task this month: To forgive and let go. To release the unproductive partnerships and bad investments and stupid mistakes and all the guilt and shame around the ways that we were naïve or impulsive or addicted or ignorant.

...and as you release and let go and forgive, look at what may be coming to you that is new, innovative and exciting. Take a chance on something that feels right and inspires you. Now is the time to have the courage to make the changes you know are right.

And there you go. Space and hippies, brought together for your Monday morning. 

Gratitude

 

“Finding our attitude of gratitude may be a difficult task, but the more we learn to return thanks, the more space we make for new unexpected blessings to appear in our lives. There is no substitute for finally acknowledging the blessings that we have taken for granted. In this process we rediscover the magic and wonder of the most simple gifts. Do we have to suffer from emphysema before we can have gratitude for the precious breath of life? Do we have to lose our homes before we can return thanks for having shelter? If we have taken for granted all our blessings of health or a loving family, will we need to be reminded to be grateful through near tragedy or actual loss?”

(quote and image via Mystic Mamma)

 This weekend is for focusing on my blessings, and finally pruning the lavender, and Tofurkey. I'll be back Monday.

Happy Birthday, Carl Sagan

Today is the birthday of my science boyfriend Carl Sagan. It's hard to narrow down what I want to say about him, or pick a favorite quote, because how can you say that this:

There was a time when the stars seemed an impenetrable mystery, but today we have begun to understand them. In our personal lives, also, we journey from ignorance to knowledge. Our individual growth reflects the advancement of the species. The exploration of the cosmos is a voyage of self-discovery.

is more inspiring than this?

Even The Writer's Almanac gave him a mention today:

Because he had done extensive research on nearby planets, NASA hired him as an advisor for a mission to send remote-controlled spacecrafts to Venus..In preparation for the mission, Sagan was shocked to learn that there would be no cameras on the robotic spacecrafts, called Mariner I and Mariner II. The other scientists thought cameras would be a waste of valuable space and equipment...Sagan couldn't believe they would give up the chance to see an alien planet up close[...]

Sagan lost the argument that time, but he won over NASA eventually. The Mariners were the last exploratory spacecraft ever launched by NASA without cameras. He contributed to the Viking, Voyager, and Galileo planetary exploration missions, and his insistence on the use of cameras helped us get the first close-up photographs of the outer planets and their moons.

I think that this latest image from Curiosity--on THE SURFACE OF MARS, fer crissake--reflects his legacy.  

Bravery

I haven't had an inspirational hippie quote to start off the week in a while. Here's one for today (source):

The truth is that meaningful change is a process. It can be uncomfortable and is often risky, especially when we’re talking about embracing our imperfections, cultivating authenticity, and looking the world in the eye and saying, "I am enough."

However afraid we are of change, the question that we must ultimately answer is this: What the greater risk? Letting go of what people think or letting go of how I feel, what I believe, and who I am?

Wholehearted living is about engaging in our lives from a place of worthiness. It’s about cultivating the courage, compassion, and connection to wake up in the morning and think, "No matter what gets done and how much is left undone, I am enough."

OK. Let's do this.  

Hippie Quote Thursday

There's an ongoing "let's plan!" vs. "let's not plan!" debate between me and the significant other. Ironically enough, the hippie quotes seem to be supporting his (decidedly non-hippie) view:

When we stop trying to control events, they fall into natural order, an order that works. We’re at rest while a power much greater than our own takes over, and it does a much better job than we could have done. We learn to trust that the power that holds galaxies together can handle the circumstances of our relative little lives.

For Monday

Albert Einstein's three rules for work: 

1. Out of clutter, find simplicity

2. From discord, find harmony

3. In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity

More Zen

Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, 

and all the while 

a great wind is bearing me across the sky. 

Ojibawa saying

(Today's zen is from this book, which I've pulled out and put on the nightstand along with this one.)

What Elizabeth Bishop Thinks

"We write for the same reason we read or look at paintings...for the total immersion of the experience, the narrowing and intensification of focus to the right here, right now, the deep joy of bringing the entire soul to bear upon a single act of concentration."

Is This Why Hippies Are Mellow?

This is the latest quote I'm trying to adopt during the Summer of Uncertainty, via Mystic Mamma (of course).

"...the search for security and certainty is actually an attachment to the known. And what’s the known? The known is our past. The known is nothing other than the prison of past conditioning. There’s no evolution in that.

When you experience uncertainty, you are on the right path – so don’t give it up. You don’t need to have a complete and rigid idea of what you’ll be doing next week or next year, because if you have a very clear idea of what’s going to happen and you get rigidly attached to it, then you shut out the whole range of possibilities.”

That Time of Year

The light in June leading up to the solstice is so lovely in the foothills. Predictably, I think of this part in Out of Africa:

The sky was rarely more than pale blue or violet, with a profusion of mighty, weightless, ever-changing clouds towering up and sailing on it, but it has a blue vigor to it, and at a short distance it painted the ranges of hills and the woods a fresh deep blue. [...] Up in this high air, you breathed easily, drawing in a vital assurance and lightness of heart. In the highlands you woke up in the morning and thought: Here I am, where I ought to be.
 

Two Quotes

I found the first quote on Mystic Mamma and thought, "What a nice and reassuring thought to re-post, wild horse picture and all." So here it is: 

“Make a pact with yourself today to not be defined by your past. Sometimes the greatest thing to come out of all your hard work isn’t what you get for it, but what you become for it.” 

Meanwhile, my brother sent me today's second quote, from American Beauty: 

Lester Burnham: "Brad, for 14 years I've been a whore for the advertising industry. The only way I could save myself now is if I start firebombing. " 

I guess the moral of these two quotes is that sometimes it's nice to give your inner hippie options (quotation-wise, that is; don't firebomb things).

Living With Ideas

My favorite singer Neko Case is working on a new album, and NPR is tracking the progress of it through some interviews. In the first interview (that you can read here), she talks about living with unfinished songs and what it's like:

"Because when they're not done, the songs, they're like little nuclear reactors that are throbbing in your suitcase. And you're like, 'When's that thing gonna go off? Is it just gonna die out? Is it just gonna poison the groundwater? What is that thing doing in there?'"

I think that description's pretty right on for living with anything creative/life-shaping that isn't ready to become something yet.

Still Hiking

"As long as I live, I’ll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing. I’ll interpret the rocks, learn the language of flood, storm, and the avalanche. I’ll acquaint myself with the glaciers and wild gardens, and get as near the heart of the world as I can.”

John Muir from Journal, 1871.

(The view from as far up Thaynes Canyon as I got yesterday. I still sometimes sing this song to myself when I have to turn around.)

Re-Reading The Dharma Bums

I'm not doing so well on my goal to read a new book a month, but I'm hoping to catch up by the pool when it's full summer. In the meantime, there's The Dharma Bums to re-read. This is from their backpacking trip to the Sierra Nevadas: 

Now the mountains were getting that pink tinge, I mean the rocks, they were just solid rock covered with the atoms of dust accumulated there since beginningless time. In fact I was afraid of those jagged monstrosities all around and over our heads. 

"They're so silent!" I said. 

"Yeah man, you know to me a mountain is a Buddha. Think of the patience, hundreds of thousands of years just sittin there bein perfectly perfectly silent and like praying for all living creatures in that silence and just waitin for us to stop all our frettin and foolin."

Mary Frances On Going To Restaurants

From "D is for Dining Out," in An Alphabet for Gourmets, by my BFF Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher:

I had a happy beginning in [the] neglected art and much abused privilege [of dining out], one that has sheathed it in unfading pleasure for me when it is done well. When I was no more than five or so my father and mother would begin to prepare my spirits for Easter, or Christmas, or a birthday, and when the festival rolled around, there I would be, waiting to greet it...on the pink velvet seat of the region's best restaurant.

I admit I am prejudiced about it. I seldom dine out, and because of my early conditioning to the sweet illusion of permanent celebration, of "party" and festivity on every such occasion, I feel automatically that any invitation means sure excitement, that it will be an event, whether it brings me a rained-on hamburger in a drive-in or Chicken Jerusalem at Perino's. The trouble is, I'm afraid, that I expect people I dine with to feel the same muted but omnipresent delight that I feel.

Worthy Of Dr. Sagan

You guys. Phil Plait at the Bad Astronomy blog has outdone himself. He's describing a massive, massive infrared survey of the sky--over 150 billion pixels, showing a billion stars--and he does it really, really well (click through to see how he gives an idea of scale). But it's at the end of the post that he gets really Sagan-esque:

Think on this: there are a billion stars in that image alone, but that’s less than 1% of the total number of stars in our galaxy! As deep and broad as this amazing picture is, it’s a tiny slice of our local Universe.

And once again, we’ve reached the point where I’m out of words. Our puny brains, evolved to count the number of our fingers and toes, to grasp only what’s within reach, to picture only what we can immediately see — balk at these images.

But… we took them. Human beings looked up and wondered, looked around and observed, looked out and discovered. In our quest to seek ever more knowledge, we built the tools needed to make these pictures: the telescopes, the detectors, the computers. And all along, the power behind that magnificent work was our squishy pink brains.

A billion stars in one shot, thanks to a fleshy mass of collected neurons weighing a kilogram or so. The Universe is amazing, but so are we.

Trying Times

I have felt off for the last few weeks, and I can't tell if it's because of the unsettled weather, having less time to myself, professional issues, or just not going to enough yoga classes with my awesome teacher.

For times like this, there are hippie platitudes--I mean, quotes from The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying:

Above all, be at ease, be as natural and spacious as possible. Slip quietly out of the noose of your habitual anxious self, release all grasping, and relax into your true nature.

Think of your ordinary emotional, thought-ridden self as a block of ice or a slab of butter left out in the sun. If you are feeling hard and cold, let this aggression melt away in the sunlight of your meditation.

Let peace work on you and enable you to gather your scattered mind into the mindfulness of Calm Abiding, and awaken in you the awareness and insight of Clear Seeing.

And you will find all your negativity disarmed, your aggression dissolved, and your confusion evaporating slowly like mist into the vast and stainless sky of your absolute nature.

(From here, via said awesome yoga teacher. Yes, I visit that site nearly every day.)

Friday Unrelated Information

1. I took the day off today. So far I have slept in and received a gift of cognac-fig ice cream made from goat milk (thanks, Amber!). If these things have happened before 10:00, what greatness will the rest of the day hold?

2. Actually, I think the "greatness" will be working on house projects and professional projects and maybe even sewing. I will think of this Isak Dineson quote:
When you have a great and difficult task, something perhaps almost impossible, if you only work a little at a time, every day a little, suddenly the work will finish itself.

Hippie Quote Thursday

“Quietly go to work on your own self-awareness. If you want to awaken all of humanity, then awaken all of yourself. If you want to eliminate the suffering in the world, then eliminate all that is dark and negative in yourself. Truly, the greatest gift you have to give is that of your own self-transformation.”

- Lao Tzu