Just this Day

In November, you can join lots of meditators meditating and then hear some ace meditators discussing  meditation as it  filters down to us from different traditions and its relevance today.  I have heard that when you meditate, you join all those meditating and all those who have ever meditated through the established forms of meditation.  That isn't a bad deal when you think about it, it is better than being with a good bank, its gives you spiritual capital beyond your own meagre offerings.  This also means that meditation isn't confined to the time your are meditating, it would seem to have a cumulative effect, to have a substance which can be added to and which you can resort to when your own efforts are depleted through illness or press of worldly events.
So, on November 20th, think about joining in wherever you are, or come to S Martin-in-the-Fields in London and listen to 4 people who  practice and value meditation and mindfulness speaking from their understanding and experience of meditation.  To find out  more go to www.justthisday.org and register or say what you might do.
Of course just this day applies to each day, each day is Just THIS day.

meditation and older bodies

There were 20 of them, average age 87, some well into their nineties, who joined us at Mandeville Place, Central London for meditation and philosophy.
Old age is like an invading army which comes and lays waste all the treasures of the city if it can.  Bodies bend and bones weaken, sight goes, hearing lessens, feet seem a long way off when it comes to putting on socks and shoes, velcro becomes your friend.  But these are remarkable people and what they say about old age, meditation and philosophy is inspiring to this Granny who still thinks she is young by dint of being younger than them.
Most moving, Hedi who has practiced meditation for maybe 50 years and studied all that time as well, had spent some days in hospital since we last saw her.  She said how in hospital, so much time is just spent waiting, just waiting for things to happen and that when she had sight she used to be able to read to wile away the time and now she is no longer able to.  So she searched in her memory which she describes as slower now for an old prayer, finding a word here and a word there and repeating it until the whole prayer was there and together, just repeating.  It is a prayer which pleads that the mind of the aspirant will join with the mind of God, it asks that that far shining light of lights, which rises afar, will become mind for me.  It must have done because she experienced a peace beyond the confines of the body and for this Granny listening,it was a confirmation that faith and years of practice will help to protect the real person when the tide of time tries to undermine.

without meditation

Out late at a party, waking late with a busy day ahead, so easy to  miss meditation, so easy.  But it's like missing out on water because you have had other drinks to cover the idea of thirst, coffee in the morning, tea in the afternoon, wine in the evening when what you really really love is the water.  So, although you wake up a bit late, you know what you need to do to bring yourself to yourself, you need to meditate.  Especially when you can see that everything round you is in the process of change, bodies getting older, problems rising from that, worries about health, about family, about houses and maintenance of all these things, all this sets meditation as a way of establishing and maintaining some equilibrium and equanimity in the face of change.

I have a dream...

50 years ago Martin Luther King made his important I have a dream speech.  We need to keep that dream alive for him by enacting it.  It is about freedom and freedom for all.

When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

When we rise each day, we start to enact our own dream which can be as small or as large as we choose, it can be as small as our individual life or it can be as large as the whole of humanity.  The biggest world is God's world and that includes every single being and all that lies between.  Our formal meditation practice is to realise there is a space for God and our daily life should be to make His dream work.  Every day whatever  and whoever we meet gives us another chance to make this real.

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Meditation measures pleasure, a thought for Sophie age 12

Dear Sophie,
You are about to start senior school! Well done!
You have had some lovely times so far in your life and I hope that you will go on having wonderful simple easy pleasures.  These are a few things I wanted to pass on to you as you move on to your new chapter especially as your name means Wisdom.
It is clear that pleasure is relative!  And that the zone of life that is pleasant is quite small when you think just how vast things are.  You have only got to look at the effect of the weather, of the heat and cold and wet and dry to see that we are only able to live in a small zone before we either freeze to death or burn up.  And we can only keep alive when the air is pure enough and we have enough food and enough sleep.  If we go without or have too much of any of them, the very delicate  balance is upset and we don't feel well.  And it can't have passed any of us by that our life span is also limited and not by government health initiatives, it just is limited to a certain number of years.  For life to be pleasant we have to be careful, not too much of this or too little of that.
We take our survival and our right to a pleasant life rather for granted.  From time to time there is a wake up call, we may be alerted to the fragility and beauty of the life around us and feel amazed and grateful to be here.  We may lose someone close to us or our own good health be compromised and then we know to be grateful for our well being and aware that our own life is balanced delicately. This wake up call is important, once we think about it, we wonder about that power which keeps us safe, we wonder what feeds us, what brought us into life and what might be beyond it.  The wisest people have pointed this out and at the same time have given us help.  While we are alive, we have doctors and teachers and lawyers and all manner of clever and artistic people to make our lives easy.
When we start to wonder what lies beyond our life, what will happen when we die, we are helped by wondering and by our own observation.   And we are helped by those people wise enough to help us measure up to this, who have given us ways of touching a space which is real but isn't touched by all the opposites.  These people have found out for themselves and left us special prayers and meditations to prepare.  Meditation is just that, it allows you time to be alone without worrying what you look like, what you are going to eat, to have or to know.  It introduces you to a steady and peaceful place.  It helps you to practice for what is unknown and to be without fear because you meet a very real Present Guide.

Coming home

summer house

 There is the physical coming home to your own place and there is something more.  It seems as if  you have dreamt the being away, all the images are like the photographs you have taken, they are reminders but not the real thing any more.  Conversations which were so bright with consciousness are dreamlike, the feel of sun and sea are already memories.  But home has a gentleness about it and finding my way back to meditating in the summer house while the rain pattered away outside was just right.

meditating dog

Meditators keep calm at the airport!

After a full LAST day in Athens, a trip to the temple of Poseidon at Sounion, a visit to the Archeological Museum in the city and being ripped off by a clever taxi driver who told this blogger that there was a demonstration in the city and he would need to go by a scenic route to get me back in time to the hotel and then charged me 4 times the right price, I settled into a taxi to the airport thinking of home.
My companion kindly took me into the British Airways lounge and when our flight was called we were fast tracked through security to the departure gate!  Only it was the wrong departure gate which we only discovered when it started boarding and we saw with surprise that our plane which was nearby had its doors closed and a BA person at the gate barring our way and pointing the way to collect our luggage which had been taken off.
No flights out that day, we stoically accept that we will be in Athens for another day so what to do?  We decide that we don't really want to creep back into the hotel in Athens under the eye of the rest of our philosophic friends who might be surprised to see us so we ask the Travel Agent if we can find a not expensive, nearby hotel by the sea, expecting that this may be difficult.  But in a trice we are booked into the Hotel Medusa, right on the beach with a cheerful Taverna outside, 90 euros for collection and delivery to the airport, breakfast, en suite shower (if you can get round the door which has been designed as a door into a cupboard and doesn't leave room for much manoeuvring inside).  We can't believe our luck even if the proximity of the airport means the regular roar of jet engines.
Of course, we have to pay for our tickets and I am now hoping that my bank manager meditates and finds the same equanimity that we have found in our extra 24 hours in the land blessed by the Gods of old.

Images which pass from one mind to another

Can you see this image of a body lovingly held?  Does it remind you of the Michelangelo Pieta? in St Peter's in Rome?  Well it is much older, it is from a 5th Century Temple in Athens.  Of course, the techniques involved in sculpture are copied from generation to generation and images of man evolve through art and sculpture.  The more interesting and moving thing is the essence which is captured again and again.  Man's story in its heroism, its joys and its intense grief are depicted again and again.  It is part of a movement to express something felt inwardly in every generation which comes out as image and word.  Whatever we believe we are, what ever we meditate upon, will be expressed as the measure of that belief and meditation. See below for something that man has always loved! And still does!

The feeling of Meditation left in buildings

This is from the crypt in the 10th Century Monastery called Hosios Loukos where we spent some time  on the way back to Athens.  One holy man who wished to withdraw and simply contemplate God in solitude became so imbued with light that he drew many disciples to himself.  When he died, they built a chapel round his tomb and from there a whole community of monks grew, a thriving order which provided refuge over the centuries to people fleeing from wars, from famine and from plagues.  The Church which is above the Crypt and the even older one next door are all decorated with mosaics and wall paintings which are full of meaning.  The atmosphere, even with a cafe and shop is markedly still. Then, on to Athens where we have a top floor room with a view of...the air conditioning unit and the back of the other side of the hotel.  However, we crane our neck sideways to see, wonder of wonders, the Acropolis which looks like a tiny but real model Acropolis.  This is because I have never seen it before.  Its delicacy and positioning make it rather like seeing a far off star and apart from any other consideration on the architecture and sculpture there, reminds us that we need reminders of the possibilities lying in our human condition.  The tiny flash of it above the air conditioning unit is wonderful and a bit different to other pleasures available in the city!  See below

Not for the faint hearted

Meditation will seek out your weakness and not let you fool yourself.  You will notice the thoughts which persistently intercede between you and the focus of your attention; they come with stealth to steal the extraordinary power of attention which is a present gift.  After all, it is the same attention which has made the whole creation as well as every beautiful thing in the heavens and every curious thing on the earth.  It is the power of attention where we are most akin to that which is behind everything.  And it is a waste of that power to be thinking of the day ahead, it will go its own way without any interference from you   It is a waste of energy to try to put right wrongs in your head, you can do that when you aren't meditating, it is a waste in my case to wonder how the grandchildren will manage the modern world or how the broody hen will manage to keep her chicks safe when she has chosen to hatch them out under the cement mixer.  It is a waste of energy when I can just join the movement back to the real home by meditating properly.  This is a statue of Apollo which was thrown into a pit in Delphi and didn't come out for over a thousand years.  When you stand in front of him, it is clear that the power he represents is undiminished so why should we worry about what might happen when we just don't know.

Those Feet were made for Walking

Being in Greece where the feel of the earth, of the landscape, of the sound of cicadas and cockerels in the morning, of life getting going around us as we meditated, make the stories of old seem as if they aren't so far away.  A footfall on the path beside our balcony is Odysseus making his way back home through the Greek landscape to Penelope, the old dog recognising him, he bends to scratch it behind the ears, the reality of what has happened in his absence, all these things were there in that footfall.  The old story of absence and return were pressing a bell in memory, the way the suitors, the pretenders have to be expelled and killed once the real owner is back is exactly what happens in meditation or should happen in meditation but this morning the suitors make a really good play for why they think they should be allowed to stay.  Meditation is an ongoing project on the way home. 

 

                                                         

Fascinated by feet even in meditation

 I am woken up by feet which are behaving badly, cramp sends them into an awkward fixed ballet mode and I have to jump out of bed to calm them down and make them available again for getting me up!  They have done this for a reason, to alert me to the beauty and wonder of feet and what feet do and also how they look.  The feet in the museum at Delphi, of which these are just a selection, are quite beautiful in their detail and of course show the humanness of the sculpture as much as the face.  The feet on the right are fifth century BC, they were part of sculptures which were hidden in a pit just outside the sanctuary to avoid them being looted.  The golden-haired Apollo and his mother and sister were also thrown into the pit.  It is moving to think of their history and their preciousness that they should be preserved nearly three thousand years later.  And that they were formed and observed and hidden and found is all part of that history.
Are you wondering how I am going to get meditation in now?  Well, the feet have been climbing round my meditation calling for attention but that isn't why.  It is the fact of the enduring beauty of something which is truly beautiful or essential.  The secret truths of all the religions is hidden in meditation and has endured and is available now for many people, many more than the few initiates of olden times.  We should be as grateful for meditation as we are for our miraculous feet.

Christian Meditation and Father Laurence Freeman

So, Sunday in Delphi, and immediately the memory of the word Sunday evokes the need for Christian practice.

On Saturday,visiting the museum attached to the Temenos of Apollo yesterday, I am struck by several statues which are so Christian that reading that they are pre-Christian by between five and eight centuries makes the case that the Christian experience is an eternal one and has always been available to the seeker.
One of the heroes of Christian Meditation is John Main, who found and passed his experience of meditation on to Father Laurence Freeman who passes it on to thousands through the message of Christian Meditation.   Father Laurence is Director of the World Community for Christian Meditation and says it is an urgent necessity to rediscover the contemplative dimension of Christianity and that we can only do that by experiencing the power and meaning that silence holds.
"Silence is not an absence, nor a canvas waiting to be filled.  It is not threatening but something deeply attuned to our humanity.  "In silecnce we touch a universality that words usually only point to.  It is not an escape from reality but an embrace with the divine reality that we know as love.  Relationships are changed by this experience of silence in transcendence, in ways that words cannot achieve.  We live together in a new way when we have been patient together in the silence of love."

Meditation and knowing people

She said how surprising it was to find that the people you thought you knew something about were not what you thought.  And there is an interesting thing, the people you think you know about are in your own head! not in their own space.  If you let them go free, they are there in their glory, in their own right and you might just see something or find something you never suspected was there, you might find they are even more lovely than you had imagined!  Certainly, if you had thought they were horrid, that gives them a chance to be newly seen and both you and they are free of the past and may have quite changed.
Meditation helps because consciously we put down our old thinking, we try to clear the mind and to hear a new sound, a mantra which will produce a different condition.  It is a bit simplistic to equate a mantra to a hoover but it does clean and order the substance of the mind and heart.
She and I meditate each morning on this study fortnight on the balcony of our room.  We had before this known one another through talking and exchanging stories and facts about our lives.  To meditate together is to let the space between us be the place of exchange.  We would both say that we have found new things about one another every day I think.  Here we all are at the outer wall of the Temenos of Apollo at Delphi.  Do you know who's who!

Missing People?

Charioteer through the crowd

This Granny was very touched to be told that her grandson missed her because

The Charioteer alone

"Well she lets us pick raspberries around the garden……. and blackberries - when they're done. And she takes us to the park. And of course she's lovely, so I don't really need to say that. And I like her big smile, when she comes in a room and she gives a cheer and does this [opens arms]. That's all. I just really miss her". 
This is the one who asked if I would die first and because I love him and all other grandchildren dearly it seemed an idea to look at what missing might mean.  
So, first Sebastian, when you think about missing someone, you search in your memory for the person and they pop up with, in our case, raspberries and blackberries and our big greetings for one another.  And our heart responds to the memory and we might think yippee we're going to see one another again soon or oh dear, when will we meet again.  But the precious thing is the person we have in the memory is what is  so dear to us because of the way they make us feel.  
Every time I think that you like me and every time you think that I like you, we feel good.  That is important.   It also shows us that where we are is not just in our bodies or in particular places, or when we are awake or in England or in Dubai, Singapore or Devon; it shows that our real existence is there all the time and everywhere we want it to be.
So, I hope you are sleeping well because where I am it is earlier than where you are, and of course I am looking forward to seeing you because you are dear to me and seeing you reminds me of that.  
Here are wonderful pictures of something which reminds us of how beautiful mankind is.  He is the charioteer who was made hundreds of years ago, then was buried, and then found again.  You see him in the distance and then close up. Daddy will remember him I think.

Meditation and Delphi

Is there someone there?

Meditation rescues us from both the bad dreams but also the delicious feeling of slipping into more sleep.  Today, instead of climbing away from chaotic dream, I was just slipping back into the bliss of sleep when the alarm went off.  Slow obedience to it but obedience nonetheless and then out onto the quiet early morning balcony .  It is just 6.00 am and nothing has quite woken, no people, no cicadas, no birds, no motor bikes.  This is better bliss than the possible sleep scenario.  I am alert when the being rests between the night and the day, aware of the waking up world but totally detached.  This is worth breaking away from sleep for. Today we go to the Temple site at Delphi today and try the feel of the site so revered in antiquity for its potency.  Will the Gods still be there?

Finding the still point

In studying through Plato, the comparative virtue of the life of pleasure and the life of reason, what begins to show itself is the unsatisfactory nature of two opposites opposing.  It might seem simple to go for one rather than the other but for sure, that means polarity, it means that if you are the aesthete, the danger would be that you became so high minded and disapproving of the pleasure seekers that you would find yourself consumed by criticism in your solitude.  You might not of course but it is a danger!  And if you go for pleasure as the best and highest, you might find that your attitude to the holy and high minded was dismissive.  You would be polarised.  Plato tries to expand our thinking so that we can find the steady point and it turns out that this point, while being within us, is really a universal.  What do I mean by that? Well, like water is everywhere but is contained by the sea or the river or the bottle on your desk, stillness is universal and can be found everywhere if you tune in.
You know that I am going to say that tuning in is meditation don't you!  Well, meditation gives you the chance to tune in, and tuning in in a place which is quiet and where others are tuning in too, does seem a bit easier.

pleasure and pain so close

Waking in the quite hot room from a restless dreamy sleep again, (is it eating late, drinking too much wine or the excitement of playing cards and chatting?) showering, dressing and going outside on to the balcony to meditate in the early morning, the slight change in temperature from warmer to cooler brings great pleasure and rest.  Settling down in this cool and turning to meditation, the mind gradually moves away from sleepiness and random thoughts of things to come and things that have been and settles to the rhythm of the mantra. Slowly the mind settles itself into a quieter state, ideas may flicker across and some catch the attention but there is a proper rest, deeper and cleaner than the troubled sleep and very welcome.

Bad nights, Meditation calms

Into your dreams tips all the rubbish of your world, all jumbled up and with no solutions.  Every person you ever knew or liked turns up at YOUR invitation to stay in a tiny tiny cottage with very few beds!! And some others you have never met but you somehow feel you have a duty of care for them.  And then after a bad night's sleep they all leave blaming you.  During this process, you wake up a few times wondering if it is morning, but no, so back to sleep or back to that awful muddle!  What a relief when morning comes and you clamber out of the dream and the cottage and go out onto the balcony and look out at  the untroubled sky and landscape and meditate soothing away all the imaginings of the dotty mind.

Meditation and Mental Health

Blogging away lightly about meditation might make it seem an ordinary everyday thing but really it is the ordinary everyday thing which makes each day extraordinary and more importantly it evens out our mental conditions.

Image of Christ from Monastery Church an icon of faith

Everybody knows that holidays are good, they stop the machinery of our lives and give us a chance to change the programming, to stop the mechanical charging about achieving this and that.  They recharge our batteries.  In the longer term, we need more of this stopping to keep us healthy, we need to clear out the accrued mental and emotional rubbish regularly and meditation is just the discipline for this.  Everything else is short term but meditation is the real deal, it provides us with space.  It is like cleaning and sorting out a room on a daily basis, allowing the day to start freshly.  It puts us in touch with our deepest possibilities, our object of faith if we want that.  It allows the angels or the gods or whatever powers are believed to come in and help us as individuals.  It helps us to move forward cleanly and it allows us to put our doubts and concerns down which is the greatest possible help to our mental state.
Take it one step further too, if our mental state is clear, that will surely help others we meet, for we are much more likely to be able to hear them and respond to their needs cleanly.

Platonists take the plunge

don't you love the way it shimmers

Imagine 60 lovers of Plato going to Delphi for a fortnight of ...philosophy fun and plunging into the sea.  Imagine too that many of us are Grannies and Grandpas looking for inspiration from something much much older than us.  It is riveting stuff and we break up into groups of 10 looking at the difference between pleasures and knowledge.
Then we break to go to the sea  and here is one of the Platonists waiting to take the plunge showing that age is no bar either to Plato or to plunging.  The day though starts with meditation and an encouragement to approach the subject with no preconceptions.   So without preconceptions were we that Paddy, the philsopher below didn't realise that the beach would be shingle and his feet would need to be shod.

Granny at the airport reads about Rev Alice Goodman, clearly a Good Woman

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2386791/What-The-F--Would-Jesus-Do--Vicar-causes-stir-car-sticker.html
Here I am at the airport en route for Delphi and the oracle who may still be there.  This means many hours at Heathrow Terminal 5 which is a giant shopping opportunity where you are trapped remembering all the things you don't need but maybe ought to get.  I am thinking to myself what would a wise man, Socrates or Plato  think and do here? and then I read about Rev Alice Goodman who has WTFWJD as a sticker on her car.  This seems to me to be eminently sensible and maybe we should stick this on all our foreheads and contemplate the dottiness of our gullibility.  I wonder if we are just waiting for someone else to do the things that He would do or say them.  He would probably see Heathrow Airport as a good analogy for life, in we come through security having handed over our baggage and immediately through we start adding things to our tiny little hand baggage.  We are attracted by Swarowski sparkle, by beauty products, by books, by that hot egg and bacon croissant and cappuccino, we feel a bit sleepy and wait for our flight out.  It is mostly all hope and desire and you have to pull yourself together and remember you have been here before and you need to travel as lightly as possible and with as little expectation as possible.

F for feet !

The reason the Rev Alice got into the news was because she used the F word to draw attention to the message and if that's what it takes to get the message of sanity out there, FFFFF! for fabulous and for feet.
So it's not so much WTFWJD but put on your own best mind and think carefully before you
board your particular flight, you need to keep safe.

Over 65 Drinkers in Health Alert. That's us Grannies!

Watch out, they are after us and our drinking.  Of course, now we are over 65 we should be cutting down on drinking alcohol and going into a gentler mode but it is a curious thing that when the governments of all countries are desperately looking for ways of looking after the over 65's because our children won't be able to apparently, that the clarion call about things bad leading to death makes it sound as if old people dying is bad.
This blogger maintains that death is totally natural, but how you do it and how you get there do matter a lot and certainly drinking yourself into the grave isn't a good idea.  Meditating on the part which doesn't die is good and of course can help cut down the rush to the bottle of Chardonnay or Cabernet Sauvignon and this is a well know fact.  Doing death well is worth having as a goal and this blogger recommends meditation as a way of coming to a peace beyond the peace which worldly things might give.  Kindness and making the inside of you conform to the goodness of the Good itself is a real goal.
And while I am about it today, the idea of punishing stay at home mothers as if they were sitting about drinking chardonnay and painting their nails is rubbish.  Staying at home with your children is the best way of learning about patience and kindness and not minding your life being upended and covered in jam.  And when you have your children at home with you in the very short time before school, you get to pass on to them the really important things.
So, I am hoping to meditate well, drink less and hoping that if I am reborn that my mother gets the chance to stay at home with me as long as she wants and that she will be a really really good sort.

Grannies rising above a tide of summer sickness

You can be sure that every holiday with a whole lot of children, sun, sea and sandwiches will also produce summer sickness as well.  This is where Grannies come in handy, they have seen it all before and they know that August is the month which is different to all other months.
This is a Granny doing the ironing on the beach! I love it.

grannies meditating shouldn't need to worry

It is a fact that Grannies worry about their grandchildren! But we Grannies need to be careful not to let the worry creep into meditation because once in there, worries escalate and breed more worries.   So keep your worries light and talk to other Grannies and you will realise that lots of Grannies think like you.
They worry about the names you are giving the children, one Granny I know has just had a new grandson called Phoenix!  Grannies worry that the grandchildren are disappearing into cyberspace through the i pad and that they don't know what is happening to them there.  Gone is the security of danger being a wasp on a blackcurrant jam sandwich or tar on the beach and we worry now about the content of books and newspapers and text messages.  Grannies are coming round to realising that grandchildren living with boyfriends is a fact they can't control and it may not be all bad.  If Grannies stay married to the original Grandpa and provide the link to blackcurrant jam sandwiches, cold water swimming and bracing walks and make the link in the grandchildren's minds that this is the stuff of security and life, that, along with Kate and William as the ideal family model, may keep the things that Grannies value alive.
The best thing that meditating Grannies can do is to maintain the link to the peace of meditation which we should be able, through our own love of it, to pass on to our children and grandchildren, even if we have to wait for them to need it.  Grannies lecturing on the things they think are best are a real turn off but if they are really nice, they will win the hearts of their grandchildren no problem.

Meditation, a cure for selfishness!

If anything, meditation gives you a bigger view, it takes you out of the small circle of individual consideration where your love for your own family leads to a larger circle and helps everything become part of your life.  You really feel most happy when others are happy.
The whole idea of selflessness isn't a route to a miserable martyrdom and holiness, it gives  you a million ways to be happy because you aren't just reliant on being happy because your own life looks good.
You might not see any connection between meditation and selflessness.  You might think that because for a time each day you are removing yourself from others when you meditate, you are cutting yourself off  but it isn't like this, what happens is that you give yourself a chance to rethink things, you give yourself a space to see that your own life is a tiny spark in a huge universe and that joining it is much more fun than staying separate.
You gain bliss if you aim for it and then you want to share it.

Prayer is what I've learned to do.

Sitting on the front step with Richard's cousin in the early morning, we get round to talking about blogs and life, its shortness and how we should make sure to have no remnants or regrets.  And we discover that lots of her friends are interested in meditation but she says that Prayer is what she practices, prayer is what she has always done.  We move from meditation to dogs! so from blogs to dogs via meditation. This is really a picture of my life, meditation, blogging towards Just this Day on November 20th, and trying to straighten out any wrinkles in the fabric of relationships.

A Hopeless Case?

Meditation has been almost hopeless, just too many children.  I woke with a sentence in mind, it said get up and meditate.  As I clambered out, No 8  grand daughter woke and knowing that the parents were asleep and I was up, getting her up and taking her out in the garden was a no brainer.  And so it went on, like a paper bag in the water, I just go with the flow.  By now I am thinking that I will just start over again when the holiday is over.  So the blog will be mostly about failed meditation but a really good summer holiday with the family.

Another conversation about Death with Sebastian

If I died Granny, you wouldn't just bury my body, couldn't you keep it somewhere?
See below for Grandpa and Sebastian (in specially designed trousers! by Sebastian).
I will have to meditate on this question to come up with a good answer.  And he will have to work a bit to come up with a better design for trousers.