Anger Management in the Sauna at 80 Celsius
I have discovered that I have almost no anger or frustration festering in my mind and body after a cardio workout followed by weight lifting and about 20-25 minutes in an 80 degree Celsius sauna. Let’s hear it for sweat- slippery, slick and sexy! There isn’t any space left for negativity in my pores after that experience.
Forgiveness is a tolerance of mistakes, the ability to forgive each other for defections. Everyday acts of forgiveness among people who know each other in the real world are incredibly common.
Buddha is not a personal name and the concept is NOT a man.
"Buddha" is not a personal name; it is a title, meaning "awakened," "enlightened," and "evolved." A Buddha's enlightenment is a perfect omniscience. A Buddha's mind is what theists have thought the mind of God [or the human mind at its height of perfection] would have to be like, totally knowing of every single detail of everything in an infinite universe, totally aware of everything--hence by definition inconceivable, incomprehensible to finite, ignorant, egocentric consciousness.
- Robert A.F. Thurman, Essential Tibetan Buddhism
end note:
I read in the November 1, 2008 issue of the Economist today that the Red Cross predicts that at least 17.5 million people may face starvation in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia. Where are our priorities people?
Note to a Thief
My mother lives in speck on the map community in the middle of the United States- visualize corn, soybeans, and rural gossip- and one community tool that keeps the 5,226 people in town informed and united is a news/advertiser published every Wednesday. Inside the pages of this newspaper, readers discover who is selling a John Deere lawn tractor for $500, who will be having garage sales on Friday or Saturday afternoons, and what the special of the week is going to be at the local pizza place: a mini pizza and iced tea for $4.00 on Thursday.
In the Wednesday, November 5, 2008 edition of this newspaper, the following note to a thief appeared.
MISSING
To whoever took our keepsake cement elf from our backyard in Dakota City, if not satisfied with it, please bring it back or send a thank you note!
H. & D. Dale
20 4th. St. So.
Two Disconnected Thoughts
1. I attempt to run away from cool temperatures and chilly winds. It’s true. I run because the cold hurts my skin, and when I breathe the nippiness into my lungs, I want to escape, so instinct urges me to run. I am certain that in my past lives I have not been exposed to bitter cold, snow or the wind’s chill, so I run. Do you run?
2. For those of you who were bullied in elementary, middle or high school, you might appreciate these research findings. According to the findings by Ballard, Argus & Remley, 1999 and Dunn in 2001, “Bullying is an early predictor of lifelong antisocial tendencies, often leading to criminal activities.”
Perhaps that unruly bully who made you pee your pants is now behind bars frittering away slow moving hours and bullying other prisoners.
People often ask me to define Buddhism for them, and I can't do it. This lack of a clear, clean agreed upon definition of the practice is the reason I enjoy what Buddhism has to offer me; Everyone must interpret it individually. This means that people are required to think, actively engage with the text, and make their own decisions about the teachings.
Today, however, I found a passage that will help me explain why I practice.
Depending on which part of Buddhism you grasp, you might identify it as a system of ethics, a philosophy, a contemplative psychotherapy, a religion. While containing all of these, it can no more be reduced to any one of them than an elephant can be reduced to its tail.
--Stephen Batchelor, Buddhism Without Beliefs
LJ - Journal Entry 6
Phonological Awareness
Unit 3 – November 2, 2008
Childhood is where an appreciation or disgust for letters all starts, and my love of language, literature and poetry today is partly due to Miss U and my alphabet book.
I remember the alphabet book that I made in first grade. I loved each of the 26 cartoon characters in that book with their individual personalities and bright colors. Miss U was an umbrella, and she had a rather reserved personality that I crafted in my head. Miss U was never wet, but rather shy and standoffish from the other letters, using her umbrella as a social shield. Mr. R and his arsenal of rubber bands was a rude dude who would pull each rubber band taut and fire it at the back of the other letters’ heads. Ouch, Miss U squeaked when she felt a sting near her hairline.
Each phoneme was more than a sound for me. Sounds, letters, words and books merged into a rich mosaic that flew off the page and interacted with my own internal emotional dialogue. Words were contextualized through my school’s reading program because I could imagine myself singing with each letter, creating joyous rhymes for our secret entertainment as we marched around my bedroom. By allowing each letter to personally shine, the letters were friends. Words united with visuals to blend the medley of literacy skills into thoughts inside of my head that organized my world. I loved it.
Even now when I read about building phonological awareness in children, I substituted my name in “The Name Game” song.
Lori!
Lori, Lori bo Bori
Bonana fanna fo fori
Mee my mo Mori, Lori!
I don’t remember my teachers having any influence on my adoration of rhyme and word play, which leads me to believe that I was a devotee of literacy and linguistics when my father’s sperm met my mother’s egg. Even today, as I write a poem or compose a sentence in my journal, I recognize the pleasure of separating words into syllables to create a rhythm to my work, blending sounds into words that cause surprise or disbelief, and selecting words that start with the same sound to soothe or annoy my readers.
There is no stopping a true reader and writer.
Linda Hogan had this advice for writers, and I think she is correct: “If someone is going to be a writer, they'll be a writer no matter what they do. I don't think I have any advice. I used to think I did, but if somebody loves to write they will be a writer.”
I never want to look for the damn Big Dipper because the sky is calling me. I would much rather appreciate the wholeness of the night twinkles, the chill in the autumn air and the sound of my companion's voice as we discuss life and our place in it. I'm glad I'm not looking for the Big Dipper because I would much rather experience the mindful whole.
Perception and Mindfulness
When perception is stronger than mindfulness, we recognize various appearances and create concepts such as "body," "cat", "house," or "person". . .
On some clear night, go outside, look up at the sky, and see if you can find the Big Dipper. For most people that is a familiar constellation, easy to pick out from all the other stars. But is there really a Big Dipper up there in the sky?
There is no Big Dipper up there. "Big Dipper" is a concept. Humans looked, saw a certain pattern, and then created a concept in our collective mind to describe it. That concept is useful because it helps us recognize the constellation. But it also has another, less useful effect. By creating the concept "Big Dipper" we separate out those stars from all the rest, and then, if we become attached to the idea of that separation, we lose the sense of the night sky's wholeness, its oneness. Does the separation actually exist in the sky? No. We created it through the use of a concept.
Does anything change in the sky when we understand that there is no Big Dipper? No.
--Joseph Goldstein, "Insight Meditation" from Everyday Mind
written by LJ on October 31, 2008
Beware of Red Heads and Angels in Concrete Cowboy Boots
I feel moronic and heavy as if there is a misguided angel wearing cement cowboy boots sitting on my shoulder. Wouldn’t you know it? That’s the angel who would find me. He’s perturbed because his wings are out of service. Angel and I survey the landscape of humanity through a hole in the clouds, but he won’t talk about his mafia past, so I explain to him that I’m passionately drawn to the cocky redhead glowing above all the other men in the shuffle below. Alas, the redhead doesn’t acknowledge my distant wave. I try again extending both arms over my head and fluttering my fingers in what I hope is a Marilyn Monroe mid-air gyration, but he instinctively turns his shadow to my face.
Although I want him to join us on cloud 10, and I’m willing to boost him up to our level, I realize that I cannot NOT demand the minimum of what I require from his appealing form and electric intellect. Hot as a passionate desire can shout fornicate, a woman needs what a woman needs.
For me, communicating exclusively online is the kingdom of the socially retarded and the interpersonally deformed, so I wondered as the days passed if we would ever speak on the phone. The age-old question a modern woman phrases in a contemporary fashion goes something like this: Is he ever going to ask for my phone number and actually use it or am I deluding myself into thinking he is interested?
I started to see myself as an online cartoon character virtually grinning and strumming the alphabet song for his amusement, an animated figure he could dress up in outrageous red miniskirts that weren’t my style, clad in black leather hooker boots that hurt my feet: adding a sway to my hips at the touch of his mouse. I cried out to be real. I wanted to wear my blue jeans with a small hole in the buttocks. Couldn’t he hear me?
In her world, he was unwilling to break through the screensaver and hold the hand of a Midwestern girl who naively wanted to know him, desperately wanted to ask a million questions about what was churning around in his brain, from the mundane to the colossal, nothing about him was insignificant to that girl.
So much for building a mending wall; dismantling the barricade of mistrust cemented around her feet and rising to her navel. A redheaded masculine tone of voice exuding carbon dioxide was out of her environmental reach.
What does she do when she doesn’t see the eyes of the man on the other end of the Internet connection? She remembers them as being blue. She doubts his intentions and wonders if he’s an online super freak, that boy is super freaky. She hopes that isn’t the case but online communication compounds her distrust.
The red haired boy slips outside the circumference of the cloud peephole at the same instant Angel spots the man who designed his concrete boots. “That son of a bitch,” Angel hisses as his story begins.
In a high school English class, I worked with students on a tribute poem about Twister the stub-tailed dog, best friends and a mother diagnosed with colon cancer. I was surprised how their language seemed stuck in high school slang- hung out and chilled- and common word usage. We spoke about expanding their vocabulary and about how selecting the exact word to convey a specific meaning was critical in a poem because the poet has so few words to work with.
Teaching for me is not only about monitoring and assessing, it's about making secondary students aware of the potential clout and force of the words they select to sway their reader, giving them the influence to make their audience sob blood or to cause a stoic heart to beat to the time of the arrhythmia of their word choice. They need to know that it’s their voice, fluency and grace that blends words together to make meaning in the world.
Oral and written language are important for secondary students because they will soon be launched into the adult world where words are power; literacy and comprehending what they read affect the choices they make and these choices contribute to collective empowerment or collective ignorance of tiny communities and throbbing nation-states. Without words, who are we? How do we as teachers instill this love and awe of words into our secondary students' writing habits?
Excerpt from “Meeting Elise” in the collection of short stories by Nam Le in The Boat
Sadly, youth makes a whore of beauty.
Don’t get me wrong, I like kids- Olivia was thirty years younger than me. I even wanted to have some with her. The problem is there are just too many of them. You can’t throw a brick on this island without concussing one. I wish I had more restraint. But I can’t help but hate how they look at me, how they don’t look at me. I hate their interchangeable bodies, their mass-rehearsed attitudes, their cars that look like boxes, like baseball caps, like artificial enlargements, their loud advertising, their beeps and clicks and trings, I hate how they speak words as though they’re chewing them, how they assume the business of the world revolves around them- how they’re right- and how everywhere this cult of youth, the pedamorphic dumbing-down, has whored beauty- duped, drugged, damaged, pixilated it and everywhere turned it to plastic.
From: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
(A Tribute to Grandmothers Everywhere)
And , yeah, my grandmother was smart and kind and traveled to about 100 different Indian reservations, but that had nothing to do with her greatness.
My grandma’s greatest gift was tolerance.
Now, in the old days, Indians used to be forgiving of any kind of eccentricity. In fact, weird people were often celebrated.
Epileptics were often shamans because people just assumed that God gave seizure-visions to the lucky ones.
Gay people were seen as magical too.
I mean, like in many cultures, men were viewed as warriors and women were viewed as caregivers. But gay people, being both male and female, were seen as both warriors and caregivers.
Gay people could do anything. They were like Swiss army knives!
My grandmother had no use for all the gay bashing and homophobia in the world, especially among other Indians.
“Jeez,” she said. “Who cares if a man wants to marry another man? All I want to know is who is going to pick up all the dirty socks?”
Of course, ever since white people showed up and brought along their Christianity and the fears of eccentricity, Indians have gradually lost all of their tolerance.
Indians can be just as judgmental and hateful as any white person.
But not my grandmother.
Dangerous Spaces
Chicas, they are a distraction from the important things, and as Luis says, sometimes to go between the legs of a chica is more dangerous than walking under a bridge in a strange barrio.
The Boat, “Cartagena” by Nam Le
As Lori says, the same is true for going between the legs of a boy.
