owl pellets

(click to enlarge)

my dear friend,

i am sorry i did not do a thorough serious job interpreting your dream, but sometimes it takes me awhile.
i'm the same with movies -- a day or so after seeing a movie, i'll suddenly say "oh NOW i get it!"

you were running through a field of lavender!  so wonderful! but i never asked you what lavender is to you. don't people use it to scent their linen closet? their bedsheets? or is it the scent that helps people sleep? i would like to know. 

in any case, you were moving energetically through a lovely free open bright unencumbered world!

and you tripped and fell.

well we all understand this on some level!  this is life. this is impermanence, yes, thank you Buddha, we get it.

notice, though, it was not a rainstorm, or a monster, or a thank you Freud snake, nor your parents appearing from behind a tree, that ended the bliss.  you did it yourself.

isn't this so very feminine....blame ourselves! i would advise you (and all of us) to watch for this. not to shake a finger and say bad girl, but to pat yourself indulgently, fondly, and say "silly there you go again."

you must tell me sometime, did you trip on a stone, or your own shoelace, or even worse did your own feet get tangled?  you see, it makes a difference in understanding.

the good news is, you were still in that lovely scented paradise.  you were down but not out. ready to lie there and enjoy or get up and run further.  and frankly, i don't believe it was a fall by your own clumsiness.  i think really, something over which you had no control, something that is actually someone else's problem, perhaps someone's thoughtlessly abandoned shoe lying hidden in the lavender, is what you tripped on.

i will have to give it some more thought. 

what IS a meadow for?

what IS a meadow for?

i'm sitting on my meditation cushion
and in the morning sunlight i can see
faint green diagonal lines
behind the strongly buttery yellow walls.
the old wallpaper.
i remember my cousin roger's room
years and years, paint after paint
i could still see the cowboys from his childhood wallpaper if i knew what i was looking for.
isn't it a wonderful metaphor?
open the gate and let the cows in to graze.

*************

more hot hot hot

heatwave or not, we are fortunate that it cools off at night.
and we have the brook!
sprung up out of cold springs and tumbling down out of the foothills over rocks through deep shady ravines down and down to the falls and the swimming holes it can turn your feet numb in a matter of minutes!

yesterday afternoon, 90 degrees and rising, at the local store, the staff was putting a sign on the door "Gone Swimming Back in 1/2 Hour."
they explained "we have the best boss! he told us to go cool off in the brook!"

enjoying the heat wave!

hot hot hot!

the east coast heat wave has been in effect here for a couple of days!

being old fashioned, we did what folks did in the old days -- went to the movies!

("Come on in! It's COOL inside!")
not just The Movies, but we went to the brand new Springfield VT (home of Homer Simpson) movie theater, which after 3 years has risen -- just in time to open with the new Harry Potter -- phoenix-like, from the ashes of it's burnt down self.
not long after the town won the distinction of being named the official home of Homer Simpson, some rejected young lover in an apartment above the old downtown movie theater started a fire which burned the whole building down! we've missed having movies just 20 minutes away.
and now it's back!

the other way i've been keeping cool, with plenty of friendly funny companions, is at the ool in Raglan! 

and no UV to worry about either.

mudpie is sunning on the raft in her new bikini.

click to enlarge - dive in!

cat toy!

it's fun to invent new ways for the cats to amuse themselves. 

one cat finds an ice cube in the water dish fascinating, the other doesn't care, he's more of a jock than a philosopher.

recently i dropped a translucent sparkly marble into a quart size tonic bottle, and he played with it for a few days!  that's a success.

then after a few days of ignoring it, he's running it around the house again!

it's a winner!

i see u in there you marble!!!

W00tstock 2011

in Raglan Shire the tinies partied for 2 days of peace and waffles and great music! best band was CRASH, an all rhino band! (slide show is better full screen...the creative details of the costumes and setting are so much fun!)

TROLL! bwahahahahahaha?

watched Trollhunter last night and enjoyed it for what it was.
woke up this morning, slapped my forehead and thought "duh, it was supposed to be FUNNY!"
it's not that i have no sense of humor, just takes me 8 hours to get the joke?
or...maybe all those funny parts were meant to be serious?
guess i'll have to learn norwegian.

birth and death

at noon, six of us showed up for meditation practice. 

afterwards, we began our discussion with a chapter from Chogyam Trungpa's book, Smile at Fear and wound our way round fear to the subject of death.

a fine traditional Buddhist topic for a beautiful summer afternoon. 

awareness of one's fear of death, and appreciation of the impermanence of life, can have a beautiful effect on how you live.

the six of us, all women today, all know we are going to die, have been dying since we were born. 

as Buddhists, we are accustomed if not comfortable with that understanding, although knowing it and KNOWING it are not really the same.

only one of us has an actual doctor's assurance that she is dying... and barring some strange accident, she knows what she will die of...in the near future.

she described for us what that is like, and how you can't comprehend that you are going to die in quite that mind-stopping way until a doctor tells you that this is it.  

she described some of what she has wrestled with; she said often people say they'd like to die in their sleep, but she wants to be there for her death -- she said "i missed my birth, but i want to be present for my death!"

another of the group said that giving birth, which 3 of us have done, seems similar to dying. 

for one thing, she said, we couldn't possibly convey a full understanding of what it is like to give birth.

those of us who've borne children agreed, it is an experience beyond transmission. the non-moms looked like maybe they thought they knew quite well what childbirth is like.

the moms smiled to themselves remembering how manners, poses, learned behaviors, modesty, ego, fall away and become irrelevant when you are aware and giving birth... and so also, can we assume?... when one is aware and meeting death.

.

the p in the ool

 if you look close here you can see the P, more than one P, someone has put in bottom of the ool. done i heard as a joke.

don't you think it is suspicious that Enjah knew all about it?

click to see larger

at the ool

mudpie is staying out of trouble at the Raglan ool.

lots of fun things to do there if you are energetic, or just loaf around with friends.

and no worries, there's no P in the ool.

here they are

flowers!

my imposing cat

caught pawing the posies

pauses and poses

                                      ~mudpie

party on!

there must be a mathematical formula to figure out how long it takes 2 miles worth of cars to stop for an accident on the freeway (that's when we came along) and how many more cars will line up behind us over the next hour or so.
that many cars stood still, engines off, going nowhere for their holiday weekend, in the afternoon on July 3.
are vermonters nicer and smarter than other people, or is it only the horrible violent traffic snarls that make the news?
here's what happened.
people got out of their cars, walked around chatting with each other, meeting each others' dogs and kids. kids in front of us played volleyball with a beachball over their SUV. the breakdown lane became a promenade, young couples, old couples, teens on skateboards, cell phone yakkers, a kid with a guitar, and a nice lady who went car to car telling us satellite radio said it was a motorcycle accident (which i don't even really want to think about).
what could have been a miserable time of frustration trying to get to the party, actually became the party!

click to enlarge

if it's july, it must be summer!

just when we quit staying home because it was raining
stopped bothering with umbrellas
took rain as the natural condition of life
it stopped
and the sun came out

-----------------------
sorting out the garden's jungle mornings, evenings
(hatted --
against my dermatologist's anxiety)
i tear out thriving 'wrong' plants
leaving the 'right ones' to flourish.

these to discard these to keep what is the point of this
i ask myself,
enjoying the sun thru my shirt
the sweat under my hat.
a waste of time.

the garden will never be done year to year the weeds the thinning
wasting time,
wasting time...
the time i could be wasting
some other way.

the singularity will not be webcast

5 sends me a link with that as subject.
the link

i reply this looks good, but it's going to take awhile.

5 replies

I'm taking it slowly in bits, started it last night,
will get a bit further sometime today

also reading some very dense books on "jazz"
and apparently (according to the library) two novels
tho I had forgotten they existed

I believe they are on the coffee table under some
books of scale exercises, two rolls of tie-dye-colored duct tape, and a cowbell