A Ripple

“Remember there’s no such thing as a small
act of kindness. Every act creates
a ripple with no logical end.”
- Scott Adams

Have you done something today to create a ripple?

Healing Request

Hello All,

I’ve been working on a book for the past month, however now I’m having a relapse of a chronic illness.

I would like to ask that I be kept in your healing prayers and meditations.

Thank you and may also be blessed.

Hospice

is coming in for my grandmotherly friend now and so I’m off into this wintery world to help her with her cleaning needs and help her eat for the morning…and then off to my job for the day…I’ll likely be very spotty with my blogging for the next few weeks while this holiday job is in full swing. I am trying to get my kids to Hawaii for their graduation… Pray for her for me…? I wish her passing to be gentle and dignified. Blessings all…

Monday’s Candle Moment: Some quotes I like

I had a reader find my old blog Defining Spiritual Presence and he commented on a post that I hadn’t remembered. I remembered at that point that I’d meant to go through that blog to see what else I might want to move over here. This is a repost that I thought had some terrific ideas in it that makes it a wonderful post for the Candle Moment:

Here’s a few things on my mind lately:

amidabuddha.org - Daily Meditation: “A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions. - Oliver Wendell Holmes”

Now that’s a tru’ism if I ever heard one….*smiles*

amidabuddha.org - Daily Meditation: “We say, ‘In calmness there should be activity; ‘ in activity there should be calmness.’ Actually, they are the same thing; to say ‘calmness’ or to say ‘activity’ is just to express different interpretations of one fact. There is harmony in our activity, and where there is harmony there is calmness. - D.T. Suzuki”

This one is deep enough that it could take years to have visceral understandings of it…to make it second nature….to make that balance in your life a way of being…

Living Tantra: The Dance of Giving and Receiving: “Compulsively rescuing others is draining. You constantly give away your energy in trade for some nourishment you imagine you will receive in return. But since you are in a state of fantasy and fixation, you never get back what you want. And you don’t even know what you actually need. Exhaustion is the inevitable result. Service, on the other hand, may be physically tiring, but it is fundamentally nourishing for a whole situation, one that includes you. The key quality of service is that it is reciprocal: it is an embodiment of the understanding that we live in continuity. Two Sanskrit words convey the sense of service as reciprocity in a state of continuity: sevā and dāna. Sevā is selfless service without attachment to the fruits of one’s labor. You just serve. The activity is complete in and of itself without any other reward. You don’t have to try to enjoy it, or grin and bear it. You aren’t striving to be good or nice. You are just expressing the natural devotion of Self to Self. You are Self serving Self. There is no difference between you, the act of service, and the one being served. Everything flows like a beautiful, precise dance of devotion. There is no other joy to be sought. This is pure seva-ānanda. Dāna is giving. The real meaning of dāna is nothing less than the total”

This is only a little of the whole article. It’s a deep teaching that I learned and am still learning about. There is a concept in Siberian Shamanism called Windhorse. That is; the shaman earns power through good deeds, right lifestyle, service to Spirit and others and through making right relationships with the Spirits and with humanity. Now power, so far, for me, means that I am healthy and able to heal others. It may come to mean more things as time passes…but that’s what I’ve learned so far….

Only thing is…it doesn’t work if that’s your primary motivation. It only works if you are willing to sacrifice yourself…if you start in a place of gratitude and the simple desire to give.

Candle Moment: Faith

This is a meme. If you would like to participate, please read over this post first.

I have been keeping a private blog for a few months now in which I record prayers and wishes that I’ve made. Naturally, I keep record of those which have received responses. There are times when I put up a post there with more than one wish in it. I sometimes do more than one answer in a post too.

Right now things stand at 17 posts of wishes and 16 posts of answered prayers.

I think that’s a very great blessing and I am deeply thankful for it.

I chose to do this journal of prayers and answers, which I call Sandlewood Prayer Beads because I have been having a crisis of faith since this summer about having a prayer answered. The journal seemed necessary meditation for me to keep my faith. I can feel the twinges of that loss of faith today.

I have been debating for an hour about what I wanted to say here today….

Mostly, I realize that I don’t have anything to say today. I need to listen today…so I ask that, as an act of power and beauty, that you speak instead today of your own answered prayers…and perhaps even of your own crisis of faith that you have resolved.

I light a candle and sit down to listen. Blessings.

Candle Moment: Taking Care

This post is a meme. If you’d like to join in, please read this post first.

My husband and I met an elderly woman when we moved into this neighborhood about 14 years ago. She and her husband were our next door neighbors and they asked my husband for help with odd jobs. They could tell that we’d hit some hard times when we moved in next door and so we mutually helped each other.

Over the years, my husband and this older woman whom I’ll call Lucy have made good friends. We’ve seen her through many things over the years; her husband’s illness and death and now her decline into terminal illness. She and my husband have made good friends. They can talk about many things that others don’t dare to talk about with Lucy….so she appreciates him and she knows that she can count on him.

To my husband, this woman is his chosen mother/grandmother figure. He loves her dearly and is grateful that she lets him help her.

Recently Lucy has asked me to help her also. She’s asked for me to help her with cooking, cleaning and other chores. She needs to be helped to get items like her mail or feeding her animals or bringing her things to drink.

She usually has a woman to help her with these things during the week, but she’s been asking me to help her on Saturdays, so I get dressed and go down the road…Did I mention that we ended up living in the house her daughter rented to us before selling it to a company? So we still live close by, just a few doors farther away… Her daughter finds it really comforting that her mother has us so close by.

The connections over the years have been many and I am grateful to take care of her a little bit. Soon she will be gone and I will miss her presence in our lives. I’ve not made the close relationship with her that my husband has, but her presence as a grandmother has always been there and I feel love for her because she has helped my husband to feel unconditionally loved by an older woman for the first time in his life. It has been a pleasure for me to see this rich relationship between them and to see the impact it has had on my family over the years. She’s given my children jobs and made sure that other people in the neighborhood befriended them….so many things.

They are small things, but these are the things that make a village…that make family of people who have no blood ties and I am deeply grateful that I am getting these experiences for the first time in my life. I might appreciate them more than most. I didn’t grow up that way. I was a military child. There is no small village atmosphere on a military base. No one lives there long enough for that to happen. There were never any ‘Aunts’, ‘Uncles’ and ‘cousins’ in a neighborhood atmosphere to think about in the middle of a storm or to share my over plentiful supply of cookies that my family put in my stocking that year. There’s no one who would bring me soup if I were sick a long while. There’s no one who would teach my children respect when I’m not looking.

These are the experiences of a small village.

They are good human connections and I know that when Lucy is gone, that tie to this neighborhood will wither for us. We have no close ties with others in this neighborhood. I think that when she’s gone, and my son graduates from high school next spring, I will truly be done living here and will be ready to move on because all business will be finished here.

I was just thinking how good it is for me to have others to take care of in this gentle way…that its a blessing. I am grateful for it. Deeply.