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Beauty in Ocean City, MD |
Wednesday, July 31, 2024
July 31--Love and Beauty
Tuesday, July 30, 2024
July 30--Breathe!
--Friedrich Max Muller
- Deep inhale, exhale with "My mind is calm."
- Deep inhale, exhale with "My body is healthy."
- Deep inhale, exhale with "My soul is joyful."
- Deep inhale, exhale with "I am whole."
- Deep inhale, exhale with "All is well."
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On yesterday's walk |
Monday, July 29, 2024
July 29--Fireworks!
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A weekly summer Sunday night event |
Sunday, July 28, 2024
July 28--At the Beach!!!
We know we’re living in God’s Big Picture when we can see God in all cultures, in all social classes, and even in all religions. We have to stop thinking that any one religion has God in its pocket, or controls God, or that God only likes certain people who happen to be Christians. Would God be that stingy? Would God be that small and petty to only love people like me? I hope not. Because it’s precisely this great heart of God that is able to love all of God’s children.
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Our view this morning by E |
Saturday, July 27, 2024
July 27--1000 Miles, Arrived!
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My last trip with Arlie to Walmart... |
Friday, July 26, 2024
July 26--Day 2 Drive
--Thich Nhat Hanh
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Today's route |
Thursday, July 25, 2024
July 25--Road Trip! Yes! Again!
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Road signs in my future 😃 |
Wednesday, July 24, 2024
July 24--We Can Do Better
--John Steinbeck
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A sampling of our Mother's gifts |
Tuesday, July 23, 2024
July 23--Freely Give
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Don't be a Scrooge! |
Monday, July 22, 2024
July 22--Such an Interesting Time to Be Alive
- Freedom means choice.
- Equal rights for others does not mean less rights for you. It's not pie.
- Keep your religion out of my government.
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Sunday, July 21, 2024
July 21--Blanket of Love
--Helen Fielding
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Bright colors (turquoise, pink, speckled, purple, yellow) for the new grandbaby |
Saturday, July 20, 2024
July 20--Safely Home; Let the Healing Continue
Surrender will always feel like dying, and yet it’s the necessary path to liberation. It takes each of us a long time to just accept—to accept what is; to accept ourselves, others, the past, our own mistakes, and the imperfection and idiosyncrasies of almost everything. Our lack of acceptance reveals our basic resistance to life. Acceptance isn’t our mode nearly as much as aggression, resistance, fight, or flight. None of these responses achieve the deep, lasting results of true acceptance and peaceful surrender. Acceptance becomes the strangest and strongest kind of power. Surrender isn’t giving up, as we often think; it’s a giving to the moment, the event, the person, and the situation.
Our inner blockage to turning over our will is only overcome by a decision. It will not usually happen with a feeling, a mere idea, or a verse from religious Scripture. It is the will itself, our stubborn and self-defeating willfulness, that must first be converted and handed over. It doesn’t surrender easily, and usually only when it’s demanded of us by partners, parents, children, health, or circumstances. From the time we were young and according to our ability, we have all taken control and tried to engineer our own lives in every way possible.
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Friday, July 19, 2024
July 19--Enjoying the Family
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One of Fort Collins' many painted utility boxes |
Thursday, July 18, 2024
July 18--HodgePodge
Wednesday, July 17, 2024
July 17--Family Fun
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Hoping to score some Palisade peaches... |
Tuesday, July 16, 2024
July 16--More Please
Bless my eyes to see goodness.Bless my words to speak kindness.Bless my heart to feel compassion.Bless my soul to radiate love.
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Bench decoration at Botanica, Wichita |
Monday, July 15, 2024
July 15--We Are ALL Addicts
Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation of July 14:
I am convinced that, on a practical level, the gospel message of Jesus and the Twelve Step message of Bill Wilson are largely the same message. The Twelve Step Program parallels, mirrors, and makes practical the same messages that Jesus gave us, but without as much danger of spiritualizing the message and pushing its effects into a future world.
Here are four assumptions that I am making about addiction:
We are all addicts. Human beings are addictive by nature. Addiction is a modern name and honest description for what the biblical tradition called “sin” and medieval Christians called “passions” or “attachments.” They both recognized that serious measures or practices were needed to break us out of these illusions and entrapments.
“Stinking thinking” is the universal addiction. Substance addictions like alcohol and drugs are merely the most visible forms of addiction, but actually we are all addicted to our own habitual ways of doing anything, our own defenses, and most especially, our patterned way of thinking and processing reality. These attachments are at first hidden to us; by definition, we can never see or handle what we are addicted to, but we cannot heal what we do not first acknowledge.
All societies are addicted to themselves and create deep codependency. There are shared and agreed-upon addictions in every culture and every institution. These are often the hardest to heal because they do not look like addictions. We have all agreed to be compulsive about the same things and unaware of the same problems. The gospel exposes those lies in every culture.
Some form of alternative consciousness is the only freedom from the addicted self and from cultural lies. If the universal addiction is to our own pattern of thinking, which is invariably dualistic, the primary spiritual path must be some form of contemplative practice or prayer to break down this unhelpful binary system of either-or thinking and superiority thinking. Prayer is a form of non-dual resting in “what is.” Eventually, this contemplative practice changes our whole operating system!
Let me sum up, then. These are the foundational ways that I believe Jesus and the Twelve Steps of AA are saying the same thing but with different vocabulary:
This counterintuitive wisdom will forever be resisted, denied, and avoided, until it’s forced upon us by some reality over which we are powerless—and, if we’re honest, we are all powerless in the presence of full Reality.
- We suffer to get well.
- We surrender to win.
- We die to live.
- We give it away to keep it.
We are all spiritually powerless, not just those who are physically addicted to a substance. Alcoholics simply have their powerlessness visible for all to see. The rest of us disguise it in different ways, and overcompensate for our more hidden and subtle addictions and attachments.
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On The Ledge in Chicago... isn't that where all of life is!?!!? |
Sunday, July 14, 2024
July 14--How Big Is Your World?
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My favorite Chicago photo-- Wrigley Field from my airplane circling to land |
Saturday, July 13, 2024
July 13--Choice Words
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Nicholas Krushenick, "Elephant Spoons" Art Institute of Chicago |
Friday, July 12, 2024
July 12--How Much Is Too Much?
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Poor Barney, I'm sorry! |
Thursday, July 11, 2024
July 11--Only Love Works
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Georgia O'Keefe, "Red Hills with Flowers," Art Institute of Chicago |
Wednesday, July 10, 2024
July 10--Love Is It
Tuesday, July 9, 2024
July 9--Re-Centering
Mystic and theologian Howard Thurman (1899–1981) writes of the contemplative practice of making time to “center down”:
How good it is to center down!
To sit quietly and see one’s self pass by!
The streets of our minds seethe with endless traffic;
Our spirits resound with clashings, with noisy silences,
While something deep within hungers and thirsts for the still
moment and the resting lull.…
The questions persist: what are we doing with our lives?—
what are the motives that order our days?
What is the end of our doings? Where are we trying to go?…
Over and over the questions beat in upon the waiting moment.
As we listen, floating up through all the jangling echoes
of our turbulence, there is a sound of another kind—
A deeper note which only the stillness of the heart
makes clear.
It moves directly to the core of our being. Our questions are
answered,
Our spirits refreshed, and we move back into the traffic of
our daily round
With the peace of the Eternal in our step.
How good it is to center down!
Leta
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Monarch on hibiscus, The Butterfly House, Chicago |
Monday, July 8, 2024
July 8--The Perfect Storm--for American Airlines
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Sunday, July 7, 2024
July 7--Our Huge Saturday
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On the Ledge |
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From the Wheel, proof that I did it! |
Saturday, July 6, 2024
July 6--YES! Sing the Song!
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Friday, July 5, 2024
July 5--Breathe and Love
We are "two peas in a pod"--we came back to the hotel and napped, then walked to a brew pub for supper. We walked almost 7 miles total.
Today--Wrigleyville and the Cubs game, my baseball heaven!
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One of the amazing creatures at the Shedd Aquarium |
Thursday, July 4, 2024
July 4--Here We Go Again!
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We shall soon see the Sea Otters! |
Wednesday, July 3, 2024
July 3--A Very BIG Question
Many of us try to shove spiritual transformation into the nooks and crannies of a life that is already unmanageable, rather than being willing to arrange our life for what our heart most wants. We think that somehow we will fall into transformation by accident.
Christian tradition has a name for the structure that enables us to say yes to the process of spiritual transformation day in and day out. It is called a rule of life. A rule of life seeks to respond to two questions: Who do I want to be? How do I want to live? … [or] the interplay between these two questions: How do I want to live so I can be who I want to be?
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Tuesday, July 2, 2024
July 2--A Good Day
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Dr. Seuss, The Lorax |
Monday, July 1, 2024
July 1--Affection
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"Playmates" at Botanica, Wichita |