A Mindful Life

This is me standing by my very first car, bought new, in 1991. I was a few months shy of 28. This vehicle opened my world. I had gone off to SUNY Oswego in 1989 to finish college. A financial shortfall required that I leave school and return to work at Syracuse University in 1990. [...]

Sometimes I experience God as this Beautiful Nothing,” he said. “And it seems then as though the whole point of life is just to rest in it. To contemplate it and love it and eventually disappear into it. And then other times it’s just the opposite. God feels like a presence that engorges everything. I [...]

I’ve been feeling overwhelmed, my system running at full steam, and so I haven’t had much left over for serious creation. So I’ve been avoiding it altogether. I was at a meeting for work today (yes, Sunday) and I decided that if I snuck a doodle in there, it might loosen things up. It’s not [...]

Soul. The word rebounded to me, and I wondered, as I often had, what it was exactly. People talked about it all the time, but did anybody actually know? Sometimes I’d pictured it like a pilot light burning inside a person — a drop of fire from the invisible inferno people called God. Or a [...]

I took this photo at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. The fish were swimming quickly in an aquarium that had a column shape, around and around, a silver streak to my dazed eyes.

Hmm. I am not doing so well with my commitment to myself on this journey. Writing of daily pages: zero. Artist’s date: zero. This adjustment to full-time work is happening s-l-o-w-l-y. However, I have been meeting my commitment to self-care. I’ve gotten 7-8 hours of sleep nightly, took a long, hot soak (does that count [...]

Two quotes that brought a wry smile, for your pondering pleasure.
Remember that as a teenager you are at the last stage of your life when you will be happy to hear that the phone is for you.
–Fran Lebowitz
America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns [...]

There is a law of nature that where moving bodies are in contact with one another, there is friction. And manners are the social lubricating oil that smoothes over friction. One learns to be courteous — it is needed to enable different people who don’t necessarily like each other to work together. Good causes do [...]

What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.
–Chief Crowfoot

I’m tweaking my colors. I noticed on the CRT at work the former green I used looked like shocking lime. That isn’t how it appeared on my laptop screen. I played around and found a slightly green off-white shade that looked fine on the CRT but was invisible on my laptop. So I’m still playing. [...]