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A closer read

The Times Picayune said it will shuttle their daily paper and deliver only three times a week. Well, maybe that is not such a bad thing – today I spent my morning coffee time instead of watching the bluebirds in my garden reading about a guy who ate the face off another guy (the victim was, of course, from Louisiana), a child’s birthday party that ended with one kid and one mother dead, and others…

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Saboteurs, Appreciators, and Captains

In the world of Life Coaching there are all sorts of names you give the tokens you are moving around on the Game of Life. The Captain I had visualized as a Stick Figure, which fit the game perfectly since I’m hairless and starting over and a Stick Figure is as elemental a drawing as you can get. So I can dress, put hair on, make my Stick Figure into anything I want my Captain…

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Cresting the wave

After the complete discordance of a few weeks ago, we find ourselves with an amusing and loving 3 year old who loves nothing more than to read his books, come looking for us and “catching us” and who goes for his nap easily and who has taken to wanting to dress himself. Don’t look back, just ride this wave until it ends:

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On reading the paper

The Times Picayune published an article by David Brooks, who writes about education for the The New York Times – the article is entitled “What you don’t learn with a top degree” – it’s an interesting look at why we go to school as two thirds of the article is about the brain drain that Wall Street created in the last decades as it attracted the best and the brightest. Towards the end of the…

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The delusion of realization

The zen temple down the street has started offering dharma talks after the meditation on Sunday mornings and the topic has been Genjo Koan, which was written in 1233 by Eihei Dogen, founder of the Soto Zen tradition. The “issue at hand” is the koan of everyday life. And so let’s just start with that. As I kneeled in the corner, facing the wall, meditating and practicing the tradition of letting thoughts come and go,…

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what if you just accepted fate

I’ve partnered with atheists my whole life and yet I’m always drawn into other’s religious views as they express them. Today, I was on the porch, watching Tin walk to the nun’s house to bring her some jambalaya, the bayou was in pristine shape, the air had the right Gulf south humidity, and there was a feeling of expansiveness all around. Let the Mystery Be by Iris Dement was playing on the stereo and I…

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School’s out for summer!

Tin completed his first year of nursery school at Waldorf and the class went to celebrate by the Tree of Life in Audubon Park today. Many of his classmates are moving onto kindergarten so that means next year Tin will be the big boy. Hard to believe. But Tin is ready for summer; he absconded with his classmate’s trombone and he began his lessons in earnest – musicology 101. First the moves, then the music.

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