A misunderstanding of the concept of now can be a slippery slope that quickly leads to a nihilistic take on mindfulness practice. If you view what’s happening in the present moment as separate from past and future experience, figuring that what you say or do makes little difference is an understandable conclusion. Understandable, but completely at odds with two basic foundations of mindfulness practice.
Looking past the quite modern aspects of online twittering there is something rather sweet and retro about the whole thing. Twitter is, in many respects, a call back to sewing circles, ice-cream socials, and mixers. These old-fashioned social events of yesteryear were primarily about making friends, having interesting conversations, and learning something new. Not so different from Twitter’s mission to be a way for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected. At it’s best Twitter is exactly what it sets out to be.
Okay, so how cool is it that the Obamas are tearing up 1,100 square feet of the White House lawn to plant a kitchen garden? I can’t wait to see the pictures of Michelle, Barack, and their kids tending the White House garden splashed on the front pages of newspapers around the world. It will [...]
4:45pmSusan
I don’t know whether laughing at this stuff is less charged than taking it seriously.
4:49pmSeth
I think they’re responding in the way people respond to black comedy - when a person falls into a manhole some people (like me) will laugh. But that’s another issue.
The point I was making was that the younger women did not see the situation through a political prism, but, rather, through a human one. They are of the generation that believes the feminist fight to be over.
I posted a comment on Diana Winston’s “Ten Suggestions for Having a Regular Daily Meditation Practice Even if You Would Rather Be Thrown into a Shark-Infested Ocean” blog entry (which, by the way, is worth reading). I looked at my post and saw this status message: “Your comment is awaiting moderation.”
If you’ve ever wanted to do some public service but couldn’t fit it in with an already overloaded schedule of work, play and/or family obligations, our savvy President-elect is online to help.
The Presidential Inaugural committee “launched a national organizing effort on the eve of the Inauguration to engage Americans in service.” Their website (USAservice.org) gives [...]
10:02am Susan
It’s New Year’s Day, what are you throwing into the fireplace this year?
10:05amSeth
All of my bad qualities are going in there. It’s going to be a very big fire.
Mindfulmom welcomes Mark Brady from The Committed Parent as a Guest Blogger today.
Any time I walk into a classroom, meeting or party, my assumption is that somewhere between half and eighty percent of the women present have been sexually, physically or emotionally abused before the age of 18; and that these experiences have compromised optimal neural integration and development to some degree; and that the same is true for between half and ten percent of the men in the room. While very likely true, these are assumptions I might be well-served to examine more closely.
Andie Coller posted an interesting piece on Politico this morning where she points out that progressive parenting principles are reflected both in Obama’s rhetoric and leadership style.
It would be easy to bash Obama’s enlightened-father philosophy as an insulting new extension of the nanny state, but the truth is that the exercise of power in any form shares a lot in common with the parent-child relationship.
Seth
So, the holidays…
Susan
Do you ever feel sad around the holidays?
Seth
I don’t need the holidays for an excuse, baby. Sadness around the holidays is for amateurs. I can be morose any time. Although the holidays provide a good excuse. Expectations are so high, and people are…well…so low.
I don’t feel like I have the luxury of pessimism any more. The country is in dire shape, the problems seem insurmountable, the leaders of the past eight years dangerous buffoons who will pay no price for their epic malfeasance. The auto industry is tanking, newspapers are going bankrupt, and Wall Street is fleecing us again with the bailout. Truly, things are awful.
And yet.
The LA Times op-ed page this week rocks with yesterday’s piece on MOCA by Heather Dundas and today’s on PTA moms by Sandra Tsing Loh.
PTA moms are the very opposite of the $500,000-golden-parachute bureaucrats Brewer has come to represent. PTA moms draw no salary. We work nights, weekends, holidays. We bring our kids’ schools new resources every day — whatever we can load into our minivans. (Binders, colored pencils, toilet paper, snacks, basketball hoops and musical instruments are but some of the items I’ve seen moms deliver.) We know not just how to make a dollar stretch but how to make no dollars stretch. (Look how handy we are with scrip, Chuck E. Cheese fundraisers, Vons give-back-to-school cards.) So thrifty are we, it shocks us when our snickerdoodle-baking world meets the LAUSD money-hosing world.
Heather Dundas from the LA Times op-ed page today:
I wanted my children to experience that connection between art and life, so I continued to take them to exhibitions. We saw the enormous photographs of Thomas Struth in 2002. (Teo’s reaction: “So what?” Adena’s: “Scary families.”) In 2004, we went to see Doug Wheeler’s unearthly bright neon wall, which we all loved, and in 2005, we saw the monumental paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat, which gave me a chance to tell the kids what it was like to live in New York City in 1980. Going to the museum had become a habit with us, and Teo had begun to forget that he hated art.
American culture has long had a carnival aspect. How else to explain the ascendancy of Paris Hilton and her fellow celebritards, or the career of Flavor Flav? But until recently, these people and their antics had been a diversion, something to be glanced at in a dog-eared magazine at the dentist’s office, or to be glimpsed on a teenager’s laptop. Not anymore. With the advent of the Palin Family . . . reality took a turn that must make all practitioners of satire quake in our boots. If this is what truth offers, our audience would do well to ask, then who needs comedy?
One of the more vexing decisions a novelist makes today is how aggressively to promote a new book. Time was you sold it, then moved to Paris, ran with the bulls in Pamplona, or danced in Plaza fountain after a night of drunken carousing, while the publishing house did all the work. Alas, those days have gone the way of the fifty-cent paperback. For example: to blog or not to blog? You can see how I answered that one.
But the most piquant detail from my daughter’s B’Nai Mitzvah Tour circa 2005 was observed at – where else - a country club. It occurred during the cocktail hour, somewhere between the canapés and the cocktail wieners, when the bar mitzvah boy was going to make his entrance. The lights dimmed, a spotlight hit a pair of gilded doors on a balcony above a sweeping staircase. The music kicked in : P.I.M.P. by 50 Cent. If the bubbes and zaydes present were aware of or concerned with the lyric content (No Cadillacs, no perms that you can’t see, that I’m a motherfuckin’ P.I.M.P.) they gave no evidence of it.
Jessie Kornbluth from Huffington Post and Head Butler’s sane holiday giving guide.
His pick for Novel of the Year is none other than our mindful dad’s new novel Shining City!
Shining City. Seth Greenland’s comic triumph begins: “Julian Ripps was too fat to be reclining in a hot tub between a pair of naked women, unless he was very rich or they were prostitutes. He wasn’t, but they were.” The rest is just that smart. And funny.
From Jonathan Yardley’s Picks of the Best Books of 2008 in the Washington Post:
I’m not going to make any cosmic claims for Shining City, by Seth Greenland, but it had me laughing out loud over and over again. It concerns a rather hapless Los Angeles middle-management guy who falls into a wholly unexpected bonanza: His sleazy older brother dies of a splendidly stage-managed heart attack and leaves him a dry-cleaning business that turns out to be a front for a prostitution ring. I’d never before heard of Greenland, but Shining City sent me to his first novel, The Bones, and the two put me squarely in his fan club.
My doctor says it’s all normal. “Normal for whom?’ I snap, “An Alzheimer’s patient in the middle of a sex change?” I lost my girlish figure long ago, I lost my girlish face in the past ten years, but now I’m losing my girlish attitude, and that one really hurts.
If you have little kids in your life you know how fast they grow and change every day, week, and month. But actually so do all of us! Perhaps it is less obvious to us, but it is true! The fact is, what we usually call ourselves– body, mind, emotions– is always in constant flux, changing, swirling, moving. And there is no pause button.
I often say there’s no such thing as a magic bullet - or magic wand - or whatever - but one thing comes pretty close and that’s a concept known as clear seeing. Everyone has the capacity for clear seeing already but sometimes our vision is blurred because we like it that way. Selective [...]
“We started with some shadow boxing. My half-hearted attempts to be aggressive were laughable even to me. But when we broke into pairs, that’s when I lost it. I can’t hit anyone. I’m a non-violent Buddhist. I’ve never swung a punch at anyone my whole life. How could I do this?”
Mindful Mom is delighted to welcome Heather Cabot, founder of the Well Mom, as one of our Mindful Moms!
Election Day got off to a rousing start over breakfast when my nearly three-year-old son stubbornly announced that he would NOT be going with me to “boat” because he did not want his feet to get wet. [...]
On a morning where an Obama presidency is cause for celebration and hope, the likely passage of Prop 8 in California is a reality check that Americans remain almost literally split down the middle with respect to our perspectives on the most basic of social issues. For those of us who supported Obama and his mandate, it will take more than just reaching across the aisle to manifest the hope for change and unity that he and his campaign have inspired. It’s going to take a whole lot of listening - active listening with a willingness to have our own perspectives shift - to come together and move forward as a more united and more evolved nation. President-elect Obama has proven to be an exemplar of this approach and, if his plans for a transition team are any indication, the hard work of open and informed conversation has already begun in his administration. Now it’s time for the rest of us to follow his lead and take these conversations to our schools, churches, temples, workplaces, and kitchen tables, truly integrating into our workaday lives the change that we believe in.
This morning’s edition of Education week outlines John McCain’s and Barack Obama’s positions with respect to education. The candidates views on critical policy issues differ significantly.
Click HERE for a Voter’s Guide that digests McCain and Obama’s positions on No Child Left Behind, Teacher Quality, School Choice, Early Childcare and Education, and Higher Education.
Click HERE for a running TWITTER feed on Obama and McCain’s positions on education.
report here, and cleverly using the only paper handy. I can still recall what most of the abridged words mean.
He signed up to join the Navy directly out of high school with a buddy of his. He wasn’t that eager to enlist but there was nothing else to do, and his buddy wanted them to stay together. After two years in Security at his base in Washington state, and a visit home, he was now on his way to his next post in Hawaii. “And your buddy?” Pause. “He killed himself. After boot camp.”
I try to think back to when my son was first born. Was I this way? Did my husband and I overwhelm friends and family with our love for our new son? Granted, it was before the Internet and we couldn’t have afforded the postage. But, was I quite so oblivious to the fact people had other things to do besides fawn over pictures of my baby napping with Eeyore?
I am a mother, a pastor, a wife (of a pastor), and an American. I am also a supporter of Barack Obama. I have eagerly followed his career since his speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. I fervently hope and pray that in just a couple more weeks he will be the president-elect and that in just a few months he will begin to implement an entirely new vision for America.
Negative feelings reside in the world of emotions, the language of which is predominantly non-verbal. Images, sounds, sense impressions, and smells are the most effective way to convince emotions, like fear, that there’s cause for alarm. Nothing speaks more powerfully to the fears of older undecided Jewish voters than images of Hitler. And to people born in communities with longstanding culturally based and unrecognized racial prejudice, the association between the first major party African-American candidate for President and a monkey is one of the most embedded, racially charged images in U.S. history.
There is a brand new Ferris wheel on the Santa Monica Pier, not so far from where I live. Countless blogs, news reports, articles and YOUtube videos depict the rainbow of 160,000 colorful, solar-power and wind lit LED lights that hover above the Pacific ocean and sparkle in the night sky as the new Ferris wheel spins. As artful as these descriptions might be, no amount of reading or thinking about this fantastic amusement park ride can compare to the visceral experience of taking it.
Whether it’s a climate crisis, a financial crisis, a personal crisis, or a political crisis it’s important to remember how to maintain equanimity in times of change. It can be quite useful to write down a list of things that are essential, that you can trust and rely upon no matter what. This way, if you get disoriented or overwhelmed by what is happening in the world, this will be your emergency spiritual first aid kit.
