John’s photo shows the odd orange skies from the ash and firesmoke.
FYI, a local professor put together a website to match housing opportunities with those who’ve been evacuated from San Diego and other SoCal fire regions.
Category Archives: photo
flying mountain
Tonite I watched an interview of housewife-turned-Buddhist-nun Pema Chodron with some friends. Chodron spoke about many common Buddhist concepts, with her own unique spin on the issues of pain and suffering and the goal to be ‘fully awake.’
For me, the most provocative quotation from the program was this one:
“We are all capable of becoming fundamentalists because we get addicted to other people’s wrongness.”
She spoke at length about how this addiction, or ‘getting hooked’ as she calls it, sets off a chain reaction of suffering. By removing ourselves from the addictive cycle we can have more peace and compassion.
I love that idea. I am certainly guilty of being addicted to other people’s wrongness just as I am guilty of being addicted to my own rightness. I recognize that this is a very rigid way to live, but it is so human…sigh.
What I really want…to see the divine in each person I meet and not to feel anger and self-righteousness when someone believes differently than I do. So I will keep trying….
Note: the picture above is of some Buddhist carvings on the “Flying Mountain” at the Lingyin Temple in Hangzhou, China. The day I visited the temple nearly two years ago it was rainy and cold, the ground so slippery underfoot that it was difficult to walk around the temple and monastery. Yet there were still dozens of worshipers lighting huge bundles of incense outside of the temple and saying their prayers. I was impressed by the devotion of the adherents. That day I also felt very homesick for my family back in the states. At the foot of the Buddha I said prayers for their continued safety and felt great comfort.
hot & cold
Today it was ghastly hot. Santa Ana winds with the smell of ash & smoke on the air. Nearly 90 degrees.
Unbelievable for nearly-November! And the predictions are that it will near 100 degrees by mid-week. Oh my!
But despite the heat outside, the Pacific waters were cold on my toes! In this photo John captured my grimace as the water came up to my calf and it was a kind of delicious pain. 🙂
paris
The family at the Hotel du Levant a few years ago. Wearing my way-cooler-than-jaime-somers bionic leg.
Ahhhh,……Paris!! 🙂
Make me smile…
Watering the garden around midday and the children from the nearby preschool walk by. They squeal with delight as they say hi to their beloved elephant friend Ned, who lives in our garden. Ned guards the flowerbed along with a few other friends including a dalmatian puppy, a turtle, a koala bear and my wingless cherub.
If you look close at the pic above you can see Ned’s outline in the background. 🙂
survivor
This is a snapshot of me, just after I finished my chemotherapy treatments. My hair was staring to grow back in and I still wasn’t wearing a prosthetic leg very often. You can see that I’m starting to gain back some of my lost weight–I’m guessing that I’m probably up to nearly 90 lbs here.
In this pic I was panning for gold in a mountain stream with my family. It’s one of the very few pictures that I have of myself in the post-chemo era.
garden rainbow
I’ve been a bit depressed about living in SoCal for a few weeks, ever since we returned from Boston, really. I felt like I wanted to flee away to somewhere with four seasons, somewhere where people wear wool. All of your lovely pictures of autumn leaves made this longing even more intense. I wanted to look out my window and see red and orange and not green, green, green.
So this was on my mind as I was in my garden a few days ago. I decided to go on a hunt for color, to see just how many different shades I could capture in 15 minutes in my plot. Below are a few of the results:
PURPLE
RED
PINK
ORANGE
YELLOW
GREEN
BLUE
After I came home and sorted through my photos I felt a bit better. I made myself a big salad with garden lettuce and thinly sliced up a zucchini and drizzled it with a bit of flavored vinegar & oil and spiced with some cracked pepper (yum).
True, we have little seasonal variety here–just a range of somewhere in the 70s and 80s year-round, but the local food is good and the gardening opportunities abound. I suspect that someday we’ll be living somewhere we I get true seasons again. But for now I’ll stop complaining and just enjoy being here. 🙂
it’s in the brows
One of my more illustrious ancestors–a former governor of New York.
I’m not seeing much of a family resemblance. Heaven knows I didn’t inherit his hair! (and what’s truly amazing about his ‘do is that was long before the days of the carefully-crafted bedhead look…makes me wonder if he didn’t have some special tin of bear grease pomade on his bathroom counter…)
On second thought, his eyebrows might look just a bit like mine when my tweezers have gone missing for a few weeks…
open
A picture from my garden meditation time yesterday. My roses are still blooming (joy)! This one smelled so fruity and flowerly–I so wish you could’ve been there with me…(and I did pluck just one from the bush to add to my kitchen sink windowsill).
A quotation that I have been pondering the past few days:
“If in the last few years you haven’t discarded a major opinion or acquired a new one, check your pulse. You may be dead.”
~Gelett Burgess
I want to be open to new ideas, to continue learning, growing and changing. A life lived with fear and rigidity is not, for me, a satisfying one! I think life is too short to not be open. We should be absorbing and experiencing many new things…to tread in places where we are are unsure. To be like this rose–showing our most vulnerable inner places and sharing it with everyone, even those who may not recognize the courage that it takes to be open.
just one more
Yah, just as you were sitting back in your office chair and yawning a bit, thinking, “Naw, there’s no way she’ll post again today” (thus breaking her previous record of three posts in one day), she goes and posts again. What is it with that pilgrimgirl?
People:
For those of you who just can’t get enough of trains (and you know who you are), don’t you dare miss today’s Daily Dose of Imagery. Sit back and just feel those rails moving beneath you as you move forward into the horizon….
And if you really want to sleep well tonite, you can add a bit of this to your mind just as you’re drifing off into a train-induced dreamworld….