Pride is not just rainbows. It is fighting for and speaking out for justice, support, and nourishment for all.
The intention of mantra and japa is to help us refocus the mind. Anything we repeat or allow to repeat in our awareness will groove itself into our being.
Be ware of what you repeat to yourself or otherwise.
Excerpt from a piece of litter. I left it there for the next person to read.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
I was just led to this blog entry on community gardening in DC from the DC Urban Gardeners‘ list serve’s daily digest. The blog entry was originally posted last spring, but still has helpful information, and the service provided by the blogger looks interesting too.
If you have been thinking about getting into a garden, now may be a better time to get on a waiting list than the start of the growing season. Now is the time that novices have realized that they don’t take care of their plots, and they are better off supporting the local farmers’ markets. If you cannot get into a garden, why not be the fantastic neighbor that starts a new garden?
In the interest of full disclosure, after a few years at the garden nearest to my house, I decided to restructure my tiny backyard to add three 3’X3′ beds. This gave me as much space as I had in the community garden. I would love to have both spaces or more, but since there was a long waiting list at the garden, I ceded my space. Currently most productive in my garden: cucumbers, hot peppers, and all sorts of herbs. Tomatoes aren’t doing too well, but I’ve gotten a few eggplants and my first big butternut squash. Yum!
The tantric yoga philosophy ascribes the characteristic of svatantriya or ultimate freedom to the energy that infuses all of us. We all want to be free, but when we get stuck in our embodiment, forgetting that we ourselves are manifestations of spirit, then we lose sight of our true freedom. To find our own freedom of spirit, we need to be disciplined, to practice, to study, to live in a way that brings us into better alignment with ourselves and world with which we are inextricably interconnected.
In this country, one of our principle ideals and buzz words in dialogue about how we should live is freedom. What can so often be forgotten in this dialogue, though, is that freedom is a contract. To be in a society where all have the opportunity to experience freedom, we need to agree, with discrimination (viveka) to certain limitations (for example, we agree to stop for red lights so that we can be free to drive and walk without a constant risk of being hit in crowded city).
Granted, I am grossly oversimplifying here, but part of the great losses of freedom we are currently experiencing is the abdication by individuals of the responsibility to shape the agreement to maximize our collective freedoms. Like the agreement with ourselves to practice steadily to experience inner freedom, we need to stay engaged, even when it seems impossible or deeply frustrating, in order not to lose sight of the ideal entirely. Here’s some information from FCNL on why it is important to lobby despite how fruitless an act it may appear to be.
