Traffic was heavy coming off the bridge
and I took the road to the right, the wrong one,
and got stuck in the car for hours.

Most nights I rushed out into the evening
without paying attention to the trees,
whose names I didn’t know,
or the birds, which flew heedlessly on.

I couldn’t relinquish my desires
or accept them, and so I strolled along
like a tiger that wanted to spring,
but was still afraid of the wildness within.

The iron bars seemed invisible to others,
but I carried a cage around inside me.

I cared too much what other people thought
and made remarks I shouldn’t have made.
I was slient when I should have spoken.

Forgive me, philosophers,
I read the Stoics but never understood them.

I felt that I was living the wrong life,
spiritually speaking,
while halfway around the world
thousands of people were being slaughtered,
some of them by my countrymen.

So I walked on–distracted, lost in thought–
and forgot to attend to those who suffered
far away, nearby.

Forgive me, faith, for never having any.

I did not believe in God,
who eluded me.

– Edward Hirsch

Knowing things can be a hindrance. I’ve always sort of had this inkling but I’ve never been able to articulate it. This morning I came across a blog posting on “Success Begins Today” that helps clear things up for me.

Yet what usually happens… Most people start from the outside (knowledge) and try to work inwards (center) only to find that there isn’t a core at all.

This describes some aspects of myself. In some areas I’ve labored to start by finding and operating from core or center. Other ares I’ve leaned too heavily on my knowing power. The difference seems to be this dependence on knowledge rather than experience.

Good stuff. Zen strikes from the oddest places sometimes. I’ll have to sit with this more.

New year and a clean slate. Funny how we have to what for January 1 to see what is true in every moment. A new moment -> opportunity abounds -> the pond reflects the moon -> leaves fall on the trail.

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Typically, I’ve toyed with a resolution at this time of renewal. Yesterday I read Steve Pavlina’s post about setting your primary focus. What I took away from this the idea of broadening the concept of a resolution. Instead of a narrowly focused goal like losing 15 pounds or working out three times a week he suggests that we look at very broad areas of life. An advantage of this over the usual resolution is that it is easier to remember and you can be creative in the execution.  So, while I was out on a walk with Mary and Boykan, it came to me. The Big Outdoors. Spend time outdoors! There it is, no expectations of more, linked to nature and the weather, a place of solstice. Just spend time outdoors. So many of the peripheral things in my life would be supported by spending time outdoors. Meditation, photography, exercise, health, fitness, poetry, walking, connecting with nature, exercising the dog, camping, snowshoeing, landscape maintenance, bicycling, backpacking, writing, stretching, service.

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Of course this means less blogging and participation in Open Source projects. Or maybe I’ll just have to become more efficient by not reading the “River Of News” that comes to my rss reader. That alone would free up so much time. Trade one for two - still one. How to get rid of the one? Still busy doing.

When a thing is done, it’s done.
Don’t look back. Look forward to your next objective.
          ~ George Marshall

The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule,
but to schedule your priorities.
          ~ Stephen Covey

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Posted with Brad Sucks & Suzanne Teng in my ear.

I’ve talked about our refrigerator before. Some things change and some things stay the same. Here you can see winter fruits and store bought veggies. We still have some carrots and beets from the summer. These keep great. Same water bottles and the condiments haven’t yet expired. I missed a couple of days posting as we had another wind storm which while not as strong as the last one it did cause problems with our Internet connection. This posting every day is hard. See you tomorrow.

Will

A couple of weeks ago, my laptop (Dell Inspiron 8200), which is my primary PC, started mis-behaving. It runs fine for ten to twenty minutes or maybe more then the CPU races to 100% utilization and the twin fans roars and the GUI becomes very sluggish. Trouble shooting the problem is frustrating. On occasion the laptop will run for several hours without any problem. I then feel like I got it fixed. Reboot and come back later and the problem is back. When the problem is occurring, if I reboot without powering off the laptop, the problem persists. I’ve tried many things to rectify this but I’m getting nowhere. I can’t even tell if this is a hardware or software problem. Because my /home is on a separate partition I was able to reinstall Ubuntu but even this did not help. I’ve rebuilt the kernel to be sure SMP was not enabled and to specify support for my Pentium M processor. There must be some desktop/user configuration that is the culprit. Wish me luck.

Fast forward to now — it is Christmas. The weather is delightful. We’ve started our special dinner preparations. Pineapple Fried Rice. Yahoo. Warm, safe and loved — I wish everyone could be warm, safe and loved. Metta.

Saturday, it snowed on the Palouse.

I notice now that the image above is a little over sharpened but I’ll leave it.

We had a great discussion with the book reading group this morning about wisdom. I can’t remember who said it but recently I heard ‘the wise don’t believe their thoughts’. This is pretty tough for most people to understand. We want to identify with our thoughts because they feel important, relevant and interesting, or at least entertaining. Yet wise people and creative people will tell you that wisdom and creativity increase in intensity the quieter the thoughts become. In fact there seems to be an inverse relationship between wisdom and creativity, and our thinking. We have all experiences this at the so call peak moments when life flowed with out thought rather that was in sports, in nature or in some creative endeavor. I’m sure you’ve experienced how unclear things become when the mind races.

We can’t give up thinking. Minds think like hearts beat. It is too easy to let the thinking carry us away and distract us from what is happening right now. Too easy to attach meaning to our mental creations and then have to defend them. It seem more healthy to see thoughts for what they are - just stories we tell ourselves. I’m enjoying relaxing my mind and giving my thinking a break. You should try it too.

Continuing with my fascination with maps, here is a catalog of NASA images and animations of our home planet. There are a lot of cool images made up of a composite of several images, sometimes hundreds of images.