The Eagles (for once, NOT the rock band)

Today, the 4th of July holiday, seems like the perfect day to reblog Kathie’s ChosenPerspectives post about her bald eagle visitors. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. What an incredible life experience.

chosenperspectives

I have delayed, avoided, and postponed writing this because I wanted to find the words to convey my recent profound experience.

For more than a month, we have had Bald Eagles visiting on our quiet little dead-end street, unusual in the middle of one of the largest, fastest growing cities in Washington state.

I’ve lived in my home for almost 44 years and have sometimes seen eagles circling high above. Twice, I was even gifted with a low fly-by right in my driveway! But I have only seen them land once before. (I wrote a whole story about that dramatic event but I’ll save it for a later post!)

A few weeks ago on my daily walk I just happened to spot, well actually hear some sky activity. A couple of Bald Eagles, apparently cruising our neighborhood for prey or a nesting site (although it seems late in the year for that…

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Even More Pink

I decided to make a separate gallery for some of the pink flowers I’ve seen in India.

And last, but not least, a pink bear that I used in a fun post (An Early Morning Mystery) I wrote in November 2014.

Pink

my fault

Rara is an incredibly creative writer, author, and poet. She spreads love and wisdom with every blog-post. She also models being accountable for her thoughts, words, actions and attitudes. I encourage you to read her most recent poem, and to explore her blog.

Cigarette Butt Pickup!

Last Saturday, on a cold, windy, wet day, some members of the Pacific Northwest Litter Project held a cigarette butt pick-up work party in the International District of Seattle.

Cigarette butts are the most common form of litter in the world and they are more toxic than you might think. The filters are NOT made of cotton, they are made of cellulose acetate tow and they can take decades to degrade. Investigators in a San Diego State University study once discovered that if you put fathead minnows and a single cigarette butt in a liter of water, half of the fish will die.

We pick up the butts to keep them out of landfills, waterways, the stomachs of animals and birds, and away from plants and children. The butts are sent to TerraCycle where they are turned into plastic pallets. Since the summer of 2011, we have picked up almost 300,000 butts!

As the result of last Saturday’s two hour work party, 23 pounds of cigarette butts are on their way to TerraCycle.

The Pacific Northwest Litter Project is part of GreenFriends, the environmental arm of Amma’s Embracing the World.

Advice to New Bloggers

Key-182922

Today’s prompt from The Daily Post is called “Key Takeaway” and the instructions are:

Give your newer sisters and brothers-in-WordPress one piece of advice based on your experiences blogging

This is a topic very close to my heart. First of all, I’d like to welcome all of you who are new to the blogging world. I have found blogging to be one of the most rewarding experiences in my life and I hope the same for you.

My advice is to celebrate when friends, relatives, colleagues and members of your personal community are interested in your blog, but don’t count on it being the case. See blogging as a way of building an additional community for yourself, as a way of sharing information with like-minded people, and as an opportunity to communicate with those for whom your thoughts and experiences are an exciting new world.

I have learned so much from reading other people’s blogs and I have developed new and treasured friendships within the Word Press community. Blogging has expanded my own world and I know that others have learned from reading mine. I will be forever grateful to my son Sreejit (The Seeker’s Dungeon and Where Love Meets War) for encouraging /pushing me to start my blog.

Photo Credit: Wikimedia

What Does It Mean to Be?

800px-Hair_pulling_stress

Being

What does it even mean to BE,
free?
Doing, doing never done,
run.
That is all I’ve ever known,
moan.
Body, mind, and soul yearn to rest,
quest.
That new goal must be addressed,
professed.
Heart caught within the mind’s net,
reset.

Written for Challenges for Growth Prompt #3: Learning to Be
Photo Credit: W ikimedia

Amrita Herbal Garden

The Friday before I left India, my friend Lalita and I decided to go a garden near Amma’s Amrita School of Ayurveda. Even though I had been to the property before, I wasn’t sure how to get there so we hired a rickshaw.

When I saw a garden across from the college, I told the driver to stop and let us out. It turned out not to be the garden I had planned to see, but it was “no accident” that we stopped. We were soon walking in a wonderland.

The garden is named Amrita Herbal Garden and it is part of the School of Ayurveda. I learned later that it covers 5 acres and that there are 500 rare species of medicinal plants growing on the land. The plants are used for research and for making Ayurvedic medicines.

I will let the pictures speak for themselves.

(Click on the gallery to enlarge the photos.)

Living and Learning in Amritapuri (Dec 14-17, 2015)

green flowers
Elephant, Dragonflies, Eagle

Lakshmi, one of the ashram elephants, has been out three times since I’ve been here. She is led into the courtyard by her trainers/attendants and the devotees, especially children, feed her. I love watching her take a whole clump of small bananas with her trunk and eat them all at once. These are some pictures of Lakshmi and Amma from 2011.

This morning during my Tai Chi class big dragonflies flew overhead. When I did some more Tai Chi in the evening, the eagles were soaring above us. Both scenes were so beautiful.

Play Preparation

Play preparation is happening everywhere. Practices, creation of the set design, costumes, backdrops, slides in Malayalam and English, lighting, sound, all occurring simultaneously. I generally go to one of the practices each day. So far they have been learning and reviewing one scene at a time. Starting on Sunday they will be putting it all together. It is so exciting. From my room I can hear many of the practices I don’t attend. In fact, at times I can hear the music even better from my room. The sound goes up I guess.

I am spending more time sewing costumes than last week although I only work on them 2-3 hours a day compared to Jani and Sumati’s night and day work.

There is one part of the play I am very eager to tell you about but will wait and until after it is performed on Christmas Eve.

Leelas abound

It is amazing how I can “lose” as many things in this one room as I do in my house. For several days this week I was not able to find my iPhone cord (and was very thankful I sensed I should bring two cords to India, and did), the Fitbit gadget (I don’t know what it is called) I put into my laptop’s USB port, and some tweezers. I looked for them for days and took everything in this room apart several times. When I couldn’t find a receipt I needed on Tuesday, it felt like the “last straw.” Within minutes of reaching that level of frustration, I found the phone charger and the Fitbit piece in places I had looked for them many times. They were practically in plain sight. I also remembered where I put the receipt. No tweezers though.

This scenario felt like something we call Leela (God’s play). No other way of seeing it made sense to me.

Soon after I wrote this section yesterday, I noticed that my meal card and my time card for Amma’s darshan (hug) had disappeared from my wallet. I felt sooooo frustrated and tired of this kind of leela. There will be more to this story later in the post.

[Note: Tokens are distributed to get Amma’s hug. It is a way to create some organization in the darshan process; there is no charge for the token. Yesterday the tokens for Westerners were given to people who had just arrived at the ashram, were leaving soon, or were new devotees. The rest of us who hoped to have darshan later were given time cards which would probably be exchanged for darshan tokens sometime in the evening.]

Journey to town

Yesterday, I had to go to town for a variety of reasons. Prior to 2006 when we went to town we had to take a canoe. When the tsunami hit in 2004 Amma transported everyone in the village and ashram to the mainland by boat because there was no nearby bridge. Over the next two years, the ashram built a bridge so people could get off the peninsula in an emergency. Having the bridge has also made it possible for us to walk to town whenever we want to go there.

ashram-01

The view from the bridge is gorgeous. This is what I saw when I went to town yesterday.

On the way back, I stopped at a shop and bought some fruit and crackers. The picture of the cashew crackers on the front of the box made them look so good. After I purchased them, someone asked what the ingredients list said. I took a look. No cashews at all! I imagine one of the “flavorings” that are mentioned on the ingredient list is something that tastes like cashews!

I remember hearing this year in the U.S. that one fast food company, I think it was McDonalds, was going to start using more real food. The example that was given was that they were going to use real black pepper! I was perplexed. Why would anyone use fake black pepper? It didn’t seem like black pepper would be an expensive ingredient, certainly not as expensive as cashews.

T-shirt

I saw a t-shirt I liked the other day. On the back it said:

Love & Serve

Give & Forgive

~Amma

More Leelas

While leelas mean “God’s Play,” they don’t tend to be fun. I see them as challenges, tests, lessons, etc. They can lead to an emotional roller coaster. Sometimes when one happens over and over like what I described above, all you can do is shake your head and laugh, and continue riding the wave, roller coaster, or whatever metaphor you want to use.

I felt sad after I lost my time card. I knew the crowds would be really big starting this coming weekend, and I thought that last night would be the only time I would have a chance to go for Amma’s hug until just before I leave the ashram in January. For the next couple of hours I looked for the man who was in charge of the tokens for Westerners. I didn’t think he would replace the lost time card, but it never hurts to ask. I never saw him, and it was getting late. Even though it was only about 8 pm I was so tired.

I decided to go talk to my daughter Chaitanya and see if she had any advice. She has nothing to do with tokens in India but she is one of the people in charge of them on the foreign tours so I thought she might have an idea. I really wanted to go for darshan that night. As we were talking, Chaitanya glanced out of the cafe window and saw that the token person was standing right there! She asked him if he was going to be able to hand out more tokens that night and he said only to people who had just arrived or were leaving. I told him I had lost my time card. He said “Oh, you had a time card? Here, you can have the last of the ‘regular’ darshan tokens!” I was happy and relieved. I could have my hug, and the leela was over, maybe.

For the next hour or so I waited in the line and got my time with Amma. So nice. I felt content and headed for my room. As I got near the elevator, I looked for the key to my room and discovered it was gone. That was another one of those shaking my head times. To me these experiences are practice in staying calm, going with the flow, being patient, being persistent, letting go, and/or learning to do whatever it takes. I reviewed where the key could possibly be. I had locked the room when I left it and put the key in my bag. The only thing that made sense was that I must have dropped the key when I pulled my wallet out of the bag to buy some fruit to give Amma during my darshan. I walked back to that table and found the people who staffed it in the last stages of putting everything away. I asked the woman if she had found a key and she handed my key to me! I was very thankful that the leela was short lived.

This morning, I discovered this set of leelas still aren’t done, which is no surprise. I had not gone to the morning prayers the day before, so forced myself to get out of bed for them this morning. When I was ready to leave my room for the temple, I discovered my chanting book was not in the place I leave it EVERY day when I return from the prayers. I quickly looked around the room and it was nowhere to be found. Did I drop it when I came back from the prayers two days ago? Or will it show up out of nowhere like the other items? Who knows.

The only chanting book I could find was a copy I have that is written in Devanagari script (Sanskrit). By then I was so late for the prayers that there was no way I was going to find where they were in the book, particularly when I would be reading it in Sanskrit script. I haven’t studied any Sanskrit since I’ve been here so thought maybe I was supposed to be working on that. I stayed in my room and read the chant from that book, slowly, until the people in the temple were finished with the morning prayers. Looks like it is going to be another day of challenge. Oh…. and I found the lost tweezers within a minute of finding out I had lost the chanting book!

“I will accept each challenge as it comes and will learn and grow as a result.”

To see the earlier posts in this series go to: https://livinglearningandlettinggo.wordpress.com/india/

Weekly Photo Challenge: Eye Spy

Three eyes came to mind when I read this week’s challenge. One is the eye of the Fremont troll. It resides under the Aurora Bridge in Seattle.

Fremont Troll- Seattle

The second is the eye of a needle.

And the third is a photo that my friend Marla took of her dog Bodhi! Who could resist a look like this?

bodhi

Weekly Photo Challenge: Eye Spy

Walking With Intention Day 7 by Charles Augustus

I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE this entry to the Walking with Intention event. I encourage everyone to read it! It was written by Charles at The Window of the Soul: Think! Feel! Live!