persistance – Living, Learning and Letting Go

I used to have repetitive dreams of being in a house that had a lot of secret rooms. When I walked down one hallway, I would inevitably discover a new hallway that led to rooms I hadn’t seen before. The house went on and on and provided me with a never ending adventure.

That is what it has been like for me to work in the Greenbelt. I enter one area after another that is covered by blackberry vines, ivy and bamboo. I never know what I will find on the other side of them.

One day my adventure started here.

As I cleared a path, I saw many downed trees.

Soon, I came across this tree. It looked as if a maple tree that had fallen had birthed a new tree.

I discovered that another part of the tree had traveled north and it too had become a maple tree.

Other parts of the tree had traveled to the west and to the south. There was a new tree at the end of the western portion. I haven’t reached the end of the southern part yet so I don’t know what I will find there.

It is mind-boggling to me that a tree which has been so beaten down by the environment has such a strong will to live, and due to that will has accomplished what seems impossible. I look forward to the day when all of the invasive plants have been removed and the trees can reach for the sky without being hindered.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Against The Odds

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Shared with Senior Salon

Today was one of those days where I had “plans” but all of them changed.

It started with me waking up at 1:45 a.m. I had been dreaming about Sanskrit and about blogging, something that is happening with increasing frequency, but thankfully it is not usually that early. As I moved from a dream state into a more conscious state of mind, the idea of posting a Sanskrit declension matrix by making a Power Point slide show came to my mind. Then the idea of adding audio to it surfaced.

I have helped others with Power Point slide shows before but only by typing in the words. I had never done a real one and I certainly had never put audio to one. As I lay there sleepless, I started pondering how to do it. Around 3:00 a.m., since sleep didn’t seem to be coming, I got up.

I went back to bed for about an hour and a half at 5:00 a.m. and then spent most of the day working on this project. The slide show went together quickly and even the audio was reasonably easy to figure out. But then came getting correct pronunciation, correct timing and most time consuming of all, finding a way to put it into a format that the blog would accept. That last part took until 7:45 tonight! But with Grace and persistance, I finished it!

I’ve mentioned in earlier posts that every noun in Sanskrit may have 7 or 8 different cases. You can identify those cases by how the word ends.

Cases:

1st case is the subject
2nd case is the object
3rd case – “with” (with a fork)
4th case- “for” (for the beggar)
5th case- “from” (from the city)
6th case- possessive or “of” (boy’s; of the boy)
7th case- “in, at, on”

The slide show will present the declensions for the pronoun “aham” which means “I”. Singular, dual (2 people) and plural (i.e. three or more) forms will be presented for each of the seven cases. You will notice that some of the words are the same but have different meanings. In those instances, we have to read the word in a sentence to determine the meaning.

So with that for an introduction, here is my PowerPoint Slide Show with Audio of the declensions for the word “aham”! (In hindsight, it would have been helpful for me to put the case number and whether the word was singular, dual or plural on the slides, but even this way it gives you a good idea what the process is like!) I hope you enjoy it.