Thursday, January 11, 2007

Sick, sick, sick!

No, that is not a moral judgment, that is how I feel.

My wife and I are both down with a virus that has us hacking and choking and without much energy. Exposed to too many germs and too little sleep at our family reunion over New Years, I guess.

So all the work on the house that I was intending to do in January lies undone, while I lie about on my bed of pain. I get out about 3 times a day to feed and water the chickens and collect the eggs. (Actually, I am not that sick; she is worse; and I have been doing a lot of work on my computer.)

I first spent hours learning how to edit my first two blog entries. None of the editing tools on Blogger would work, and I finally found it was because I was using the Safari browser (yes, I am a big Mac fan). Blogger does not support Safari, so now I access it on FireFox and am away.

And I have done the same to my website. I am a real neophyte there. I have been composing with Nescape 7.2 Composer, finding it straightforward enough (I guess), but really having trouble to get everything to publish properly. Now I finally have it worked out, and have started a new page to download photos from our family reunion. (By the way, does anyone have experience with a better but still free website composer?)

In between, I have been working a bit trying to calm my cough and be present to the moment with some simple meditation. (Am I a neophyte at everything?) I found a delightfully simple form of meditation in a little book by Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese monk now living in France. Living Buddha, Living Christ (Riverhead Books, New York, 1995) suggests this simple form: breathing in, calm your body; breathing out, smile; breathing in, be aware of the present moment; breathing out, acknowledge it as a wonderful and precious moment. Calming, smiling, present moment, precious moment. I feel like I must look like a Cheshire cat sitting behind the wheel of my truck or in my big chair with a grin plastered over my face. But it seems to work, and I am working at it.

Consider this: in our hectic world, with the pressures of work and home and traffic, and security and environmental fears, would it help to really work at some simple meditation? Would it help us to be more centered?

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