At the edge

“We must be willing to constantly sit at the edge of mystery and unlearn what has helped guide us in the past but is no longer as useful now.”

- Robert Wicks, pastoral psychotherapist; words from his book Crossing the Desert (which I’ve not read; his words are passed along by Lyn G. Brakeman in an article in Presence article “Pray As You Are”)

Builders

Song of the Builders

On a summer morning
I sat down on a hillside
To think about God --
A worthy pastime,
Near me, I saw a single cricket:
It was moving the grains of the hillside
this way and that way,
How great was its energy,
how humble its effort.
Let us hope
It will always be like this,
each of us going on in our inexplicable ways
building the universe.

- Mary Oliver, Why I Wake Early

True swing

"The rhythm of the game is like the rhythm of life...

Seek that place what your soul joins…
Play the game you was meant to play, the one that was given to you when you came into the world…
The trick is to find your swing, your authentic swing. It’s something we were born with, something that is ours alone, something that has to be remembered… Just swing the club…

Settle in deeper…
Listen to the sounds of the night…
Every one of us has one true authentic swing…that’s a good thing… Can you see it?”
~
– Bagger Vance, in the movie "The Legend of Bagger Vance"

Enough?

"Lord! who hath praise enough?"
-George Herbert

Naming food

Naming is important. Even for food.

A few observations cited Brian Wansink’s Mindless Eating book:

Old chocolate cake was rated as better-tasting when it was called Belgian Black Forest Double Chocolate Cake.

Kids ate more veggies when broccoli was referred to as "Dinosaur Trees," a V-8-type veggie drink was named "Rainforest Smoothie," and peas were labeled “Power Peas.”

We can fool ourselves for good!

So kids, maybe my “meat medley” name wasn’t such a bad idea?

Slimmer space

I am interested in trying out ideas that might give some health advantages; that is, if they’re not too difficult. Here’s a couple of easy ideas that supposedly will help us eat more healthily.

* Turn up the lights. Dimmer lighting makes you more apt to eat more, according to researchers at the U of California-Irvine. “People ten to underestimate the amount of food that they eat in the dark,” says Brian Wansink, a food psychology professor at Cornell University, PhD, and author of Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think.

* Use smaller plates. Studies show “almost everyone put 25 percent more food on a bigger plate.” Why? Wansink comments, "We eat with our eyes, not with our stomach."

* Hang artwork of fruit or vegetable still life. Posters of healthy food in a dining room resulted in diners eating more fruit and vegetables and less meat, according to research from the Behavioral Sciences Division of the US Army.

From http://living.health.com/2008/09/02/welcome-to-healths-skinny-house/

Still water

"We can make our minds so like still water

that beings gather about us that they may see,
it may be, their own image

and so live for a moment with a clearer,
perhaps even with a fiercer
life because of our quiet."
- William Butler Yeats

Each of us

“Each of us is an adventure

of God’s Spirit.”

– Tilden Edwards,
Living in the Presence: Spiritual Exercises to Open Our Lives to the Awareness of God