Your moment of Zen

A sunset is heaven's canvas.

- Unknown

Photo credit: Borepatch

Your thought for the day

 

Um, farming is hard work

Peter writes about how a bunch of folks underestimate just how hard subsistence farming really is.  "Green Acres" is funny because Oliver Wendell Douglas doesn't have the faintest idea how to farm, but it's just a TV show.  Reality is different.

Just how different is shown nicely by a very interesting young lady from China.  Li Ziqi has a farm where she grows pretty much everything she eats.  The Queen Of The World found her Youtube channel and I find it to be very relaxing to watch - the music is soothing and the videography is simply spectacular.  There's a reason that her videos have been viewed almost 3 billion times.

But if you watch you will see just how hard she works.  Her life looks rewarding, but she works increibly hard for it.  Folks thinking that they'll set up a couple acre farm for the End Times should really watch a few of her videos just to get a sense of what they are getting in for.

As I said, The Queen Of The World and I are big fans of Miss Li, but we're both a little old to start that sort of lifestyle.

Music to unclench your fists

Sitting quietly, doing nothing,
Spring comes and the grass grows all by itself.

- Zen poet Matsuo Basho 

Aesop has a must-read post (riffing off of Francis Porretto) about refusing to pay attention to the panic porn:

UN. PLUG.

You'll add years to your life, and you won't spend most of them in abject fear and dread.

And so here's a Sunday Classical piece to help you unplug.  Relax.  The world will be here tomorrow but today the grass grows all by itself.

I also like the picture Aesop has.  It says this:

turn off the news.

go outside.

breathe.

you were never meant to carry the burden of the entire world.

The grass grows by itself.  It's said that plants grow better when you play music for them.  So turn up the music.

And make peace with God
And make peace with yourself, 
'Cause in the end there's nobody else

Have a great Sunday.  The World will be here tomorrow and tomorrow is time enough for that.

Quitting the news

Chris Lynch has an interesting post up about the mental health benefits of quitting the news - ignoring the feeds rather than obsessing on them.  I did that last weekend in Key West and felt MUCH better.

Quitting the News is the new Quitting Cigarettes. 

Kindness in the depths of winter.

Because it's the depths of winter.  I found this pretty touching. 

Your moment of Zen

The Moose club on Anna Maria Island has a sweet rooftop bar.
 

Your moment of Zen - Beethoven's “Moonlight Sonata” for an old Elephant

 This is sweet, and shows that in this political silly season that there is a human decency that crosses species boundaries.  From the notes to the Youtube video:

Mongkol is a 61-year-old former logging elephant. His captive-held life was spent hauling trees in the Thai forest. His body shape is deformed through hard labor, he lost his right eye and tusk in this brutal logging practice. Mongkol was rescued and brought to Elephants World to spend the rest of his days relaxing peacefully in freedom by the River Kwai. I discovered Mongkol is an extremely gentle, sensitive elephant who enjoys music, especially this slow movement by Beethoven which I play to him occasionally in the day and night.

This video is awesome, and 100% non-political - which adds to its awesomeness.

There are more, like Debussy's Clair de Lune.  Maybe Mongkol likes moonlight.

What this world needs is more tug-of-war

 

Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring--it was peace.

- Milan Kundera

Your moment of Zen

 

The Queen Of The World went to the beach yesterday to see the sunrise, and took this picture of a Florida beach that was literally deserted.  Me, I was asleep.  Florida Man, amirite?

A moment of Zen

Last week's ride.

Photo by The Queen Of The World

Off to a Jimmy Buffett concert now.  Hopefully I won't blow out my flip flop ...

A Meditation on Memorial Day

A firearms Koan

pic.twitter.com/sUQxkdWK4i

— Sal the Agorist (@SallyMayweather) May 4, 2018

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.

- Carl Jung

Palate cleansing news

It seems like the Republic is going to Hell in a hand basket, torn asunder by totalitarian pricks on both sides.  As a ever so brief respite from that, here is the big news from Ellsworth, Maine (courtesy of childhood friend 2cents).  Warden guides wandering moose back into the woods:

ELLSWORTH — A sickly looking moose that slowed Bayside Road traffic Monday morning was found to be healthy and sent back into the woods by a game warden.

Detective Dotty Small said the moose, which looked thin and sickly, was first reported to police at 7:37 a.m. Monday. It was seen in the area of 505 Bayside Road, just south of Spindle Road.

Sure, it's not exotic and dangerous like Bison chasing tourists at Old Faithful.  It's Maine - the way Life should be*.

* Well, that's what the sign on I-95 says.

Wisdom from the Dalai Lama

One day Chao-chou fell down in the snow, and called out, “Help me up! Help me up!” A monk came and lay down beside him. Chao-chou got up and went away.

- Zen koan

Image via Gerhard Van der Leun on Gab.ai.

Creation

A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.

- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Via the Astronomy Picture of the Day which has a marvelous explanation about what is going on in the image.

Your moment of Zen

Southport, N.C.  A lovely little town, although the property values are approaching the absurd.

A moment of Zen

A haiku:

Repeat after me:
It is always a good flight
When you're going home.

Although it will be strange - #1 Son moved out while I was gone.  I seem to be shedding family as I age.

Good thing I'm aging gracefully.  /sarc

The rock and the wave

... every man is an island. It is a truth that often the tolling of a silence reveals even more vividly than the tolling of a bell. We sit in silence with one another, each of us more or less reluctant to speak, for fear that if he does, he may sound like a fool. And beneath that there is of course the deeper fear, which is really a fear of the self rather than of the other, that maybe truth of it is that indeed he is a fool. The fear that the self that he reveals by speaking may be a self that the others will reject just as in a way he has himself rejected it. So either we do not speak, or we speak not to reveal who we are but to conceal who we are, because words can be used either way of course. Instead of showing ourselves as we truly are, we show ourselves as we believe others want us to be. We wear masks, and with practice we do it better and better, and they serve us well –except that it gets very lonely inside the mask, because inside the mask that each of us wears there is a person who both longs to be known and fears to be known. In this sense every man is an island separated from every other man by fathoms of distrust and duplicity.

- Frederick Breuchner, The Hungering Dark

The rock wears no masks.  It does not resist the wave because it thinks that it should be seen resisting the wave.  It does so because that is its true nature.  The storm howls and the wave crests, and the rock stands immovable.  Because that is what it does.

Let winds be shrill, let waves roll high, 
I fear not wave nor wind

Lord Byron, Adieu My Native Shore

The rock is no fool. We can learn a lot from the rock.

Interlude, with silos

When we moved here to Roswell in 1997, this was the end of civilization.  Now it's deep in the heart of suburbia.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.

- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Good luck with that here in the ATL ...