no way to…

Posted: January 31, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Society, Spirituality | Tags: | Leave a comment

I was a big fan of Dan Millman’s work back in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, especially his most popular book, Way of The Peaceful Warrior. I was glad to see this quote from Dan on Facebook, posted by the folks at Fellowship of Reconciliation.

There is no path to Happiness. Happiness is the path.
There is no path to Love.
Love is the path.
There is no path to Peace. Peace is the path.

Easy enough to say. So much harder to actually live.

Barbie dolls that makes sense

Posted: January 30, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Episcopal thoughts, Society | Tags: , | 1 Comment

Episcopal Café pointed me to a blog by Leesha Faulkner of the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal (of all places!).

She notes the news of Barbie being banned in Iran, and while she makes it clear she has no love for Iran’s policies, she suggests that we could do a better job of providing role models to our girls than the classic Barbie. Some of her suggestions for Barbie dolls that send the right message:

  • Tina Brown (controversial at times, but successful in her chosen field)
  • Maya Angelou
  • Margaret Mead (posterity has not been kind to her, but she was a trailblazer)
  • Sally K. Ride (the first woman in space? absolutely!)
  • Nancy Lopez

and last but certainly not least

  • Katharine Jefferts Schori, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church

There has been plenty of press about the “princess syndrome” in today’s young girls, and as one who, as I have said before, was raised by feminists in the 1970’s at Pitzer College, I think this is a marvelous idea.

Somehow, though, I think that Mattel is not likely to buy into this.

Sacred Music Friday: One Faith, One Hope, One Lord

Posted: January 27, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Music | Leave a comment

One Faith, One Hope, One Lord, Charles Wesley Singers — 2009 Youth Tour to New England. Courtesy of Unapologetically Episcopalian.

word whomp

Posted: January 26, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Episcopal thoughts, Web/Tech | Leave a comment

Perhaps you’re familiar with the game Word Whomp. A group of cartoon gophers present a set of random letters and you click (or in the case of my iPad, tap) on the gophers to create words from the letters available.

Recently I was playing and the letters a-l-b were among those displayed. So, of course, good Episcopalian that I am, I entered “alb,” at which the gophers shook their heads and rejected the word.

What? As a practicing Episcopalian I resent that! I would expect the makers of a word game to recognize such a word, even if not in common use by most of the population.

the Republican presidential race

Posted: January 25, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Humor, Politics | Leave a comment

This explains a lot…

Sacred Music Friday: Behold The Tabernacle Of God

Posted: January 20, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Music | Tags: | Leave a comment

Terry and I are headed to the ocean for a couple of days. The plan is to be back with you on Wednesday. Unless, of course, something spurs my blogging instincts while at the coast.

Today’s Sacred Music Friday: John Rutter – Behold The Tabernacle Of God, courtesy of Unapologetically Episcopalian

working

Posted: January 19, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Work | 1 Comment

One thing I have in common with my dad is that today in my fifties I feel about my job the way he felt when he was in his fifties. That is to say frustrated and aggravated by corporate silliness and stupidity. The difference is that my dad was able to comfortably take early retirement at age 55. I’m on the other side of that milestone and see another nine years of work before retirement is a realistic option.

I keep repeating, mantra-like, that I am grateful to be employed in this economy, and I am. I keep telling myself that I can make the conscious choice to simply choose to like what I am doing. That sort of works, some of the time. And I do remember a lot of the time to look at the Buddha when needed.

The quotidian reality is that I look forward to my evening time with Terry: newspaper, iPad, and scotch. And the week becomes a race to Friday.

Still, it is not as bleak as it sounds, and the truth is that my identity is not defined by my job. I remember Studs Terkel’s elegy to labor, Working, being a big seller in my early B. Dalton days, and I remember a book coming out to counter that: Work: I do it for the Money. I fall into the latter camp. But the reality is that I have a marvelous life with my wife and our four-footed child Tasha, and it is supported by the work I do.

in person

Posted: January 18, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Work | Leave a comment

One of the things about my company is that the teams are global and distributed. There are a lot of telephone meetings and many of the people I work with I have never met.

I did, however, have the opportunity to meet my counterpart in the other organization this past week. The one who I once mentioned, you may recall, bites the heads off of nails for breakfast. I will say that she did not look anything like what I imagined. She is tall, slender, fit (as in zero body fat fit), with long black hair. But regardless of appearance, it was good to meet her in person.

Having met, I’m sure our relationship will remain pretty much the same, and I’m still convinced that she bites the heads off of nails for breakfast. Yet I have to say that having had the chance to sit down and talk with her in person will make it just a little easier and a little more comfortable to interact with her on a day-to-day basis.

That’s a good thing.

getting organized

Posted: January 17, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Cooking | Tags: , , | 1 Comment

Terry and I use a lot of spices in our cooking. We love our spices, so when we did our kitchen remodel one of the items on the top of the list was a built-in spice rack. It came out exactly the way we wanted, and it gets lots of regular use, as you can imagine.

Yet for all those spices in our built-in rack, we still have a lot of overflow in the kitchen cabinet. A lot of that is small jars, thanks in large part to the samples we get with virtually every order from Penzeys Spices. The lack of organization has been mildly annoying ever since our kitchen remodel, and last weekend I decided to do something about it.

I thought I would just get a lazy Susan, but Terry told me that there was a spice rack that had pull-out drawers which looked like it would organize things very nicely. We looked it up on the Bed Bath & Beyond Web site and it was right there: the Spice Stack. I went over to our local BBY (as we call it) and they had them in stock. In comparing it with the other spice racks in the store, it looked to me like the right item for the job. I brought it home and in no time I had made order out of chaos.

I love it when a simple solution provides so much benefit.

missing church

Posted: January 16, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Episcopal thoughts | Leave a comment

I didn’t make it to church yesterday.

Ever since St. John’s swapped the 9:00 and 10:30 services it’s been tough for me to get out of bed at that earlier hour. Yesterday morning I just couldn’t deal with it. It was cold, I was sleeping comfortably, and I’d had one too many glasses of wine the night before. That, and the annual meeting was yesterday. I didn’t want to deal with that, and I knew that if I went to church it would look odd if I left before the meeting. So I fed Tasha and went back to bed.

The thing is that when I miss church I really do miss church. The Eucharist is important to me, and I miss it when I’m not there.

Maybe it’s not so bad to miss church once in a while, just to remind me about how important it is to me.

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