InMotion

  Last week, I drove 100 miles north from Salem OR. and parked my borrowed car at Cloud Mountain Retreat Center . Inspired by friends and readings, I wanted to be on retreat with others seeking to deepen our meditation practice. This would be a retreat held in noble silence, no speaking, reading, phones or other digital devices.   As I walked the grounds at Cloud Mountain, I would reach in my pocket to discover that there was nothing there.   No oblong device there, my pocket had achieved what we retreatants were leaning into: emptiness.   If you attend a 6 day retreat and maintain silence for the duration, stuff happens. Questions come up: who am I?, why am I?, what's my next step? Having a daily meditation practice as I have for a number of years is helpful, but for what?   Sometimes I think my meditation is done in order to check a box to get credit in the category of “spirituality”.  As in, "i f I don’t go to religious services, pray, chant, perform s...

  Preface : in re-reading and tweaking this post, I notice that I have not once mentioned, you know, IT.   Would it be possible to try that out in real time (no talking about IT). Like maybe as a new years resolution. That would be challenging (97.5% of the time it’s the first thing you hear on NPR in the morning).   Nevertheless, I am considering   it.  Maybe regular periodic moratoriums.  That’s all I have to say about that. 2021 started out with meeting the gutter man, the electrician, and the handy man as final preparations were made on sprucing up our 160 year old condo in New Orleans. It sold right away for the asking price. It was fun to review my Google Calendar for the early months of last year, recalling my visits to doctors (I am an old   man) and friends down there as we had our last visits together in the Big Easy. One last bike ride along the shore of Lake Ponchartrain. I would have had a last bike ride along the Mississippi river with ...

  My wife Carol and I have always been contrarians regarding menu planning for Thanksgiving, being intermittently vegetarian all our adult lives and almost always featuring menus not including turkey on Turkey Day.   Carol has supreme confidence in whatever she gets involved with, I have supreme anxiety about achieving success in whatever I do. You know how they say “just get out there, you’ll be fine”.   Well, I have gotten out there numerous times where I have experienced it being Not Fine, which seems to confirm my fears.   I am fairly certain that this is a circular logic bullshit loop, but I digress… WARNING: the following includes details of a disturbing culinary misadventure.  But hey, I say read on because this is how we learn!  Take the path less traveled!  OK, enough of that. But I do feel better now. Living in New Orleans inspired me to learn how to make a Cajun-style gumbo. I use skills learned from a cooking class at the Southern Food ...

  Greetings blogsters!   It’s been over two months since my last post.   I’m not on the success track outlined by blogger gurus (optimally it would be 2-3 posts per week).   But this is this, so I am happy about that. I hope you find here something funny, useful, goofy, or just of interest to you. As long-time readers know, I often write about my uncomfortable moments, so here I go again. We’re still in the plugging-in phase of our lives here in Salem, learning the layout of the city and arranging to meet new people, perhaps find some new friends.   Combining a social event with biking is a nice option for us newbies. The local bike club arranges regular weekly rides on weekends and a few weekdays. Riders meet at a local parking lot and bike out from there as a group.   This last weekend saw Saturday as likely to have the most favorable weather and so I showed up for that ride instead of the Sunday which I’d done a few times.   A gentleman I hadn’t m...

  Discussed in this post : struggles we face; shirts; memory; live music. I hope the hyperlinks work for you and the pages are still up, there are some sweet ones here.  My last blog post was almost 2 months ago.   My wife and I are moving into a new home so stress is high, even as we are enjoying much about the process. And our new home is wonderful.   I’m dealing with some hopefully minor health issues, but it’s requiring seeing a bunch of doctors.   Aging is getting to me.   It’s been really hard to “find time” to write.   As usual, this is the best that I can do.   In order to post I have to stop editing. Here it is. The next paragraph is not what I originally wrote. That one just disappeared mysteriously; this word processor is freaking me out.   It seems to do what it wants to do, and what it wanted to do this time was destroy a paragraph.   I thought I could retrieve it with CTRL “Z” but it didn’t work this time.   Maybe ...

  I read three articles from recent issues of The New York Times Magazine that blew me away.    In “I Feel Like I’m Just Drowning”, Sophomore Year in a Pandemic (NYT Magazine, 5/16/21), Susan Dominus offers us a deeply moving detailed report on her 8 months spent with a group of high school sophomores and their families and teachers. If you are like me (late 60’s in age, retired, financially secure, healthy, lots of friends and family, able to exercise with joy outdoors alone), then you may also be awe-struck by how different this last 15 months has been for most other people.   Different in a challenging way (I’m tempted to say different in a bad way, although hopefully many of these other people will find the “bad” to have been “challenging” in that the lessons learned bring deeper understanding and insight into how to live and survive. It’s also true that bad things happen to good people. But I struggle to just accept that it’s happened, whatever it is. But this ...

We are living just west of West Salem in the Lodge, our pet name for the 22 ft. single axle “Bambi” Airstream Sport that we have used for spring, summer, and fall travel since 2017. Living in it because we sold our condo in New Orleans, and our home in Salem is under construction.  There are delays. We thought we’d get in by this time, but now even the middle of June is planned but questionable. I worry about residency status for driver license and all that kind of thing, and feel as if my creative spirit is a bit tamped down as I worry, worry, worry. Also my aging body is doing stuff that adds challenges (knee, throat, brain). I am making do and it’s all manageable. I hope to post again soon. In the meantime, a little story.  Yesterday was as fine a day weather-wise as is possible. Carol and I decided to drive 4 miles from our RV park to the West Salem Safeway parking lot to avoid the busy traffic on the highway, unload our bikes, and ride along the Scenic Bikeway north of Sa...