Cracking the code of impermanence

Funny thing, after the laptop computer broke, then the fan broke on a particularly hot day, and finally my french press coffee carafe (again) today. Like I wasn't properly getting some message, not taking the hint. Sheryl has a lovely photo of my laptop disassembled all over the table in her blog. It's like doing surgery on your old buddy (again) only this time he doesn't survive.

So the broken laptop got my attention about some things I was ignoring, changes I needed to make, and habits of wasting time that I had gotten into. It broke my routine. It forced changes. Good ones, I think. The fan broke for no particular reason, other than to get my attention. It didn't. So the carafe broke too--- funny; that carafe only breaks when my attention needs getting. I had taken to buying spares but this was the spare, so, oh well.

Sheryl took me to Longs to get a replacement, and we settled on a plastic melitta drip cone that won't break, and a bunch of paper filters. This after a slight argument because she already has a funky old plastic cone. But I liked the technological improvements on the new cone. I mean it's down to this: my thousand dollar espresso machine has been down for the count for months. The french press has followed suit. I want a freakin' new plastic coney thing that sports a window so I can avoid overflowing my coffee cup, and a little splash guard/handle, and nice deep ridges on the sides to prevent the filter from sealing off and getting bogged, and hopefully the right sized little hole in the bottom so it won't brew terribly weak coffee either. She gave the coffee geek a break and we spent five bucks. And it's black so it matches my jacket. Then she reminded me how much I'm like her ex-husband (in a good way).

Do I actually care that much? No. It's just coffee. A hot drink in the morning. I even drink tea sometimes. What's really important? Did I own the espresso machine or did it own me?

I've had some interesting experiences with technology. Often I'm very intuitive about it-- which was handy when I spent 9 years as an Audio Visual Tech. Sometimes I'm way too connected. Like the time when I stopped a clock, my watch, and my friend's watch all at once because I wanted to spend more time with her. It was an accident. Or the time I said outloud to myself "I watch too much TV" and my new TV broke within about 60 seconds. The picture tube fried-- it was fatal. Or the other time when me and a room full of college students were watching TV, and me and another guy said at exactly the same time "Lets change the channel" and the channel changed, twice. Would have been a nice trick if anybody had a remote control, or if that old TV was even capable of using a remote. It wasn't.

Why bring up all this: I guess it's just to say, pay attention to your connection with your own environment. What are you telling it, and what is it telling you back? Are you listening? It's important. We don't live in a vaccuum, we're all connected. We're all plugged in, all wired together.

And I guess, just one last thing--- the big circuit has an infinite power source, and can operate on any and all frequencies, including the frequency we call physical matter. So there's little need to fret when something breaks, goes away, or even dies. It's a picture on a screen. Enjoy it while it's here. Revel in that painful immediacy and recognize the beauty of knowing that it's just ripples on a lake so huge you can't even imagine it's depth or breadth. Those shores stretch to forever, and the bottom is so deep it goes to absolute zero.

My computer broke.

Bummer man. My laptop broke a few days ago. Having to borrow Sheryl's to get anything done online. Makes it unlikely for me to be doing much writing. Will be getting a new one pretty soon; my father agreed to buy me one, which was mighty big of him to do. Thanks, Dad!

Looking forward to a new Macbook or possibly an iMac, and to getting all my software and files transferred over so that I can get back to work. Haven't been shooting many photos lately either either. I had the old laptop apart months back to replace the hard drive. I have to say, these are well built machines, but not a lot of fun to tear into.

I get some pretty interesting scam offers every time I put up gear for sale on Craigslist. But we finally sold one camera to a really nice guy. Two more to sell, unless we decide to keep the S3 for shooting videos.

Sheryl and I are invited to interview at a retreat center this week. We've been discussing it a lot. Change is in the air.

God Winks

Waiting for God to wink at me, and let me in on the joke. We're expected to move within about three weeks. This fact doesn't strike me as relevant to our lives or our practice. In fact it doesn't even seem real. And yet there it is. The property owner is moving full steam ahead towards vacating this house. So, yeah, sometimes you have to move away from one thing even when you don't know what the new thing is that you're moving towards. There is spiritual precedence for the "empty handed leap into the void". I've done it before. I can do it again. I'd rather not. We still have time to catch God winking and to hear the punchline of whatever it is that we're currently not laughing at, or with.

I've been thinking about ministry lately, and what my concept of that is. We make no bones that what we do is SPIRITUAL counseling and SPIRITUAL healing. Striving our best to be open and non-dogmatic to every single client who comes our way: it might not be achievable, but it's worth striving towards that ideal. And our ever-present axiom to work towards the highest benefit of all concerned, which for some reason I feel is very achievable.

I think that what (or who ) is in front of me is always the most important thing to deal with right now. We can tend to think of events, or even people as distractions. But they never are. Even if the purpose of a perceived distraction is to focus one deeper into a particular direction, everything in our lives is in fact, relevant to where we are, right now. So we're getting our daily spiritual lessons, whether we see them or not. You've heard the expression "can't see the forest for the trees." I'm trying not to ignore the trees, grass, shrubs, squirrels-- it's all a part of the grand forest.

Selling these digital cameras

Canon S3 IS with 12x image stabilized zoom, also shoots tack-sharp video with amazingly good sound quality. Great camera, barely used it. Uses SD cards

Canon digital rebel model 300d with 6.3 megapixels: did most of my photojournalism work with this. Then I convinced Sheryl she'd like it as a hand me down. She did, she still does. I had to pry it out of her hands to get her to upgrade.

Canon Rebel XTi with a little over 10 megapixels and a slightly different interface, user preset picture styles, etc. Love this camera, but when Sheryl upgraded of course I had to as well. Feels like I just bought it myself, hard to believe we're selling it already.

Flower Galaxy

Slow down, look to your left, bend a little closer and there is a whole galaxy of life right next to you. "Horton hears a who" right? I should read that little book again. Buy from my flower gallery here.