I’ve been waking up in the middle of the night. Because of my meditation training, I can spend that awake time meditating and praying for others. When the alarm went off at 7, I was ready to get up. I headed out for my walk to the top of Kukuna. When I hit the beginning of the development, which was once a plantation, I checked my pedometer. Nothing. The battery had run out. I will have to order batteries on Amazon, so I’m sure that I have enough to last through this mess.
I ran into Craig as I was walking up the hill. That meant he had already completed his walk to the highway, far beyond where I walk. He said he had woken early and decided to get going. David came up behind me and passed me. There were three other walkers and three gardeners that I saw. That’s all, folks.
David told me that he is doing better, having modified his stride. He described the difference as taking shorter steps. Interesting. I told him to roll unto his toes more as he walked so he could transfer his weight to his hips and off his knees as he came down the hill. He has given this back to me as a shorter stride. I teach; I learn.
Thinking about shortening my stride reminded me of Esther Gokhale, who developed a system for correcting posture. She suffered from severe back pain at one point in her life. She searched for groups of people that didn’t suffer from chronic back pain. She found a tribe in Africa, analyzed their posture and movement pattern, and developed this program for teaching correct posture, how to walk, how to sit, and how to move in general. One African tribe she watched and observed that they used shorter strides; they made more steps when they wanted to move faster, they do not make longer strides. She described their walk as a glide. From what I observed, when I take shorter strides, I find that I engaged my abdominals and glutes more. These muscles protect my back.
Elsa is always by my side these days. If I move to the lanai, she moves to the lanai, etc., etc. This behavior sounds what you’d expect any dog to do, but it wasn’t that way between Elsa and me. Elsa had that relationship with Mike. It has only been recently that she is always near me, very recently.
When Mike was alive, I told him that Elsa was his dog. He insisted she favored him because he fed her. I knew it was more than that. He loved her so much; she was so attached to him. I love that he had her. When he was in the hospital, I bought him stuffed animals, Honolulu Elsa, to keep him company, particularly at night. I could only find a good-sized stuffed bear at Target. I called Mike from the shop to check this would be all right. Judy found a small stuffed dog on the Big Island, which she mailed to Mike in Honolulu. That little dog sat on top of the box holding his ashes until February 15, when we finally put Mike’s ashes in his grave. We put Honolulu Elsa in with him. The big stuffed bear? I have that in my bed for hugging when I need it.
I got around to repotting the plants I bought a few weeks ago. I put this off forever in my usual style of procrastination. I was motivated now because they looked so sad yesterday. If I did nothing, they were going to die; if I did a lousy job repotting them, they were going to die. Their only chance of survival was repotting them. I had nothing to lose.
Some good things have come out of all the tragedy of the world being shut down because of the Covid-19 virus. My relationship with my sister has improved and continues to improve. This is wonderful. It started with Mike’s death. She started calling me weekly. Now, with this isolation because of the virus, we are speaking more often. We are both aware that we are well within the group in greatest danger from the virus. We know we may never see each other again.
Dorothy’s son just moved out with his girlfriend. Dorothy thinks he did it for her sake as well as his. He gets to be with a peer with benefits, and he doesn’t have to worry about bringing the virus home to his elderly mom. However, this means she’s completely alone now. Should she need him, I’m sure her son would be there in one hot second. Still, it’s a change.
I also spoke to my friend Carol in Ohio. She and I have been friends since 2004, when we both taught at Licking Heights. She is doing well, thank God. One of her daughters lives nearby. Either her daughter or her husband delivers supplies once a week, leaving it outside for Carol to pick up.
After my talk with Carol, it was time for a nap. I was expecting a call from August, my grandson. He is going to help me with some technical issues. I have to reformat some of the blog entries, and I am interested in getting equipment to screencast the way Khan Academy does. I like that a lot. That way, I can provide lessons online in phonemic awareness. I understand that most people will wonder how my approach to teaching word recognition can work because it is not a familiar system for teaching reading. It is hard to convince people that I have had students teach themselves to read using this method.
August and I both found a mutually acceptable time to work on my blog. I had discovered that the formatting on the public version wasn’t consistent. The solution was simple. All I had to do was hit the edit button, erase the poorly formatted text, and copy the correct version. I had to do this for most of the March entries.
August was controlling my computer remotely. Love it! That way, he doesn’t have to give complicated directions, which I have trouble following that would cause him frustration. He checked my stats -out of curiosity. 757 yesterday!!! Holy cow! I’ve been running one-digit numbers; all of a sudden, this number. He found the part of the site which told him how to determine where these viewers came from Israel! Huh? What was that about?
______-______-______
Musings:
I’ve read the same passage in Jung’s book, “The New God-Image,” now several nights in a row. I closed the book after reading the passage because I wanted to remember to write about it tomorrow. I kept forgetting, rereading the passage, closing the book planning to write about it tomorrow, and then forgetting again. My intention finally coordinated with my memory.
I understand that we do not see the world as it is accurately. People talk a lot about how subjective perception interferes with our accurate perception. But there is so much more, which interferes. No two people stand in precisely the same spot at any time. So for each of us, we see different aspects of the same thing and never the whole. Human perception is within a certain range, which is different from that of another animal. Our neurological systems are different. The other animals see the same physical world we do, but they see different aspects. We are all three blind men looking at the world from different angles.
I also believe that all religious beliefs represent an aspect of that God. Since we cannot perceive the physical world completely, how can we presume we see the metaphysical world completely?
“Even though our experience is limited to psychic realities, that does not mean that psychic reality is all that exists. We have good reason to believe that the external world exists, and we have equally good reason to believe that a transcendental, metaphysical world exists. It is just that we cannot know either of these worlds. Jung is clearly refuting here what is so often laid against him, so-called psychologism- that way of thinking which reduces everything to psychology.”
Edinger, Edward F., The New God-Image,” p.96.
No comments:
Post a Comment