From Mindfulness In Plain English by Bhante Henepola Gunaratana:

The length of sitting depends on how much time you have for sitting meditation practice and how long you can sit without excruciating pain.

Today my favorite term from astronomy is Southern Local SupervoidDid you know that if the Milky Way were 80 miles in diameter our solar system would be just two millimeters wide? When the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy inevitably collide it's exceedingly unlikely that any of the hundreds of millions of stars comprising both galaxies will come ( Read more... )

There's so much passion these days. Have you noticed this phenomenon? People love to announce their passion for this or that. I've read of passion for exercising, for scrapbooking, for cooking, for various social causes. Passion is apparently now a completely positive and admirable state of being. Remember when passions were sometimes ungovernable ( Read more... )

When you come home after staying in a hotel you notice little odd or filthy things about your own home, like the smudges around the door knobs, the kinds of filthy or suggestive details that might be seen as tantalizing or significant when your home someday becomes a crime scene. The door of my office opens out, which I always find unsettling. ( Read more... )

B is moving in. B will live here, how terrifying. But not really so terrifying. It's not like we're married or anything. We're going to share a room, a bed in a room. A bedroom, there I said it. He elbows me in his sleep. His dreams are vivid and peopled with colorful characters in fantastic settings. I appeared in one of his dreams, firing two 9mm ( Read more... )

So much has happened, almost none of it in the world. I lost B, and was distraught, nearly crazy from grief, a spectacular, cinematic sort of grief I didn't think I was capable of, even though he left me for terrible, unconscionable reasons; then I got B back, sort of. Tenuously. Then a lull happened. Then I lost B again, even worse than the first ( Read more... )

If you take Failing Street to Unthank Park you'll see a swingset. This is where I saw the ugliest child in the world. It might have been a large opossum with excellent balance.

I've been at odds with myself for months, but it's getting better. I mean I ran afoul of myself back in June and it's been sort of a lost season. I got used to saying "I am unable" and "That is quite impossible." I wasn't doing anything, much less something about it. Nothing could be done about anything, ever. It's amazing how much more helpless ( Read more... )

I was going a little crazy so I changed a few things. I don't have much to say so here's a picture of the dog.

( click for puff )

I finally found something that describes my scary pains:

"Characteristics of pain:The pain is usually localized to the chest wall, and can be fleeting and sharp, or can be a sharp 'catch' that interrupts a breath. The chest wall can remain 'sore' for hours or days after a panic attack. The severity of the chest pain is often magnified by the panic ( Read more... )