The Ten Suggestions, part 7

7) Be a participant, not a spectator.

This may affect the amount of TV you watch or the hours you spend at your gaming console. Some happy people watch TV, some don't. Pretty much every unhappy person I know watches a lot of TV. Life is made for relating with people, not machinery broadcasting images that someone else has chosen for you. I don't believe that what's on TV makes people unhappy, so much as they get too comfortable with the habit and don't live lives of passion and spirit. Can't think of anything? Join a dragon boat team.

The enemy is inertia. The televisory life is seductive in its ease and comfort. Most of us, myself included, have a hard time getting up from a comfy couch. So then, how do you break the inertia of your patterns of comfort?

Here's a simple reflection to keep in mind. Try it on next time you're stuck in spectator mode:

"Is the payoff I get from spectating greater than the payoff I get from participating? What is the payoff I get from spectating, anyway?"

What are some ways to begin participating in life beyond your four doors? What interests you? Many people I've met struggle even to answer that simple question. If you're willing to take some simple chances, here are some ideas:

• Buy the book, The Artist's Way, and follow the program it outlines.
• Go to a craft store like Michael's, and buy a bunch of random stuff there, and make something out of it.
• Have some friends over for dinner, and try cooking something. Stuck as to what to cook? Pancakes and bacon would be an interesting place to start, and they're easy to make. What is that I hear you say? Pancakes are a breakfast food? Oh come on. Wouldn't you rather have pancakes?
• Join Meetup.com and find some cool meetups that interest you. Start with "Anyone Can Join" if you're here in Portland, and then why not sign up for my "Spiritual Growth and Adventure" meetup?
• Got a camera? Walk around town when the light is good (dawn and just before dusk) and take pictures of stuff.

Or you could just watch TV.

The Ten Suggestions, part 6

6. Develop a daily practice.

For me, it's meditation and prayer. For others, it's art. For many, it's exercise, or taking a walk to enjoy nature. The key is same time, same place, every day. This is healing and nourishment time for your soul, and you get to determine what it looks like. Consistency within the practice (doing the same thing) should be balanced with making small changes and experimenting with new things. It should change over time or it will become stale—just as you change over time, or you will become stale.

What if you have no daily practice?

Start by setting aside a special place that you use for this activity. It could be a corner of your room, a part of your garden, your balcony. Creating an altar of some sort, and putting a few sacred objects on it, perhaps a plant or flowers, helps to set a ritual environment. If you're unsure where to begin, try a two-part yoga/meditation practice. It's what I do, so maybe I'm biased. Learn a simple yoga asana or two (I do a sun salutation) and then sit and focus on inhaling through your nose and exhaling through your mouth. Draw long, slow breaths and exhale at the same deliberate speed. If your thoughts wander, explore the feeling behind the thought (fear? anxiety? concern?) and then locate where that feeling might live in your body. Unsure? Make it up. Then as you breathe, simply bring awareness to that part of you.

An extra hint that is very useful is to begin your meditation session with some sort of incense (such as Nag Champa, sage, palo santo, or copal—these are my favorites but any will do). It not only sets ritual space but also quickly imprints on a part of your brain that encourages meditation. Your memory of the smell will help your brain remember it's meditating, and will hasten your meditative state.

The Ten Suggestions, part 5

5. Learn that you are not your emotions.

You have emotions, but they do not define you, nor do they determine "how you are" at any given time. If they did, the human race would have perished long ago.

Although we seldom realize it in the moment, our emotions are a cocktail mixed from many spirits, including how we interpret what happened, our circumstances and how we react or respond, our biochemistry at the time—including how much sunshine and vitamin D we have going on, how much exercise and sleep we're getting, influence of caffeine and alcohol, and whether or not we're hungry or thirsty. Emotions are real, but they're not the full story. They can change on a dime in any direction.

The Ten Suggestions, part 4

3. Dispense with your God, if that God is causing you misery.

The God that most Americans are introduced to through church, media, and society, is antisocial, schizophrenic, and maybe bi-polar minus the meds. Most believers, including many who are actually happy themselves, will disagree with me vehemently.

Let me put it to you this way: Would you respect someone who claims to love everyone but would banish one of his own children to eternal misery for not returning the affection? I didn’t think so. Such a man would be petty at best and psychotic at worst. So why should I respect a God who does the same?

An otherworldly hell simply isn't compatible with the concept of love, although many believers do their level best to have this make sense somehow. A brilliant pontifical bible scholar I once knew commented that in the Bible, God never really succeeded in changing anyone when he threatened them with misfortune, but when he promised them life, they came in droves. Face it: Unless we learn otherwise, we project the wounded, unconscious masculine identity onto God. It’s all around us—it’s insidious, it’s pervasive, and it plays to the darkest impulses of our human nature. It’s that notion that we somehow more “right” than another group of people because we understand God and they don’t. How many lives lost and souls destroyed over this premise?

A wise rabbi, when confronted by atheists who told him, “Rabbi, I don't believe in God,” would always reply, “Which one?” If you wish to get to know the Divine on the Divine's terms, it would be a good idea to start with this: God is love. Explore love in all its forms, meanings, and nuances. Learn by doing. Make love your life’s study, and you will learn more about God than most people in the history of humanity.

A grown-up God for grown-up people
Do you ever find yourself praying for stuff for yourself or for changes in your circumstances? Perhaps most of us do sometimes. But God is not Santa Claus, rewarding you with favor for bribing him with good behavior, faith, or even “The Secret.” I heard another rabbi say that God put us in a physical universe and we are subject to its laws. So when hard times come, it is not for us to say, “Why?” but rather, “What now shall we do?” If you want God to answer your prayers powerfully, ask God to break your heart with compassion, or ask God to show you ways to serve those who need you. Both of those, incidentally, will lead to happiness, if not deep contentment. Yes, I think God has a sense of the ironic.

This “radical love God” takes more courage to follow and believe in than the other ones. Cynics, take note.

Certainly many people are happy if not content despite their religious beliefs, which are otherwise inconsistent with the way they instinctively know to love. (And I'm not speaking of those soul-dead parents who would disown their children because they're gay or for having an inter-racial relationship.) This is demonstrative of the fact that there are many ways to be happy, inconsistencies are allowed, and that this list does not equal the 10 Commandments, but rather 10 Suggestions.)

As always, pick the ones that work for you. Your mileage may vary. Six more to come.

Welcome and congratulations, Anne Rice!

Dear Anne,

I know it was a tough decision on your part to leave the Catholic Church—one filled with grief and controversy.

I made the same choice in 2000, and let me tell you, it has worked out well for me. It will work out well for you, too.

One thing I have found since leaving is that I've been free to explore truth on its own terms—truth as it lives in my heart, mind, and body, and not truth as it lives in the retelling of successions of celibate men cloistered in a city-state in the middle of Italy, who as a whole, know little of such greatness and power as can be found in women, in sexuality, in creativity, in self-expression, in risk-taking, and rule-breaking. Take these things away from a man's experience, and you don't have much of a man.

Like you, I was disconcerted about the role of the bishops in fighting Proposition 8, as well as the rising tide of neo-conservatism in the Roman Catholic Church. I don't know about you, but I knew the church was pretty much doomed for awhile when Josef Ratzinger ascended the throne of Rome and became Pope Benedict XVI. The furtive and lackluster response to the sexual abuse scandals seemed both the last nail and a seal of Crazy Glue around the lid of the coffin, in which lies the church's moral authority in the modern age.

I know you will miss liturgical and sacramental life, as you indicated on NPR the other day. But now that you are on the other side, you may find that Christ has walked down many roads blocked off by today's Christian Church, and made his home there. Christ was a rule-breaker, an iconoclast, a trouble-maker, and an unreasonably compassionate and passionate lover. His public love and respect for women was a scandal, and is such a scandal today that the church has presented an "impostor Christ" to worship, a watered-down version of the original, who somehow cares more what people do behind closed doors than what happens when they have closed hearts.

Now that you no longer have Benedict to answer to (as if you ever really did), I encourage you to explore some progressive theologians. My favorite is Albert Nolan, who wrote Jesus Before Christianity, a brilliant book that I hope you will read.

I have grown and seen so much, Anne, since I left. I love God and appreciate Christ more than I ever did as a Christian, and as a Catholic. You will too. You probably know this though.

Thank you for being luminous and courageous.

The Ten Suggestions, part 3

3. Explore your spirituality

For now, forget every definition of spirituality you've ever heard before, and try this one: Spirituality is the way that the Divine, or whatever eternal, formless or formful essence you may or may not believe in, woos your soul. What woos your soul? Truth? Beauty? Virtue? Love? Family? Adventure? NASCAR? If it penetrates your being and gets to the middle of you, consider that it's the Divine getting your attention in the way that only it can. Not sure what gets to your soul? Start with your imagination. What fascinates or interests you? Start there. If nothing interests you, I don't believe you. But if so, it might be a good idea to see a therapist, but run the other way if the first thing he or she does is suggest drugs.

This insight about the nature of spirituality came to me at Burning Man some years ago when I struck up a conversation with a woman. We were both gazing at works by artist Alex Grey, and I was sharing with her some of my spiritual adventures originating from my travels on the shamanic path. She sadly said to me, "I wish I had a spirituality like you, but I don't." I asked her what made her happy, and she told me with profound appreciation about the joy she gets from her family and friends. They meant everything to her. It came to me to say to her that her family and friends are her spirituality. Through them, she experiences God. She started crying with joy, and suddenly I knew that what I had said was even more true than I knew it to be.

So that's why I ask you: What woos your soul? Give your life to it. Marry it. If that seems like a bit much, at least take it out for coffee once or twice a week, for the love of all that is good and decent.

Don't just have a spirituality. Explore it. Revel in it, linger with it as you would your lover's body. Smell it, taste it, savor it. Wrestle with it. Go deep with it, go shallow with it. Laugh with it and laugh at it. The allow it to laugh at you. If you cannot find humor in it, then either it's not your spirituality or you're not looking at it openly and honestly.

I know that many people today don't even know what interests them beyond whatever pop culture feeds them and bores them with nightly. If this sounds like you, check in with yourself. Are you happy with that? Does it literally bring you joy and give you energy to reach for that remote? If so, awesome. If not, then you have some exploring to do. As I said before, start with your imagination. Travel magazines and National Geographic are good places to start.

The Ten Suggestions, part 2

Get related to your body.

Start with moving it. Although exercise doesn't cause happiness, it's a major contributing factor. I heard of a study in which the anti-depressant Zoloft was tested against an exercise regime in a group of clinically depressed subjects. After a certain time, the results were the same, but going forward, exercise surpassed Zoloft's effectiveness. Your mood improves when the energy within your body is moving. Dance, jogging, yoga, tai chi, martial arts, gym workouts, walking, hiking, biking, swimming, etc. are all good. I'm partial to ecstatic dance. Opportunities to learn ballroom dancing, salsa and tango abound here in Portland and probably in your city too. Learning to use your body, take the next steps, which are enjoying and loving your body.

Next, enjoy your body. Experience pleasure. Don't be a slave to it, but definitely serve it. Don't skimp out. The whole point of having a body is to enjoy it, and use it for good. What is good is something that you get to determine. Want to stay unhappy? Then believe what other people say about what pleasures you should and shouldn't experience. (Note: your pleasure should never come at the expense of someone's well-being, including your own.) If you find yourself stumped, experiment with dark chocolate, massage, and burying your face in a large rose for starters.

Then love your body. Appreciate it for what it provides for you: eyesight, transportation, pleasure, opposeable thumb use/grasping, hearing music, and myriad other things we take for granted. Don't compare your body to anyone else's. You will, but just forgive yourself and return to appreciating what you have and taking good care of it.

The relationship one has to one's body could be likened to that of a trainer to a racehorse. In the horse race, rider and horse become one. And the horse will win, or at least compete well, if it's fed well, rested, pampered, and allowed to run. Horses love to run.

What does your body love?

And don't forget: LISTEN to your body. And by this I don't mean simply the growling and gurgling sounds that come from your belly when you're hungry. Your gut has wisdom. Do you feel tension down there? Do you feel gusto down there? People who do not listen to what their guts are telling them about their lives wind up with gut problems—physical ones. Your gut has information about what to do for yourself and others, whom to love, whom to leave, what is your truth, and what is your lie. It may take some time to sit with and sort out when the mind and heart are also involved in the conversation. When in doubt, trust your gut.

The Ten Suggestions, part 1

In March of last year, I responded in this blog—to an article that reported Portland to be the unhappiest city in the country—by coming up with 10 suggestions for being happy. I naturally called them "The 10 Suggestions." An ex-post-bloggo Google search revealed that some others had also coined their own "10 Suggestions," but naturally I think mine are the best.

So let's revisit the 10 Suggestions, one blog entry at at time.

1) Adopt the idea that you are the only person responsible for your own happiness.

Nelson Mandela, who was arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment for his anti-Apartheid activism, was consigned to hard labor for the duration of the 27 years he served before release. Despite the ill treatment a black political prisoner would have received in Apartheid South Africa, Mandela emerged from prison a leader—not angry, not set upon revenge—and ultimately happy. Clearly, he was the only person looking after his own happiness, and shortly after his release became the first black leader of a post-Apartheid South Africa.

Being responsible for your happiness means being at the cause of your life, and not the effect. Happy people, as the famous Serenity Prayer suggests, either change the things they can or accept the things they can't change, and they have wisdom to know the difference. Changing your world becomes a game worthy of playing hard, and part of the fun is finding your team. If you don't succeed, either try a different tactic or a different direction, and don't take it personally. Play games worth losing.

What if your situation frankly sucks and you cannot change your circumstances?

Indeed, sometimes happiness asks us to simply accept things the way they are. Easier said than done? Start by understanding that you are enough and that "how you are" does not equal "how you feel."

Doing this requires one to step back into what is known as "witness consciousness"—that state of awareness which we simply notice what's going on inside us. If it had a voice it might sound like, "I notice I'm despairing right now." That thought will be quickly followed by any number of other statements, usually not empowering. It's safe enough to say that any other thought you would have would be something besides witness consciousness, which is not emotionally charged one way or the other. Just be aware. Notice what you're experiencing, and then note that you're having an emotional/mental/physical reaction, and then use those thoughts to marshal on your behalf toward another thought pattern or behavior that is empowering. One of the best behaviors to adopt is sharing your state of mind with another person who cares. More people care than you realize, trust me on this.

Next week: Get related to your body.

"Why I too hate Tantra" and upcoming events

When I first began to explore Tantra in the mid-2000s, my friend Robert Allen, who at the time was one of Seattle’s main tantric emissaries, inspired me to deepen my role as a tantric guide. So when I saw the title of his recent blog entry, “Why I hate Tantra,” I had to read it to see what might have gotten into him. (Read it here.) None of my friends and colleagues has a deeper understanding of Tantra than he.

Robert, like many others, is fed up with much of what passes for Tantra these days, and in many ways I agree with him. The deeper my understanding of Tantric mysticism goes, the less content I am to call even what I teach Tantra. Yes, it is “neo-tantra”—that much is beyond debate—but what separates the real thing from what most Americans think of when they hear the word, “Tantra?”

Tantra is not smoking-hot sex bathed in curry and lit by a patchouli-scented candle with a Ravi Shankar CD playing in the background, the Kama Sutra book on the night stand opened to page 69. Tantra doesn’t need to be sexual at all. Tantra at times melds sexuality with the sacred, but sacred sexuality (which I’m a major proponent of and teach as well) does not equal Tantra.

Tantra can be the most confronting, and perhaps, most comforting, of all the spiritual paths known to humans. Tantra is making love to your fear. Tantra is making love to your work or leaving it. Tantra is finding the Divine wherever you look—especially in places they told you you wouldn’t find God. Your most profound encounters with the Divine will most likely come when you’re not looking, but the Divine tends to reveal itself most often to those who take the time and energy to look anywhere.

Most Tantric and, dare I say, spiritual teaching is all about ascent—with the goal being to elevate the spirit, raise the vibration, transcend the suffering, achieve purity or attain higher states of bliss and ecstasy, but the truth is there is the soul has other needs, like getting to the bottom of that mother complex you have been plagued by all your life. Spirit is good, and seeks to rise, but the soul is the part of us that is like water—it seeks descent and depth. Soul is of the soil and ashes and earth, which perhaps is why Tantric practitioners in India do their rituals in graveyards, with the ashes and bones of immolated people. Only when you are ready to get down and dirty, to smear yourself with the grief, tears, and blood of your own suffering, and maybe mine too, and let out a baleful wail, will you be ready for enlightenment. Today’s best-selling spiritual writers and religious teachers don’t tell you that to be enlightened, you must first be endarkened. But it’s the truth.

Of course, grief, tears, and blood are difficult to sell to a world desperately trying to put a band-aid on any kind of suffering it encounters.

Dear readers, are you ready to go deep into your body and get serious about healing those deep, wounded places? Are you ready to cross a living threshold, or are you content to buy a Kama Sutra candle at the Exotic Love Boutique, practice your orgasms, and call it good?

Maybe you’re thinking, "Where’s my Nag Champa incense? Where’s my day-long orgasm?” If you’re ready to cross a threshold, to live on the edge of your personal magic and power, you have a great opportunity on July 31 when Michael Mirdad guides the Portland Tantric Meetup in a day-long intensive. Michael is the real thing. After July 17, the $100 tuition increases to $125, so save some money and register ASAP. I look forward to sharing this journey with you.

As we ramp up for fall, plan for the return of our two-part series on the essence of Shiva and Shakti, Massage A Trois, and other opportunities to explore the longings you carry in your soul.

Speaking of which, check out my other meetup, the Spiritual Growth and Adventure Meetup.

Many blessings, and enjoy our spectacular weather,

Owl

A very tough mustard seed

This article feels like the final nail in the coffin of any illusion Pope Benedict should preside over Roman Catholicism.

It's the day before Easter, and as someone who practiced Catholicism intentionally for the first 30 or so years of his life before changing course, it's a reflective time: Even though I love and honor Christ (in my own way) as much as I did for all those years, I hesitate before calling myself a "Christian." Does that mean I believe in Christ? Does it mean I believe all the teachings *about* him? Does it mean I'm part of the community of believers who identify themselves as Christians? Yes (sort of), no, and no. None of these answers came easy to me and yet I still struggle with them sometimes. My truth is that I have experienced much more of God outside of my Catholic/Christian experience in recent years, which in no way diminishes what I did experience of God in those years past. But I love the church as I love my family: It's where I come from. And now this...

I never liked Cardinal Josef Ratzinger. He was the enemy of liberal thinking within the church. As head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, he was the theology police and he wielded quite a ideological truncheon. He censured liberal theologians who challenged the way the church thought about women, sexuality, and even social justice. He was sort of a Karl Rove figure in the church—an insider, a mover-shaker, and a tremendous influence even on John Paul II.

When he was elected pope, it was the absolute worst thing that could happen for the Catholic church, and I knew it immediately. Now it's showing up in ways I never imagined—shameful not just for the pedophilia and the cover-ups, but the way the Vatican is pushing back. However, these kinds of situations are like quicksand: The harder you try to swim out of it, the faster you sink. Watch while that happens. If Ratzinger doesn't leave office early (which would be a rather unprecedented move in the church), he will take the floundering church down with him.

Pedophilia is an obvious outcome when a church idealizes celibacy and prohibits its priests from marrying. (The dysfunctional/toxic masculine is now preying on itself and will destroy itself.) However, the church deflects this criticism by saying the vast majority of pedophiles are married people. What a distortion of statistics, proving the maxim, "There's lies, damn lies, and then there's statistics." A small portion of the married population has pedophilia issues. A significant portion (certainly not a majority, but a telling percentage) of the priesthood does, and many more have problems with alcohol and tobacco. And add to that the job/mission of a priest is to heal souls, not to damage them. And let's not forget healing one's own soul, which mandates a dynamic relationship with the Divine Feminine (sorry guys, there Is No Other Way).

When Jesus put Peter in charge of the community that would become the Roman Catholic church, did he intend any of this? NO. There's enough evidence in the canonical bible to suggest that Jesus valued the company and counsel of women far more than was "appropriate" for his time, and there's good reason to believe he was married to Mary Magdalene. Of course, these ideas will be suppressed as long as there's a celibate conservative theologian presiding over Rome.

I think that Christ's work is being faithfully carried out both inside the church, but especially outside of it, all over the world, by people who understand the message of the gospel whether they espouse any Christian theology or not. Christ wasn't about the process or the belief system; he was about results, or as the gospel puts it, the fruits of one's labor. Christians and non-Christians both understand the work that is to be done, but increasingly, this bureaucracy called the church is becoming irrelevant. What a pity, and how sad for Christ's legacy.

But one of the principles of true leadership, which I'm sure Christ understood, is that a truly successful leader starts something and lets it take root and grow until no one's quite sure where the original idea came from or what role that leader played in the process.

Thanks be to God—at least that mustard seed has grown and infiltrated the world, beyond the walls of the church.

On Easter, I can be thankful for that. May your Easter be blessed, may your life be renewed, and your mind and heart opened.

Today's work...

Yeah, I usually blog about compelling spiritual matters. Today's compelling spiritual matter is bonsai. It compels my spirit something fierce!

Yesterday my friend Chris and I went to Wabi Sabi bonsai nursery in Estacada and I found this nice little Japanese Black Pine var. Ondae. Ondae is a "cork-barked" variety of Black Pine, which grows thick bark with deep fissures very quickly, adding to the look of age. I potted it up today in an old pot I had another, far less worthy, plant growing in. Nice combo, don't you think? The pot is a Japanese pot from one of the really nice kilns over there, although I don't know what kind. It has a broken corner that I fixed with a little glue. Here's the pine and a detail of the lichen growing on its bark.

The passion of an elderly woman

Those who spend any time with me here in Portland know that I'm into bonsai—those trees of various species pruned, primped, and potted to achieve the scale and beauty of a much larger tree. I practiced the art many years ago in Los Angeles, and began again immediately upon moving to Bridgetown. So ever on the lookout for new material to work with, I found an ad on Craigslist for an estate sale, mentioning bonsai. It was in Salem today.

I arrived at the estate sale with a few other garage-sale vultures, as I imagined them, early, hoping to be the first person to grab my quarry—if in fact there were a quarry to grab. They could have been lousy trees, after all. They could have been overgrown or nearly dead "mall-sai," the "bonsai for the masses" one finds in the kiosk at the mall or at the farmer's market. Serious aficionados like me are looking for something large, graceful, old, powerful, interesting.

I found some serious trees, scattered among some really unremarkable material. First thing I found was a potted redwood, and I found an ume (Japanese flowering apricot), what looks to be a cherry, and what looks to be a princess persimmon. The redwood was a significant find, and the gal who was pricing the items mentioned "more trees over there." Over there I found a rather large wisteria with graceful lines, sweeping branches, and pretty bark with the patina that only comes with an older tree. I found a few pots I liked, paid way too little, and packed the car with my prizes.

Bonsai is an interesting art, insofar as the world's finest trees change hands over generations, and over the lifespan of a tree, several artists may leave their mark on it as they adapt it to their vision. The tree cooperates within its limitations, but some talented artists are able to shatter what appear to be major limitations of a particular specimen. So in homage to the trees I was adding to my collection, I asked whose they had been. They belonged to a woman named Marge (last name begins with "C" I think) who passed away. I took a little time to wander the house to see if anything else interested me and notice what I could of Marge. There was not much, some rickety mid-century modern furniture and unremarkable kitchen stuff, as well as some Asian art.

But I learned something of Marge by her trees. That redwood I found came from a bonsai nursery in Mendocino County, California, collected by a couple of brothers who dig them out of the forest. Most of the redwoods of its size and age come from this source. Then there was this wisteria. A really nice, valuable tree. Both were in nursery cans and there were no bonsai pots in the collection of pots for sale that would work for them; she hadn't purchased them yet, but she had planned to. Like me, she enjoyed flowering/fruiting bonsai.

I suppose they could have been her husband's trees—the toy train set in the garage hinted at a masculine presence, but I sense the trees were her thing. She attempted wiring but wasn't very good at it. She had to shell out some serious money for the redwood—easily a few hundred dollars—and at least a hundred and a half for the wisteria as well. She had hopes for these trees. All her other trees were small but the redwood and wisteria were large. She was thinking bigger before she died, and this was her start. I'm pretty sure Marge was peripherally involved with one of the local bonsai clubs, or made the drive down to Corvallis to go to Wee Tree Farm to get the Wisteria. The ume still has the Wee Tree tag on it. Neither the redwood nor the wisteria were beginner's trees, although from the condition of the collection (which also had some ginkos and some really bad trees), I could tell Marge was a beginner—a beginner with a passion for her trees, which she couldn't fully serve.

Sadly, perhaps, she wasn't close to any other bonsai people; else they would have taken care of her trees for her, or like in my club here in Portland, auctioned them off to club members with proceeds benefiting her estate.

I am grateful to Marge for these trees and look forward to tending them (I potted them today in bonsai pots) for years to come. Hopefully I will do Marge well by these trees, and eventually pass them onto someone else who cares about them and continues to refine them or even recreate them to their own taste.

So after the estate sale I drove to Telperion Farms, a big bonsai nursery sort of on the way home (a short side trip, anyway), and bought pots for the new trees (repotting time is NOW) so I could get to work. I had a nice visit with Chris, his wife Lisa, and their friend Gary, a talented potter whose work I couldn't afford.

Maybe I should have splurged though. When I stopped at Chipotle in Tualatin (or is it Tigard; I get those two places mixed up. Nyberg Road, that one), and ordered a burrito, something beautiful happened. I couldn't get the wallet out of my zipper pocket on my pants. No matter what. The gal at the counter laughed, saw me struggle, and simply gave me the burrito. I found money in the car, but she wouldn't take it. I told her I'd share the karma down the road with another.

I have this little statue I got in Peru, of a guy with a couple of C-notes and several bags of grain and other treasures around his neck. He's the "eqeko de la buena suerte," but I call him the God of gratitude, abundance, and generosity. (The person who sold him to me insists you must put a cigarette in his mouth, but only on Thursdays. I've mostly complied.) When I pray to God using this little figure, I am reminded of those facets of God—generosity, abundance, and gratitude. This morning I was in a very excited mood and I made a special prayer to el eqeko.

I was truly blessed today God's generosity and abundance, and I am grateful, even as I look for another way to share the generosity and abundance. A friend of mine wants a bonsai; I think she's going to get one from me soon. :-)