Blue Dots

In a very mindful state, I was driving to Sears across town to buy a new fridge. There was a lot of traffic. At the intersection of the Susquehanna Trail and Route 30, I sat waiting to turn left to head east. I began to see the cars and trucks as arteries. Then it flashed to a blue stream. I recall all the pictures about consciousness flowing through the Universe - it's always drawn as blue dots. Then I see it. Each car, with a blue dot in it, pushing it along its path. The highway is just a bunch of blue dots going about their business. But! They're not all bright shining blue! Initially I see red, orange, yellow, but maybe these colors are remnants from recent Chakra work earlier in the day. Then I let myself see them differently, where they are all blue, but just not bright and shining. They're dull, pale. Focused, with their heads down. Focused, but on the wrong things. Getting to where they need to be. But where do they "need" to be? They're already here! Now! Once in a while, a brighter, bluer dot, but nobody else cares. That one is just Happy. Do they know? Do they care? They all just have their own little personal agendas. So much Ego in the world.

Blue dots on the move:
1/3 are moving away from something they hate (work, home, etc.)
1/3 are moving towards something they despise
1/3 are stuck between 2 things they despise, unhappy in both.

This might be why people love their cars and love to drive. Or at least say they do, but they bring so much anger to the roads too! But in their car is the only place they're away from everything they're running from. What do they do? Grin and bear it. They take tiny steps, hunting for happiness (back to school, buy something new and shiny, gorge themselves on food, file for divorce, get lost in television) and hope. Or they don't do any of that and they just keep being. Unhappy.

What should they do? Stop the hating. JUST STOP. AND BE. Take notice the possibility for happiness. Start down the road. Try and get a glimpse of what's really out there. And in there. Not your physical reality of cars and tables, but the REAL reality we don't see, because we can't see. How it's all just One and Connected.

Start out in your car. Just be. Enjoy the Slow Lane. Conversation and music. You'll get there when you get there. Just be in your safe place between Everything Else. And then grow that safe place so it can encompass more places. Tune into the energy, and everything gets easier.

One Love Kirtan

One Love performed today at UUCY. It was absolutely perfect weather, and the concert was held outside on our labyrinth. After watching the sunrise over the Atlantic Ocean from Rehoboth Beach on the Solstice yesterday, my heart has been very full. Wonderful things happen when you're traveling through life full of happiness and love, and then have yet another uplifting experience. It's almost like there's nowhere "up" left to go. So you start to go beyond. Words can't do it justice. tat tvam asi

All of the chanting was absolutely wonderful. One in particular really spoke to me, however. The words are simple:

Where do you seek me? Here I am
Here I am, Here I am

It's a very moving melody. Unfortunately, it's not on their CD (which I of course purchased immediately after the show). I finally found a version later that captures it pretty well on this page (which is full of so much great, great stuff): http://wahiduddin.net/music/ (see #27 - Moko, where the first half is Hindi, but the second English).

It's a great, moving chant in and of itself. However, one of the guys in One Love pointed something out that sticks with me every time I hear it: You can view the lyrics as a person speaking to a deity, or as a deity speaking to a person. I strongly encourage you to grab the mp3 file and think about this. Listen as if you are looking up at the sky, asking the question. Then reverse it -- be the sky, looking down at your earthly body, and ask the question again. 

During the concert I was completely able to lose myself in random visuals of the weekend, in the fullness of my heart, in everything. Afterwards, I snapped back into myself and along with it came the realization of the dozens of folks around, sitting at a concert. But for a moment there, nothing else mattered. I wanted to write "I was just being" here to conclude, but that's not right. For that moment, there was no "I".

Jury Duty Spider

Serving jury duty in York County. I was sitting in the "waiting room" which is more like a big holding cell.

A spider was hanging down from the ceiling. I'm not a good judge, but it was a high ceiling with tiles and flouresent lights, maybe 18 feet? In a room seating 175-200 people, the spider hung close to directly above where I sat the yesterday morning. I'm the only one here with the vantage point to see it. If I draw attention to it, it's dead. But there, now, it's harmless. Is it happy? Or miserable and starving? After maybe a half hour, he made it back up his web thread to the ceiling! Now he's gone, probably back between the tiles.

 

The spider came back down later. I was checking periodically, but at distance he's difficult to see unless the light is reflecting just right. He surprised me when I spotted him again, down near head-level now. After a good bit of contemplation, I had to tell the gal in front of me about the spider. I couldn't just let it end up in her hair or something, so I tapped her on the shoulder and mentioned the spider. It took her a second to see him. Then she gasped a little, and then reached out and broke the thread. He fell to the floor, but I couldn't see him - the patterned carpet of gray and black and white is not conducive to spotting escaped spiders. Maybe he would live after all!

But then she stood up and smooshed him.

RIP little guy. Hope you had a happy life.

Slow Lane

I used to drive in the fast lane all the time.

I enjoy driving, but it was just an intermediate step in a rush to the next event. It was like I thought that next thing is where I could find happiness, so I had to rush to get there. Then one day I'm driving down I-83 in the slow lane. I'm just being. Driving and listening to Krishna Das chants. I had a destination and a time frame, but it didn't matter. I was just being happy. Then I took notice of the cars flying by me on the left. I looked at the drivers. They were all sternly focused on pushing ahead. Some where on the phone, others were literally grimacing as the car in front of them wasn't going fast enough.

My epiphany came then.

Stop rushing from one thing to another to find happiness. Be here now. Like anyone else, I certainly enjoy being with others and being at different destinations. But if you're just pushing for the sake of pushing, whatever you're looking for won't be there either. You need to carry it with you, wherever you go. Life isn't the destination, it's the journey.

"We are all just walking each other home." -- Ram Dass

Quoting the internets:

Oprah Winfrey, age 54, was found dead in her home residing in Chicago, Illinois at 8:21 AM on September 20, 2008. Local Police and the FBI are trying to keep it on the down low for now until further notice. From what has been reported thus far, she appears to have a bloody area around her eye, a bullet wound in her stomach and some cuts and bruises up and down her body. They suspect she was beaten while she was trying to sleep, and shot in the side with a silenced handgun. According to the FBI, she was killed anywhere around 1:00-2:00 A.M. this morning.

The assassin was indeed very stealthy and un-noticeable, as the FBI has no idea who or what could of done this. They consider that she even might of painfully commited suicide due to the lack of evidence.

“I didn’t hear a thing, I was up until 4 last night just watching T.V. and reading some books, nothing suspicious was heard or seen, I even went outside for some ‘cigs’ a couple of times and saw nothing” -Markus Julane, Oprah’s down the street neighbor.

This blog will be updated with further info on Oprah Winfrey’s death as soon as the FBI gets things straightened out.

More Linkage

Score one for power management

I came home from the gym just now to find the microwave clock blinking *18:88 which is of course never a good thing. I guess unless it's 7:28 pm? Anyway, I poked my head into my office where both my new desktop and work laptop were running. But all was quiet. Granted, these are pretty quiet machines, but it was just too quiet. Sure enough, both were off -- which means the power must have been out most of the time I was gone. The UPS probably can only power things for a half hour, but the laptop battery should have kept it going quite some time (though it's docked, so I'm not sure if it uses more power then). The laptop is plugged into the UPS, but in a "surge-protection-only" slot. Plus, both machines were largely idle.

I cranked up the laptop first, and the "resuming windows" screen popped right up. So the XP power settings worked properly -- when the battery gets low, hibernate. It did and restored just fine. Perfect.

Next I started my new desktop which is running Vista 64, which I'm not very familiar with. I just played around to enable Hibernate mode last night but only used it once. I'm not sure how the UPS software would respond or what would happen. But as it booted, I got a plain text screen saying that the battery ran low, so the system went into hibernation. Do I want to restore? Sounds good to me, let's restore. It also picked right back up where it was. Awesome -- behaved exactly as it should have.

This is such a far cry from years ago where I would shut down my desktop when I went to lunch. Back then (that was a 486-100 machine) when power would hiccup, odds were fair that as the computer blinked off it was in the middle of writing to a disk. And thus corrupting it. I can't recall how many hard drives I had to replace due to corruption, usually caused by power issues. But now we have battery backups that last at least long enough to tell the machine to shut down. I think every (non-laptop) computer in the house should be on one. Which means I need to get a new one because there isn't one upstairs -- the one for the home theater PC is really old and powers the TV and cable box too, so I should get a new on there and put the older on up on my son's machine.

I'm quite impressed how this stuff "just works" nowadays.

drip, drip, drip

We had a bit of a water issue in the basement. We'd cleaned up the puddle a couple times, but wasn't sure where exactly it was coming from. I assumed it was condensation-related from the A/C, but it's been nice here and the air hasn't been on recently. We both mopped up a lot of water before finding a small rubber tube that had been dislodged from the French drain. Tucking it back in place stopped the puddling on the floor, but there was still water dripping though the tube. It was an overflow for the humidifier that we never use. There's a spongy material that rotates through a plate of water that helps keep the air less dry in the winter when the heater is running all the time. However, we never use this -- and looking in there it's caked with mold and gunk. No thanks.

Even though we don't run this, it's still hooked up. There is a small copper tube that tabs a cold water pipe in the ceiling which was slowly feeding water into the humidifier. Of course, since it isn't running, it just drips in the plate and then overflows. Since the overflow tube on the floor was actually in the French drain until recently, I have no idea if this has always been dripping like this or not. But I almost have to believe it has been like this for a long time. Since we have very little water in the basement, the drains are just dry rock. So these drips just seep around the local area (far away from the sump area) and evaporate -- keeping the basement moist. But just how moist is the question because we do run two little de-humidifiers down there.

Watching the drips, I can ballpark their size and rate. I tried to make a similar size drop in the kitchen, but probably made it a bit smaller. I measured these at 9 drops to fill a 1/4 teaspoon measuring spoon, which is 1.25 ml. This comes out to 0.14 ml/drop, and looking at the relative sizes I think I'm underestimating the volume per drop. However, we can move forward with this value. For the rate, I figure it was about 1 to 2 drops per second. Again, estimating low, we'll go with 1 drop per second. Multiplying, 0.14 ml/drop * 1 drop/sec * 3600 sec/hr = 500 ml/hr. I have no good feel for milliliters per hour, so let's keep converting: 500 ml/hr * 24 hr/day = 12,000 ml/day. Sounds like a lot, but what is 12,000 ml? There are 3785.6ml/gal, so this turns out to 3.17 gallons/day. Wow.

I'm probably underestimating both the size and rate, but we're looking at 3 to 6 gallons per day dripping through this tube into the drains. The de-humidifiers in the basement are typically emptied once per day (though not regularly) and probably remove a combined 5 gallons per load. Which means we haven't been keeping up. So while the basement looks dry, it always feels moist and I finally know why.

I've turned off the valve now, reducing the drip rate to 0. I've also emptied the humidifier case so that even if it's still dripping a bit, it will take quite a while to refill to overflow. I have also emptied the de-humidifiers, and they are cranking away right now. I will empty them again tonight as well. By my calculations, there's probably a good bit of moisture still in the drains to take out, but staying on top of the de-humidifiers for 2 or 3 days may actually dry the basement out almost completely. Let's see.