Mindfulness gives you time.
Time gives you choices.
Choices, skillfully made, lead to freedom.
You don't have to be swept away by your feelings.
You can respond with wisdom and kindness rather than habit and reactivity.
- Bhante Henepola Gunaratana
Beyond Mindfulness in Plain English
The first real grip I ever got on things
Was when I learned the art of pedaling
- Seamus Heaney
The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man.
Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish.
Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.
- Iris Murdoch
I feel that I am entitled to my share of lightheartedness and there is
nothing wrong with enjoying one’s self simply, like a boy.
- Leo Tolstoy, Responding to criticism for learning to ride a bicycle at age 67
Life is like riding a bicycle.
To keep your balance you must keep moving.
- Albert Einstein
Check out Steve McCurry's excellent bike images. Here.
yes, exclaimed elf, we made it through march. march was a real adventure.
what did you do, queried weary bleary eyed orphan.
oh, i had so much fun with the kids, like us. they were young curious playful energetic experiental wild and free.
that's a long verbal sentence, laughed orphan.
life is a long laughing sentence, said elf.
can we go out to play now, asked orphan.
yes, let's take the day off and be creative, said elf.
please give me a hug, said orphan, people need five hugs a day for emotional well being.
elf hugged orphan.
orphan hugged elf.
Inside Drapchi prison near Lhasa, Chinese guards beat Tibetan nuns and monks with rubber hoses filled with sand.
They applied electric cattle prods to their bodies, sending wire cranked juice through skeletons, extracting screams. Denounce the Dalai Lama, screamed one soldier, a young lackey from Human Province. He tightened metal screws around a woman’s wrists, bending them back at a horrendous angle until she screamed from pain, Never!
He wiped her blood off his broken glasses and increased the pressure. It was a job.
I am doing my DUTY, he screamed.
Save my face, sang a Chinese girl, an innocent victim of the national genocide one-child policy wringing out a mop made of spider webs inside water rainbows.
She languished in a large bland cavern classroom at a private business university in Fujian. It was private because all the students had failed higher level exams for more prestigious universities. They settled for this prison. She cleaned crumbling uneven cement floors with strands doing her Duty.
Beijing operatic actors fashioned death masks for their performance in a funeral formula.
In Turkey divorce is seen as a failure. A place where the majority of women know their place and stay in it. A place where mothers control and manipulate their daughter’s behavior, attitudes and imaginary freedom with a heavy dictatorial hand called love. Chains of love.
One was different. She confided in me. I listened. After seven months of marriage she’d decided to leave her husband filing divorce papers.
“I feel so much better,” she said. She opened up. She felt free. She had a lot to say. She’d believed her husband in the beginning.
“He lied to me. He courted me with sweet words and I thought, or believed I thought or thought I believed he had an open mind but I was disappointed because he wasn't honest...so after some time measured in weeks then months I saw his, how do you say, irresponsibility, how he wouldn't contribute his heart to me, to our relationship and then, when I tried to talk to him he was closed to me, he shut down and I was working and trying to keep the flat up and work on our relationship but I saw it was difficult, then really, really impossible to live with everything in my brain and heart.”
She inhaled. “Now, when he saw my action to end the marriage he was filled with remorse and regret and apologies. But it's too late. I told him to move out. He returned to his family. He tries to bother me every day in his childlike whining way but it's over. I can handle it. I am strong and know what I want in my life. My family is very supportive of my decision.”
“In China it’s always about saving face. Appearances. Here, it's about self respect, growth and personal dignity,” I said. “Some get it and some don’t.”
“Yes! I am not living the lie anymore. I feel free.”
Share Article