Meditation...

Wonderful and cool thing happening at the house this week… Cindy’s meditation teacher, Paul Muller Ortega, is doing initiations. His teacher was Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (the one in India the Beatles made famous), and as it happens, I was initiated by Maharishi in 1972. I was 11 at the time, and while I remember several things about the experience, there’s a fair amount I don’t. I do, of course, remember my mantra as he gave it to me, and though I haven’t practiced meditation with much regularity it’s always been in my “toolbox”…. a pretty good tool.

Ultimately, we're all beings of faith... some people have faith in the randomness of things, and that there is no unifying force... I have faith that many (if not most) things do not happen by accident, and that love is like hydrogen- you can't run out of it. What will you do with yours?

Inspiration

Interesting winter... after a 30 foot fall from a roof and two crushed and fractured vertebrae, I'm back to working and climbing, though carefully. I'm very lucky to be alive and able to walk. I'm also very lucky to have a wonderful, loving partner and some good friends to help me through. There are times in life when a person can be "blown open" - this wasn't the first time like that, and I've been taking some good things from my fall and subsequent recovery period. The sun still sets in the West, I still jerk around and convulse without completely being able to control it, my spine still hurts.... but something is different, and it feels really good. As a performer, "Inspiration" is a term I used to reserve for the creative process, but in recent years it's meaning has expanded for me- "in-Spirit", or "of-God"...
















Really, who are you? I've known for a long time that my "being" doesn't stop at the ends of my fingers and toes, but, like most folks it's easy for me to forget about that in the daily effort toward food, clothing, shelter, and whatever else I think I need. The truly exceptional people I've known seem to remember it more often. I don't know all the things I was put here to do, but I do know some of them- apparently I'm supposed to stay around a bit longer....

Details...

Good fun yesterday up at the Animal World crag in Boulder Canyon... went up after lunch to rope solo my favorite 5.8, and maybe look around for some other stuff to do after warming up. The wind was quite a factor, though, and after the 5.8 I wound up toproping on something nearby with a couple of friends from the BRC I happened to run into, and wearing a windbreaker to do it. I didn't check in advance how my foul weather clothing would work with a harness (gear loops, etc.), and wound up trying to clip hardware to fabric, fumbling around, and so on. Not really a problem on a toprope, but as fall arrives I'll be needing to get this little part of my act together.... this is the time of year when the climbing around CO and UT is at it's best; the weather doesn't change quite as suddenly as it can in summer, and the insect factor is minimal- enjoy it wherever you are!

Smart grid?

Recently, Boulder (as well as several other towns) has been getting "smart grid" utility hardware on poles and electric meters around town; the pitch is that automated meters and two-way power consumption data can be used to improve the efficiency of the grid's power distribution. Over the long term, we may be able to save quite a bit of energy this way, but in the near term it looks a bit like the weird setup our local power company uses to bill for wind energy- customers wanting to support wind power pay a higher price for electricity that comes from the exact same grid as it does for the rest of us; same wires, same mix of wind, gas and coal burning plants (the "smart grid" isn't smart enough to allow one household to buy power from a different plant than the house next door). I'm not really against the idea, but some restraint might be in order here- when a large amount of stuff is run by computer from far away, well, things don't always go as planned..... this link is to a story about hacking smart grids