A picture by Michael, Gratitude, new blogs and the stream from recent days are on the card today of what's fresh and interesting in the buddhoblogosphere.
 | Three details from a recent photograph in One Foot in Front of the Other. Copyright 2007 Michael |
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Michael of One Foot in Front of the Other astounds me with his photography -- though he is no less interesting a writer of prose and poetry in his blog. At right, are three details from a recent photograph. A basketball flies into the trees, on its way toward the basket, posed perfectly to capture the name of its maker. Three players under the basket look like a grouping from The Last Supper. Two players’ shadows tell us the action that just happened. The details are scaled diferently, for display here. But you get the idea. Somehow, Michael squeezes a lot that is interesting into a single snap.
Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos into order, confusion into clarity.... It turns problems into gifts, failures into success, the unexpected into perfect timing, and mistakes into important events. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow. - Melody Beattie
Beginning March 9, 2006, Bill Harryman, in his Integral Options Café blog, started a 30-day regimen of Gratitude Blogging, "an experiment [where he committed himself to posting] one thing each day for which [he was] grateful." His first statement of gratitude was simply this: "Today I am grateful for a good friend who called me to arrange a lunch date."
On his 30th day, Bill was still going strong and finding himself to be expansive. His sentiments on Apr 7 weren’t a single item, but a list: "So many things to be grateful for, so today I will choose just three: canned protein drinks (taste bad, but do their job), clients who want to change and do their part to make it happen, and Kai's comments on my efforts at haiku (very helpful)." And he finished with the trailing tagline "What are you grateful for?"
Bill’s gratitude-posting regimen lasted well past the thirty days he committed himself to, but eventually, he did stop. But he has started up again with daily gratitude postings rather recently. And he blogged some gratitude today, hooray.
A week ago, I came upon an article that cites a study on the benefits of gratitude. The 2003 study, "Counting Blessings Versus Burdens: An Experimental Investigation of Gratitude and Subjective Well-Being in Daily Life" tells us "that a conscious focus on blessings might have emotional and interpersonal benefits."
While we all seem to think we know what gratitude is, categorizing it and understanding what raw gratitude is is open to some dispute. As you might suppose. Try categorizing your own emotional states. But, rather non-controversially, gratitude is slotted in among clusters of other emotions that are pleasant, positive and interpersonal.
But there is an element of negativity in gratitude, for some, and this can be why many people are reluctant to explore and expose what they are grateful for. Gratitude can arouse feelings of indebtedness and one's lack of value to society.
Without going into the details of the impressive-seeming study and unpacking the statistical analysis of the collected data [which is well beyond my ken these days, anyway], it is reported that "participants in the gratitude condition reported considerably more satisfaction with their lives as a whole, felt more optimism about the upcoming week and felt more connected with others than did participants in the control condition. ... Therefore, it appears that participation in the graitude condition led to substantial and consistent improvements in people's assessments of the global well-being."Thus, Gratitute seems very Buddhist and healthful for one's spirit and the community one lives in. Blog on, Bill. We all can be grateful for your gratitude-blogging regimen as something we may, ourselves, take up. What else might we be grateful for?
It is a birthday. Lucid Nomad began a new blog just this weekend, titled An Open Book: Of Mindfasting & Enlightenment. Mindfasting is not a term I'm familiar with. Lucid Nomad describes it in one of four posts already up. Quoting Alan Fox of the University of Delaware, Lucid Nomad writes,
"Mindfasting ... is emptying the mind of artificial constraints to open it up and make room for the appropriate natural response to occur. It therefore involves the elimination of rigid, dogmatic, formulaic attitudes and habits, and our self-identification with them."
Another new - practically brand new - blog is The Hinterlands, written by Gregor of Entering the Path. The Hinterlands is where Gregor intends to post words and photography from his hiking adventures in the back country.
It's not a birthday for the blog Buddhism and Conflict Resolution, an Amida Trust blog. It's been around four and a half months, but is new to me. The blog describes itself thus, "We aim for this weblog to be a source of guidance and inspiration for those people following the dharma who seek to resolve confict situations. Effective resolution is characterized by finding an agreement between two opposing ideas which engenders commitment, avoids harmful emotions and actions, and safeguards principles and relationship."
Ryan Oelke has a fairly new blog, begun last March, called Ryan Oelke, to add to the four he already had going - Buddhist Geeks, of course; the long-lived all-quadrants-all-the-time Integral Awakening; the valuable group blog Anxious Living and his blog in the Zaadz community. Ryan also informs us there's yet another blog, Tumblog, out there that he hasn't yet done much with. Ryan Oelke (the person) tells us that Ryan Oelke (the blog) is to be his "central campsite on the web," to be used for "personal/business" purposes. This makes sense since the new blog is at ryanoelke.com.
James Ure of The Buddhist Blog had a profound, touching experience helping people who were recipients of free meals at a nearby Presbyrterian Church. "As I filled each persons cup I concentrated on them as if they were the only person in the world. I saw the water I poured as precious gold. On such a hot day these folks gulped water as if it was the only thing that mattered--and in that moment it was. In that moment, offering them water was the most important thing I could do."
iPhone, uPhone, we all moan for iPhone: We find that ~C4Chaos of the same-strange-name blog is "sourgraping" for an iPhone in addition to drooling over it all, while Nagarjuna of Naked Reflections is "uncommonly excited" about them, but won't get one right away, if ever, even though he's "dazzled by its elegance and seamless multi-functionality." But in the midst of all the mad interest, Carlos Rull of carlosrull.com suggests that we "iChill" and says we should enjoy "the iFlowers and the iOcean [and] go for an iWalk."
Sean of Deep Surface recently wrote of his father's death which happened suddenly while the two of them were on vacation, walking along a beach on Waikiki in 1984. The father was just 43 years old. In a follow-up post, Sean writes, "The images of that day with my Dad are vivid, but they exist only in my mind. Even what I do remember has grown fuzzy and lost details over the years. It’s clear to me that even the most defining moments in my life are not real in this moment. All my memories can be described this way - imagined stories of the past, incomplete and inaccurate. Even so, still being able to deeply feel the emotions related to those stories feels like a gift. When I can accept my memories as illusion, with no more reality than a novel, they are easier to savor as they arise."
After rather recently wiping out his blog, MikeDoe of DoeDo is back into heavy blogging, again. A current topic is creating, wearing and modelling a line of men's skirts. It is a very surprizing topic, fully unexpected, from the manly Mr. Doe.
