Monday, April 13, 2009. I had a really good 3 day weekend.  Actually, I had a really good whole last week. I felt like I had a vacation.  I don’t know if it’s the St. John’s Wort I’m doing a trial run of or just relaxing more, but my constant thinking about work has eased up.  My urges to get just a little more done, to get a little more caught up, to get another call returned, have eased.  And those weren’t stressful thoughts, the only stressful part of it was my sense of urgency that I had to be doing it around the clock, nonstop.   I’m still working 12+ hours a day, but there is no sense of urgency about it.  That’s one way my ego tries to control me. Making me feel I urgently need to be doing something.  Making me want to constantly change what is.  All week I’ve been having good long periods of non thought and not just during meditation.  This is when I can tell that my decades long daily meditation discipline is working.  The mind silence is the fruit of my labor.  Sometimes I catch my mantra going in my mind all by itself.  Or I catch myself singing or chanting aloud.  I love it when that is the autopilot I revert to.  I love that that is my default setting, when I clear my mind of nonessentials.

I’ve been watching the cardinals as they nest in the eleagnus/silverthorn bush outside my back porch.  When I am on the laptop in the living room or the back porch, I can sit there and watch them. It’s better than tv.   I’m so glad I live in my own private little wooded sanctuary here.  Yesterday morning I was just going to go back to bed after meditation, but decided to go put some sunflower seeds out for the cardinals and squirrels first.  That of course led to spending the morning working in the yard.  Had I planned it, I would have put on jeans and work boots instead of going out flipflops, tshirt and tights.  I trimmed back a bush near the front of the house, and went around the yard putting cuttings down where I want new hedges to be, and set the sprinklers on them.   I heard two squirrels fussing and I discovered I had severed a major squirrelway offramp, so I had to make one for them.    A branch that led from the roof to the camphor tree was gone, indeed I had topped the entire bush.

So I went to the east yard and got a long bamboo branch and fashioned a bridge for them.  As I climbed the rough bark of the camphor tree, barefoot, to get the bamboo in place, I thought how nice a climb it would be if I had on jeans and workboots and gloves.   Afterward, as I went around the yard watering all the new cuttings in, I selected some bamboo lengths to fashion a wall by the shed.  I used the grapevine and eleagnus to weave a little wall in and out of them, which will fill in as the grapevines take off this summer.  My grapevines here have very purple edible grapes July-Sept.

I’ve been eating salads of loquat and mulberries, with fresh stevia leaves to sweeten, all fresh from my new garden.  I truly do live in Paradise. Hmmmmph and funny, it’s been here all along.

Ah, another day, another eight hundred million gazillion opportunities just waiting for me to notice them.

I’m diving in!

Eastre / Ostara and the history of the Easter bunny