Positively Glorious!

Well, not really. That title’s more a reflection of my recent trip through the supermarket aisle containing the flashily provocative titles such as “Barack Obama’s Gay Cover-up.”

It’s not really an accurate title, but hey, it got you here.

So, I love visualization. For the past 10+ years, my work has entailed environmental data, and thus various data visualizations have come across my radar over the past decade. I love them all, create when I can, and search for new ones constantly. Still, although I’ve been a scientist for my entire career, I’ve been a writer for my entire life. Thus, no data visualization I can find compares to the textual visualization of Wordle.net. Continue Reading »

Lately, I’ve been feeling a bit stretched– as Bilbo described, I feel like butter spread over too much bread. I know the cause: there’s a notable lack of mindful time in my life right now. I’ve known it for some time– months, in fact. Yet, like a sick man who deals daily with his sickness although it’s dragging him down rather than visit the doctor, I’ve done little to improve it. Why do we do these things to ourselves?

I’ve written about meditation time before, and noted that my life becomes less than ideal without a certain amount of meditation time. Previously in my life, meditation would be a focus, but periodically it drops off. The outcome is that I have swings of positivity, a pendulum of mindfulness. Phases of centered beauty, punctuated by phases of seemingly frenetic loss of balance. Continue Reading »

I saw a wonderful quote by the Zen Buddist Thich Nhat Hanh that is just a beautiful illustration to me right now (emphasis mine):

If you tarnish your perceptions by holding on to suffering that isn’t really there, you create even greater misunderstanding. Reality is neither pleasant nor unpleasant in and of itself. It is only pleasant or unpleasant as experienced by us, through our perceptions. This is not to deny that earthquakes, plagues, wars, old age, sickness, and death exist. But their nature is not suffering. We can limit the impact of these tragedies but never do away with them completely. That would be like wanting to have light without darkness, tallness without shortness, birth without death, one without many. One-sided perceptions like these create our world of suffering. We are like an artist who is frightened by his own drawing of a ghost. Our creations become real to us and even haunt us.

This is a quote and an illustration that I want to hold on to– especially the first and final sentences. How many times do we hold anger or other negative emotions toward another based on something that we think we know? How many times is an argument with a loved one based only on a dialog in our head, rather than on the positive outcome possible or the reality of the loved one’s emotions or motivations? Continue Reading »