2006-11-26

A spectacular shirtsleeve day kept a lot of people away from church today – I believe there may have been more people in the chancel, where the choir, clergy, lay chalice bearers and acolytes sit, than in the congregation! I imagine many were called to enjoy outdoor activities in order to take advantage of the rare beauty of the glorious, sunlit day. The weather will break soon, and winter shall be with us, so it was a carpe diem kinda day for a lot of the congregation’s golfers and backyard grillers.

Jim had asked me to pick up fast food for lunch after the church service, but I could not recall what he selected and so called home to find out but there was no answer. The church being only three minutes or so from home, I drove home to find Jim up on the roof! He had decided to put up Christmas lights today, since In this dry, warm weather he could easily walk around on the roof in the back and carefully perch on a piece of foam while he worked on the steeply pitched front part of the roof. What a delightful surprise! Camelot is a sweetly made bungalow and when the roof details are outlined with lights, the illuminated architectural lines make a pretty Christmas picture.

I collected the burritos supreme for which Jim had asked and we enjoyed lunch and stretching together before he went back to the outdoor lighting project. Romi came over while we were finishing lunch in order to work on computer maintenance for us and Carmen arrived just after he did in order to continue her project of typing my poetry into the computer. That’s a big job, as I have had a poetic streak since childhood and from time to time, a poem or song will just form itself and demand to be written down. I keep all my creations, so by now the file is large!

It will be so good to have that body of work ready for me to edit and get up on line. I do not believe I am a good poet, in terms of the kind of literary value that makes verse into true poetry. However when seekers are working to advance their spiritual process, you never know what little thought or phrase will help. Since most of my poetry is metaphysical, I hope to share it on line one day in case it might be of help.

I was grateful to have a day to rest, as I continue to feel very much under the weather. In addition to all the other symptoms, I seem to have picked up a severe anemia which means that even walking up the stairs creates a raised pulse, panting and dizziness. Tomorrow I will contact my GP, Dr. Aboud, as the anemia needs to be corrected.

Gary spent some time teaching me how to use my new cel phone. It is more complex than my previous model, which became obsolete recently, so I had to replace it. So far I have learned how to make a call and how to receive one, and how to send a text message. That is the ABCs of it and most of what I will ever need, but since this phone has a ton of other features, we will explore them at a later teaching session or three. Gary showed me the camera feature and I was just delighted. And there are a host of other buttons and whirligigs to play with. It is too bad that for me this represents a learning curve instead of fun. However, I shall persevere. One day it will have become fun.

We five were joined by Tom F for our meditation, which was a silent one today. It was an excellent talk around the circle and I greatly enjoyed sharing the silence of our meditation with this circle of devoted seekers. After the meditation, Romi offered his “Love Tea” ceremony and we had a good conversation until suppertime. The Gaia Meditation, with Jim offering the prayer at the closing, signaled the end of our visitors’ stay, and Jim and I called his Mom before coming upstairs for a romantic snuggle and bedtime around midnight.

The kittens have nearly grown to adulthood now, at nine months old, but their kittenish behavior continues. Dan D’s latest chicanery is to take bites out of the soft toilet seat I have in the upstairs bathroom. It is beginning to come apart under his none too tender ministrations and I shall have to make a journey to the bed-and-bath section of some nearby shop to replace it and the soap dish which Chloe used to test the theory of gravity one day recently.

They have trained us well. We now have nothing on our coffee table, as they like to lie on it. We have taken up two rugs upon which they have been fond of depositing unfortunate substances. And their tendency to unroll entire rolls of toilet paper has us leaving the TP off the roll and secreted elsewhere. And now the toilet seat is disintegrating. Ah well! Their charms lie elsewhere!