2007-08-06

As the heat soared to 101 F, Jim went out to mow and garden after Morning Offering while I came upstairs to my bower office to pursue finalizing my two speeches for the L/L Research Gathering on Mackinac Island. Stopping only for lunch, I finished the work on the Inner Shift speech and then edited down the quotes I had collected in preparing the speech until every one really popped. Then I sent them to Gary for reformatting – my practice when collecting quotes for an article or speech is to separate them by dotted lines, for the eyes’ easy viewing of each one.

Gary was able to remove all the dotted lines except one, and that one little line really stumped him for a while. Eventually, he says, he was able to remove it using “Borders and Shading” choices.

Tomorrow I shall finalize the Outer Shift speech and pare down the quotes I collected in order to prepare that speech from a whopping 36 pages to some saner length. My idea with both sets of quotes is to offer the attendees a handout which gives them more than my speech can, in terms of quotations that delve into the subject from various angles.

I did a bit of e-mail before I left the office for the day. I sent a thank you note to Melissa for the picnic. She really knocked herself out getting everything more than ready and made it a wonderful occasion and I wanted to express my gratitude. I also wrote Gary requesting that he create a letter for all of our local meditation group, inviting them to our new season of public meetings, starting the second Saturday in September. We will be awash in Homecoming on the first Saturday.

And I let Carmen know that Mick has asked for solitude next weekend, since Gary and I will both be at Mackinac Island. Mick will be alone in the house for the first time in years and wants to take advantage of that and settle into some deep alone-time. She and Romi often visit on Saturday to volunteer and then have a nice meal and some conversation with us. I wanted to call that off for this one day. Ro will still be in Czeska, so I do not have to notify him!

Gary had the very good idea of preparing a little gift for Bob, the co-producer of the Mackinac Island L/L Research Gathering. He has gone to immense trouble to be sure that I am comfortable there, getting a hospital bed organized so I can sleep comfortably at the Grand Hotel, finding a comfy chair for me and on and on. we settled on giving him one of my song-and-story tapes and a cute thank-you card. I spent some time decorating the envelope. It is a nice little gift for a fine man.

Mick and I did our mat exercises and bathed before resting back into the evening’s special TV fare: a block of Star Trek Enterprise episodes. It was a heavenly, quiet, restorative evening. I offered the prayer at the end of the Gaia Meditation and we turned out the lights at 11 PM.