Mandala #26: Awake

Hoping you can see the slideshow I put together this morning after finishing my 26th mandala since beginning this series on September 17, 2014.





Update (July 31, 2017):  Mysteriously, the video of high water at Whatcom Falls that didn't appear in previous days is now suddenly viewable.  I have looked back to that post numerous times in the past month, only to find an empty space where I wanted the video to be. Scroll down to July 7.  It's another new morning here, and I'm getting ready to take a walk to the bridge underneath which the water flows through.

jarvenpa

"outside the windows" (scroll up the page to read about jarvenpa's life)

One of the first blogs I read and commented at was written by a woman whose blog name was jarvenpa.  She lived in a fairly unpopulated area in Northern California, not all that far from the ocean, in an area that I am familiar with and which is dear to me.  It was dear to her, too.

Just now I learned that she died at age 67 of a heart attack a little over two years ago.  Her last blog post was in the winter of that year.  I didn't get any more updates from her on my blog feed but would visit her blog anyway, wondering why she had stopped posting.  It never occurred to me that she had died.  Her posts had become less frequent.  She had many responsibilities.  A full life.

For some reason, today, I went to her blog again.  For some reason, I clicked on the name of her friend, ocean lady, who told a Buddhist story about a turtle.  I had just read Colleen's Turtle Musings.

"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe."
(John Muir)

jarvenpa is dear to me.  She shared her heart with us.  I'm grateful to have known her through blogging and for the connections we all continue to make through our blogs.

"...I’ve stayed up, haunted, through many a long night. And I wouldn’t have missed it. And…well, in the moment, the air is sweet. The bees have gone into their hives for the night. Some I love are dead, some are far from me, but right here the cats are purring, my littlest kid sits with his papa, the dog is smelly and loyal and content, and life goes on. For now, that’s enough."

Age 98! / Alive-Alive O

Ferlinghetti: On Bob Dylan being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature

This morning, I watched above video which was featured on the Doonesbury video archive yesterday. One of the last things my mother mailed to me, a few days before she died suddenly and unexpectedly of a heart attack in December 1994, was a newspaper article about Lawrence Ferlinghetti. My mother wrote poetry until 1966, at which time she stopped writing poetry and took her first watercolor class.  For the rest of her life, she expressed herself through the visual arts.  In the days after she died, I found that she had been reading a well-worn copy of The San Francisco Poets, by David Meltzer.

Haven't been posting much, due to trying to achieve basic survival as a self-employed medical transcriptionist.

Although I was making some headway, that all changed (for me and thousands of those of us who make a living as medical transcriptionists) on July 27 when the worldwide computer virus, first affecting the Ukraine, took down the speech recognition software provided by Nuance Communications, used by 86% of hospitals in the United States.  Nuance also hires transcriptionists to work at home for poverty wages for many of these hospitals.

Many of us who barely make a living doing this challenging and emotionally rewarding work that is at the bottom rung of the medical profession were without work for a full week.  Although Nuance's speech recognition software is still unavailable to us, many of us who are independent contractors have been hastily retrained on clunky back-up software that has not been used for years.  We are back to transcribing every word that is dictated.

We are faced with a tremendous backlog of medical dictation that must be transcribed in a way that takes up to twice a long as with speech recognition and is the source of repetitive motion injuries.

And yet, it's been a beautiful summer so far.  Sunny, breezy.  Although I have not had the energy for much walking or my yoga practice, I have made sure to spend time with friends when I am not working.

Many of the current events in the world are disheartening but we are:

Saved by beauty:

Holding steady.
















Perseverance furthers.  Have not been able to post videos on my blog for some time, but today I was successful.  This is from one of my rare walks in the past week or two.  High water at Whatcom Falls
(Hmmm ... the video shows up here on the editing page but not in Preview).  Perseverance furthers.

Saved by music:



Hope to have time soon to catch up on your blogs.