bashasgarden

After 2 weeks of running around like a squawking chicken, I have come to see I am blissfully happy not working. I have an interview on Wednesday with a major pharmaceutical company, and will do my best at the interview, but if they offer me a job, plan to get my friend, a negotiating genius, to help me craft some negotiating points--part telecommuting is my goal. There is no reason I can think of in this day and age to not do some work by home computer. Reason being, the commute is grueling, and if I can't negotiate that, I will not be willing to do that commute every day. This is a challenge--if they don't offer me a job, I am happily planning a month of painting and relaxing with my husband before a serious job search.

I will be in touch periodically.

Garden news: brilliant red poppies, deep purple irises. My flowers are behaving wonderfully.
We are growing another row of raspberries, and I will go to a neighboring stand to pick strawberries this week, make jam, and put some by the side of the road to sell.

Still have to do some direct seeding, but aside from squashes, cucumbers and melons, and tomatoes, everything is planted and doing well. We have been eating japanese greens, bok choi, spinach, and salad for a full month now. We will be having a lot of potatoes this year, and more flowers than before. For my paintings.

Love to all my friends.
Basha

Well, it is good to remember the previous post, because I LOST MY JOB LAST WEEK!!!!

Now, the great unknown looms. However, I have what i need today, and even more than.

Meditation is the prescription so that I will know what next actions to take or not to take.

I was very interested in the story in the New York Times Magazine section this past Sunday about studying the brain. In particular, the article mentioned the study of meditation and monks who had been practicing it for years. Here is what it said:

" may not come as a great surprise that interaction with the environment can alter our mental architecture. But there is also accumulating evidence that the brain can change autonomously, in response to its own internal signals. Last year, Tibetan Buddhist monks, with the encouragement of the Dalai Lama, submitted to functional magnetic resonance imaging as they practiced ''compassion meditation,'' which is aimed at achieving a mental state of pure loving kindness toward all beings. The brain scans showed only a slight effect in novice meditators. But for monks who had spent more than 10,000 hours in meditation, the differences in brain function were striking. Activity in the left prefrontal cortex, the locus of joy, overwhelmed activity in the right prefrontal cortex, the locus of anxiety. Activity was also heightened in the areas of the brain that direct planned motion, ''as if the monks' brains were itching to go to the aid of those in distress,'' Sharon Begley reported in The Wall Street Journal. All of which suggests, say the scientists who carried out the scans, that ''the resting state of the brain may be altered by long-term meditative practice.''

Which leads me to believe that the more you meditate, the less anxiety you should experience.
This has been my own experience, yet I still manage to avoid meditation for long periods of time. Perhaps there is another payoff I am getting from my anxiety, an unconscious one, no doubt, for who in their "right mind" would choose anxiety over joy. Yet, if meditation delivers much benefit, why would one not do it regularly?

We are settling into Spring, and the grounds look better than they have in weeks. We have new drama in the chicken coop, and it is the way we respond that I know I could not be a farmer who kills animals. We have a bunch of hens I raised a few years ago, and they are still producing enough eggs for our use and to sell a few. We have two roosters, one given to us, and the other is his offspring, or maybe his nephew, sired by his brother who died, I can't remember. And we have one yellow bantam, and one old hen from our first bunch of chicks, eight years ago.

The old hen is partially blind, and her beak has grown long, "long-in-the-tooth" I guess for hens. She has lost weight, seems to be dehydrated at times, and is now the object of merciless pecking from some of the younger hens. I am protective of her, but we have no more room to give her her own coop. But we do let her out of the run to be on her own during the day, and she seems to do okay away from the younger ones. At night, we pick her up and put her on the roost with the others. In the morning we start again, to separate her from the others, as they seem to take on, one by one, the role of killing her. By foiling the killing, stalling, giving her more time, I hope I am building karmic energy for my own old age. It is all I can do for her, and in doing so, she is becoming more meaningful to me, somehow.