Many, many thanks to Corinna, Ann, Nitsan and Simon for the Sony Vaio, and to Lyndy for the Canon IXUS. I guess I'm fully equipped now and have no excuses left.
The interesting thing about gifts is that whenever I put them to use I remember the people who bestowed them and a little of my heart goes out to them in continuing gratitude. This is especially poignant with gifts received from friends who are no longer with us: Ken Patchen's Collected Poems which Kit Lean Chung gave me in 1994, the hippopotamus nail brush from Natasha, the books from Ian Waller, Leon Bryce and Larry Koenig. The greatest gift is always respect, and these gifts were just the givers' way of saying that they appreciate what I'm doing with my life.
An interesting principle is that if you are connected to a living teaching, and through the teaching to the source of it all, then you also need to establish a channel for that teaching to pass out of you to others in order to maintain the continuing flow into you from the source – like a siphon. It's the same with energy – if you give then you will receive. The living teaching needs lively sharing spaces for it to properly come alive and express itself. And it has all the attributes of a living entity – character, independence, unpredictability, awkwardness. It can be relied upon to obey the laws of energy, but also to constantly surprise, delight and alarm. John always said that the best way to keep a secret is to tell everyone. It's a bit like refusing to carry anything with you other than your connectedness and your open heart. Walt Whitman. A contributor to Ron Silliman's blog recently suggested that the only people who give anything away for free nowadays are the poets and I would agree, although I would probably define a poet as someone who feels the internal and somehow expresses that feeling rather than someone who necessarily writes poems. A few years ago I read a survey which discovered that more than half of the people it questioned admitted to having been moved to write poetry at least sometime in their life. I guess there's hope for us yet.
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I always think of Natasha when I bang my Tai Chi slippers together to get rid of the dust. She always did it so briskly and purposefully, with a gleam in her eye, like a warrior preparing for battle.
Leon and Wal, and Natasha and Kit were among the people I used to look at wistfully sometimes, thinking they had much longer than me to learn. How wrong we can be.
Pat
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