Travis Eneix

Came across a remarkable article today, Giving Something Each Day May Keep the Doctor Away.  The piece is about the origins of the website (and challenge), 29gifts.org.  It’s a noble effort and a good reminder of what’s important in life, especially in this age of Consumerism.  Check it out, I think it will put a smile on your face (which is my official gift on the first day of my taking up the challenge.)

This comes at a particularly synchronistic time for me.  I am headed to Burning Man this weekend, to experience that mad atmosphere of engaged participation and gifting economy once again.  Almost feels like cheating since, for at least ten of the days of this challenge for me, I will have no choice but to give things away every day, and likely many times a day.

Cheers!

You have to love the British!  There’s a big ta-do over an offensive depiction of the Buddha in a Norwich gallery, which you can read about here.

Whether you think the piece is offensive or not, I find it more telling that the complaints were about the Buddha with a fruity phallus, and not the, “Christ crucified on the back of a flying bomber and Hindu god Ganesh sitting beneath a Nazi helmet.”  Not sure what that says about the level of concern for Buddha’s image, as opposed to Christ and Ganesh, for our modern age, but I do think it’s interesting.

Cheers!

I am visiting New York city for the mostly annual visit to my wife’s family. We are having a grand time. I love this town! As we were headed to Chinatown from the Upper East side o the subway, I was approached by one Garth Wolkoff. Garth is an English teacher and a writer, who has a blog dedicated to what New Yorkers are reading on the subway. I think the fact that my wife, and her Mom, are both New Yorkers kind of grandfathered me into being qualified to be an item on the blog. Also, the fact that Garth used to live in my tow, San Francisco, probably helped. You can read the entry, One Taste, over at undergroundreads.blogspot.com. Enjoy!

Enlightenment and epiphanies can show up in some pretty strange ways. The Buddha found it under a Boddhi tree, Nelson Mandela in prison and spiritual guru Ram Dass through psychedelic drugs. Little did I know, mine would arrive in the form of a hard-shelled reptile simply trying to cross the road — a turtle.

Shhhh, I’m going to tell you a secret.  One of my wife’s nicknames for me is turtle.  I’m not going to tell you why, but it is with great joy that I read this piece over at HelpOthers.org - A Turtle Who Taught Me Kindness.  Enjoy!

One of the websites I enjoy is ThinkArete.com by Brian Johnson, the founder of Zaadz.com.  Brian just added audio recordings to his Big Ideas section.  Big Ideas are little gems that Brian has pulled from a vast array of teachers, sages, and thinkers.  I hope you enjoy the offerings collected there half as much as I do.

As a sample -

“If anything is worth doing, do it with all your heart.”

~ Buddha, 6th century bce Indian mystic and founder of Buddhism from The Dhammapada

Cheers!