After a good night’s sleep I began a chat with “U.” I was passed on to various folks for 2 hours ending with instructions to call the same number I had called the night before. I had a sinking feeling, and then an idea came. When the helper asked the first question, the answer was “yes”, but I said “no.” I did likewise on the next question. And that got me on the line with a live person. That person connected me to the angel I’d been looking for. She ran me through the process of ordering a better phone that was cheaper. Unfortunately the process failed both times.

But this goddess put me on hold assuring me that if the call got dropped she would call me back. She found a “U” store in my area that had the phone that I could buy there. She also recommended that I go instead to the much closer “W” store where all manner of things are sold including phones for the “U” prepaid service. She said if I’d let her know when I’d be at the “W” store, she would call me there on my cell phone to help me through the process of getting it. I didn’t accept that, but marveled at the offer. She explained briefly how to simply change the SIM card over to the new phone.

That may all sound so simple to most folks, but this is my second cell phone and first smartphone. I’m a newbie. Anyway, I got the phone from “W” and got the SIM card changed over and it worked!

Then came the next 7 days where I felt like I was swatting flies turning off notifications from apps which I then deleted. Making a call was much harder with this phone until I learned the new way of things. I love the ease of answering texts with a little keyboard. My battery is at 45% which is better than my flip phone was doing. So I’m happy I made the change. And so far no addictive behavior on my part. And now if the internet goes down again I’ll be able do email or check the internet provider online with my phone.

Recently that charger stopped working. The red light was out permanently and leaving batteries in it for 8 hours did not charge them. I got a new one. I couldn’t find a model similar to the old one, so I bought one of the current models. Things have changed in a quarter century. Electricity gets to this one through an adapter for USB plugged into a wall socket and the other end of the USB cable plugged into the charger. It can charge a single battery (the old one required a pair.) It has a display that shows how much charging has been completed and then shows it full with the word “finish” visible when complete. It takes 1 hour to charge. This was a very nice surprise. I wonder if it will last 23 years. I may not find out since I am currently 79, but I sure do like it. Here’s a picture:

Am I hungry for information? Or something else? I’ve decided to stop what feels like hopping around all these writings and take a breath. Maybe I’ll understand more as I try something different. I looked at what might work:

• I want to read only one main book at a time. I want that to be mostly non-fiction.
• There is always one book that I’m reading for a book group. The books we read are “depth and mysticism” and we read them slowly and meet every two weeks. This kind of reading with the discussions is not a problem for me.
• I read spiritual material in the morning for about a half hour. This could easily be the same book I read for the book group. It could also be another non-fiction book.
• I like to read a bit before going to sleep. Fiction would be good for a short read at night for a half hour or so.

So that’s 3 books, the main book of non-fiction that I read during the day, the fiction for a short read at night, and the book for the book group which is also a short read. That felt calming just thinking about it.

I did this today and I noticed my mind felt clearer. I realized that I didn’t have to sit and figure out what I was going to read. Twice while reading I made a connection with the other book that I had been reading, but had set aside until later. I found it interesting that I did not feel driven to get that other book out and look at exactly what it said about what I was connecting to. It felt like I already had enough of the idea in mind. I felt a sense of freedom that seemed to clear my thinking to focus on what I was actually reading.

This is a start. We’ll see where it goes.

In the morning I had a sort of epiphany. I recalled one of the letters we had read in our book on writings of Hildegard of Bingen. In it Hildegard says that we humans are fragile. Toward the end of the letter she writes of her own fragility and need. Suddenly it dawned on me that I, too, am a fragile human being. My imperfection is a given. And I realized that, yes, I am fragile just like Hildegard! Now, Hildegard was also incredibly gifted, so that phrase “just like Hildegard,” comparing myself to her, shocked me. Am I also gifted? Funny how the awareness of the possibility of being fragile yet gifted had come to me from one of those books I had been complaining about. Surprise!

• Emacs update: I used it for 2 months and got used to the keystrokes I needed. In the end I decided that Obsidian is the program that is best for me to use since I write mostly in Markdown and my notes are stored and easily retrieved there as I write. The same would be true of Emacs if I decided to learn to use it in that way, but I’d rather save the time and trouble and stick with what is working for me. I am satisfied that I did finally give Emacs a go.
• We still have not got the permit to fix our septic system. We got the inspection after 6 weeks and nothing after that. There is an apology on their website for slowness due to the move of the department from here to there and some kind of update, etc. We are doing fine since the system still works as long as we keep water use way down. I see it as preparation for our climate future.

Reading:

My profile on The StoryGraph

Read:

• Practice of the Presence: A Revolutionary Translation by Carmen Acevedo Butcher
• The Rose Code by Kate Quinn - World War II story of three female code breakers at Bletchley Park and the spy they must root out after the war is over. Excellent historical novel. The ebook was 654 pages and I read it in 9 days, so I was engrossed.
• Life, Loss, and Puffins by Catherine Ryan Hyde - YA by an author who gives me stories with heart in troubled situations.
• Christophany: The Fullness of Man by Raimon Panikkar
  
• The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage by Richard Rohr
  
• The Oracle - Peter Cawdron - In WWII a German soldier contacts an strange artifact in Delphi. One of Cawdron’s First Contact series. I marvel at the ideas he comes up with.
• A Rare Benedictine: The Advent of Brother Cadfael by Ellis Peters - 3 short stories introducing Brother Cadfael
• Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon - I loved this story about 18th century Maine, a midwife married to a lumberman, a murder, and greed. It was intriguing and also quite beautiful amid the wickedness.
• A Morbid Taste for Bones (Chronicles of Brother Cadfael #1) - Ellis Peters - I had thought I’d read the whole series, but have decided I’m not all that interested in life in 1120 in an English monastery. I’ll go ahead and read the last book in the series to see how it ends.
• Facing Apocalypse: Climate, Democracy, and Other Last Chances by Catherine Keller - A very interesting look at the Book of Revelation. Keller does what she calls “dreamreading.” This is not an interpretation of the prophecy and it certainly is not predicting the future through it. It’s scholarly work, I’d say. In it I saw how a system present in that time remains present.

Currently Reading:

• Rabbi Jesus by Bruce Chilton
• Selected Writings (Meister Eckhart) editor Oliver Davies
• Why Religion?: A Personal Story by Elaine Pagels
• Religion in the Making by Alfred N. Whitehead

Podcasts:

3 New ones:

Wild Card with Rachel Martin: Once a week, famous guests pull questions from a deck of cards and open up about the kind of stuff we all think about but rarely say out loud.

• Feed: https://feeds.npr.org/510379/podcast.xml

Sources & Methods: National security, unlocked. Each Thursday, host Mary Louise Kelly and a team of NPR correspondents discuss the biggest national security news of the week.

• Feed: https://feeds.npr.org/g-s1-84651/podcast.xml

Radiolab: Hard to describe this one - all sorts of things and really well done. I listened years ago and recently came back.

• Feed: https://feeds.simplecast.com/EmVW7VGp

• I’m typing up this post using Emacs. I’ve decided that practice is the best way to learn the keystrokes I need and maybe I’ll find that it is as wonderful and powerful as avid users say. Thankfully it has a menu at the top that I’ve learned how to get to. Oh, did I mention that I’m using it without a mouse? So, F10 gets me up to the menu bar. Ctrl-x u is Undo. And Ctrl-x Ctrl-c closes it down quickly. These 3 things get me out of trouble which I do get into when learning–anything.
• Fun fact: We discovered that we need a new drain field for our septic system. That means that while we wait for the permit and for the work to be done we have to be very careful about how much water we throw out like in showers and all that kind of stuff where water goes down a drain. You get the picture.

Reading:

My profile on The StoryGraph

Read:

Since my last update I read 5 Sci-Fi novels:

• Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky
  
• Inner Space by Jakub Szamalek - Fantastic story taking place on the ISS. Loved this book which was an English translation.
  
• Dark Beauty by Peter Cawdron - Peter writes first contact novels. He’s prolific and each story I’ve read so far is unique.
  
• The Darkness Between the Stars by Peter Cawdron (Novelette. Short and engrossing)
  
• Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson - Fantastic story. Long trip on a multigenerational ship. So intriguing and great descriptions of life as it might be on such a journey. An ending I don’t think I’ll forget and I usually do forget what I read.

Also read:

• Round the Bend by Nevil Shute - Maybe the mental process of going round the bend isn’t all that bad. This novel makes one wonder. Good story taking place in the Persian Gulf in the days before computers, fast transit, etc. A man fascinated with airplanes goes into business there. He meets up with someone who seems a little off in his thinking yet does great work on his planes. Shute is not big on happy endings it seems. I read On the Beach as a kid. No happy ending there, either.
  
• Illuminations of Hildegard of Bingen by Matthew Fox (Read this for a discussion group.)
  
• The Way of the Mystics by Howard Thurman - He brought in mystics of several religions. The book is an edited transcript of several of Thurman’s talks. I found him giving those talks online and it was wonderful to listen to him. Not everyone’s cup of tea, but I love to hear open-minded people talk about these things.

Currently Reading:

• Christophany: The Fullness of Man by Raimon Panikkar
  
• The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage by Richard Rohr

Podcasts/Music:

• Nothing new to report, at least nothing I remember.

(I finished typing. Now let’s see if it will process into a post. First Ctrl-x Ctrl-s)

Here is what I experienced.

Searching

Searching the files by filename or contents is easily done with Searchmonkey. In fact, I often use it to search files in the Obsidian vault, because it gives me better output than the Obsidian search. In Obsidian it is easier to open the file and read or edit.

Markdown

Writing markdown outside Obsidian is not a problem. I often use ReText to make small edits or to quickly save a note rather than going into Obsidian to do it. I’ll save it on my Desktop while I use the information and then later move it to the Obsidian vault if I want to keep it.

Auto-save

Obsidian saves the file as I write or edit. Other programs require saving, but usually will remind me if I haven’t saved. I like the automatic saving, but there is not a lot of friction involved in saving a file manually - Ctrl S usually does it.

Viewing

Looking at the files in ReText is good enough. I can switch between the markdown to Preview. In Obsidian I can edit while seeing the file in Preview which is easier. Thinking about the ease of Obsidian’s preview, I looked around for other options. I found two very nice ones: Ghostwriter and Remarkable. Seeing how little distraction there is when writing in Remarkable, I realized how much distraction I have in Obsidian. It’s nice when I want these many things handy, but not when I’m needing to focus.

I also found glow, a very nice CLI viewer that will open my editor with a keystroke. This is especially useful when I am working outside the Desktop environment. I’ll mention more on this later.

Convert to HTML

Doing this exercise using ReText reminded me of the need I sometimes have to convert markdown to HTML. When I use Obsidian to do that I get a lot of additional style instead of strictly the necessary HTML that I need. I found that I could view the HTML in ReText and copy it using “Edit/View HTML code” from the menu.

Links

A big plus in Obsidian is its linking capability. There is a rule that links shall not be broken, so if the name or location of a file is changed, all links in the Vault that refer to that file are also changed. Working outside of Obsidian I would need to do a content search for the links to the file and change them manually when I changed a filename or location. That is a big point of friction.

Sense of security

Overall I feel comfortable that I can still use the data stored in the Obsidian vault if I no longer have Obsidian available. In addition, the friction points that I encountered informed me of potential problems with linking and also led to a program that will likely be better for writing without distraction while retaining the advantage of seeing a preview of the output.

Surprising idea

All the above is about working on a Desktop with color, images, a mouse, etc. But something came to my mind that I’m getting a real kick out of and the enjoyment gets me to use it–the black and white screen with the word “login” on it. It’s an old friend.

This post is about using a CLI environment for less distraction while writing. The experiment resulting in some friction when working on Obsidian files outside of the Obsidian program brought the thought of this to mind. It seems that the difficulty of going outside the limits of a single program can indeed release useful ideas. You may want to read Ellane’s article and try her suggestion. Maybe you’ll come up with some crazy ideas, too!

Increasing font size

In Linux I can get a terminal with Ctrl Alt F1. I login and I’ve got bash available to type in commands. The font on this terminal used to be small, but I had made it larger when I enlarged the font on the Grub menu (I have more than one OS on my machine, and they are selected from this menu.) This change in font size also changed the size of font on my terminals. To make this change add this line to /etc/default/grub: GRUB_GFXMODE=640x480

To increase the font size in the terminal in GhostBSD add this to /etc/rc.conf:
allscreens_flags="-f terminus-b32"

Programs

• File manager: nnn - This one is quick and easy to use and allows me to open the file in nano. I also have Midnight Commander if I need it.
  
• Editor: nano - still looking for a better markdown editor for commandline
  
• Browser: lynx
  
• BSSG: Create YAML for website posts and pages; convert markdown to HTML; open server for viewing site on localhost in lynx. There’s a link to the website for this Bash Static Site Generator at the end of this page.
• Terminal multiplexer: tmux - Create panes on the screen in order to use more than one of these programs at the same time

As I get used to the keystrokes, I’m finding I’m more focused writing on the blank screen. I use only the editor to do the writing and then tmux with BSSG and lynx to look at it. If I see a need for a quick edit, I open another pane for nano to edit. When finished, I go back to my Desktop with Ctrl Alt F7 (this function key number varies with different versions of Linux) and take a look at my work again using BSSG to open the server and my regular browser for a view in color with images.

I’ve been thinking about a digital garden. It seems like putting incomplete ideas out more in the open on my website might help me work with them. This idea came to me when I was thinking about “gnawing rats” which is in I’ve Got Time, a current read. Writing is one of these things that keeps bugging me and when this idea came, it felt like a relief. So I tried making the structure for it and I succeeded. But…

One problem is that the structure would take too much time and effort to work with. I immediately thought this whole thing was a bad idea, just a distraction from writing. But…

Later I thought actually it’s a good idea, but poorly implemented. I was trying to make it separate from the site. I think it can easily be just another page or more on the site outside the blog. I already have a couple other pages and this could be like those.

I also realized that my intention is not to have a lot of permanent material in the garden. I see it as being there temporarily for me to work with. There will be a link in navigation to “Garden” and I’ll just put what I want there. It doesn’t have to make much sense to anyone but me, but may gradually get formed into something. We’ll see what shows up there. Currently I don’t know what I’ve got laying around in notes. That’s part of the problem that I want to solve.

Reading:

My profile on The StoryGraph

Read:

• A Refiner’s Fire by Donna Leon. #33 in a series I’ve been reading for years
• The Color Of Abolition by Linda Hirshman. Read along with a small online group. First in a group of books on Abolition.
• Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts by Oliver Burkeman
• Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism by Vanessa Machado De Oliveira
• The Mystery of Mrs. Christie by Marie Benedict. Historical novel about the mysterious period of time Agatha Christie went missing.

Currently Reading:

• Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force that Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War by Jon Grinspan. Reading along with a small online group.
• Becoming Mrs. Lewis by Patti Callahan. A historical novel. Mrs. Lewis is the wife of C.S. Lewis, an author I found early in my life.
• Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas by Elaine Pagels. The beginning of the book goes into some detail about the different groups of Christians in the early days. There were those who followed the teachings that are in this gospel version. I like how Pagels explains the various differences in beliefs.
• Feeding Your Demons: Ancient Wisdom for Resolving Inner Conflict by Tsultrim Allione. Feeding instead of fighting demons. So far I’ve found this quite useful. Catchy title, isn’t it?
• I’ve Got Time: A Zen monk’s guide to a calm, focused and meaningful life by Paul Loomans. I am almost finished reading, but am going to spend more time going through it again. Very sensible and so much that I want to absorb and practice. It doesn’t sound difficult, but it is a different way of approaching tasks than my never ending to do list.
• Illuminations of Hildegard of Bingen by Matthew Fox. Contains several of the paintings from Hildegard’s books with commentary on them.
  
• The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage by Richard Rohr. Reading a chapter a month along with a podcast with Richard Rohr and guests discussing the book.

Podcasts:

• Internet Archive: Future Knowledge: a new podcast about how knowledge is created, shared, and preserved in the digital age.

  • Conversations with authors and experts on topics like digital preservation, the future of copyright, open access, AI, and the policies shaping our information ecosystem.

    Whether you’re an author curious about how to reach readers, a librarian facing new challenges in the digital landscape, or someone who cares about the future of information, Future Knowledge invites you into a timely and essential dialogue.

• The Woman Behind The New Deal : Throughline : NPR : “From Social Security and the minimum wage to exit signs and fire escapes, Frances Perkins transformed how people in the U.S. lived and worked. …how a middle class do-gooder became one of the savviest and most powerful people in American politics — and built the social safety net we have today.”
  • Throughline is probably my favorite podcast. As they say. “Throughline is a time machine. Each episode, we travel beyond the headlines to answer the question,”How did we get here?”
• Welcome to NON-ZERO-SUM GAMES and podcast Non-Zero-Sum James (Podcast RSS: https://pod.link/1810797958.rss): “…exploration of win-win games and how they are essential for a better future. Each week we’ll explore a new aspect of game theory, moral philosophy, ethical economics and artificial intelligence—looking to solve the complex problems we face in our world together.”
  • I’ve been going through the podcast listening and then visiting the link in the show notes to the site. Going through this way in the order the podcasts are presented has made it easier for me to understand the material.

Music:

• Ellle and Toni doing “Mrs. Robinson.” Near the end Toni does a great guitar picking addition that I love. These two put something out at full moon each month. Mrs. Robinson - Elle and Toni - YouTube
• I was remembering a Paul Simon song about drops of rain one morning as I heard the rain falling. Searched and found the name, “Kathy’s Song.” Looked to see if I had it and found an album of music by Eva Cassidy in my collection. I had forgotten how I love her style and voice. I especially like “You Take My Breath Away.” Here are a couple links if you want to hear her:
  • Eva Cassidy - You Take My Breath Away - YouTube
  • Kathy’s Song (Simply Eva) - YouTube

• Changed static website generator from Jekyll to BSSG
  
• Bumped up my walking exercise: 30 seconds faster walking/60 seconds at usual speed. After a few sessions this has become enjoyable.
  
• Our 20-year-old, large self-defrosting freezer started leaking again and we decided to get a new one. We opted for a small 7 cu-ft freezer without self-defrost. We are loving the quiet, the low energy use, and the way it makes us consider if the food we are buying is what we really need for the next little while. There is a lot less room in this. Hardly any frost in it after 2 months, so I won’t have to do that chore as often as I thought I might.
  
• We got new windows for the house. The windows were collecting moisture on the inside and we wanted to get safer ones for hurricanes. Immediately after they were in we noticed that the indoor temperature held more steady in the house and it was quiet. Energy use has gone down with the combination of the freezer and windows.
  
• Started using 3 Blueland cleaning products to reduce plastic packaging. See my post New Cleaning Products for more detail.

Reading:

See My profile on The StoryGraph for more details on the books

Read:

• The Emergent Christ by Ilia Delio
• The Awakening Call by James Finley- Read this with the Depth and Mysticism reading group
• Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls. Great True-Life Novel about the author’s grandmother
• Living Beautifully: with Uncertainty and Change by Pema Chödrön
• Meditations with Meister Eckhart by Matthew Fox
• The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance by Dorothee Soelle
• Meister Eckhart from Whom God Hid Nothing by Meister Eckhart
• Critical Traces by D.L. Keur (#10 in a series)
• Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine by Alan Lightman
• Strength to Love by Martin Luther King, Jr.
• The Sower of Black Field by Katherine Koch (Historical novel. The author came to the archives where I worked to research her relative who was a Passionist priest in Germany in Nazi Germany.)
• Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint by Nadia Bolz-Weber
• Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet by Matthew Fox
• Coercive Power by D.L. Keur (#2 in another series)
• The Mystics Would Like a Word: Six Women Who Met God and Found a Spirituality for Today by Shannon K. Evans - A very different view of 6 mystics. Read this with the Depth and Mysticism reading group

Currently Reading:

• The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage by Richard Rohr
• The Color Of Abolition: How a Printer, a Prophet, and a Contessa Moved a Nation by Linda Hirshman
• Illuminations of Hildegard of Bingen by Matthew Fox - Current book in Reading group
• Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts by Oliver Burkeman
• Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism by Vanessa Machado De Oliveira

Podcasts:

• I’m listening to Season 3 of Everything Belongs where The Tears of Things by Richard Rohr is being discussed by him and others. I’m reading the book along with listening to the podcast. Next issue is Chapter 4.
• Flora Lichtman has been back on Science Friday for awhile now. She made a 10-episode audio series called “The Leap” profiling scientists who were willing to take big risks. This first one is with biochemist Kati Karikó, who did work on mRNA that was needed to develop early COVID-19 vaccines. Her work was dismissed, but she carried on anyway. Great interview. I’m looking forward to the remaining 9 podcasts.

I throw 1 tablet of the laundry detergent in the water for a medium load (2 for a large load). Let it dissolve for awhile and then add the clothes. There appears to be no suds as it washes, but the water gets dirty and the clothes get clean.

To clean the toilet I drop one toilet cleaning tablet in the toilet and it foams for awhile. Then swish and it cleans great.

The dish soap takes a technique new to me, but my mom tells me that she has seen the technique used by many over the years. I used to put water in a dishpan with liquid soap and then immerse the dishes in the water to wash them. Then rinse. With the powder I wet a sponge and sprinkle the soap on it (or on a wet dish). Then I wash each dish with the wet sponge, adding a little water now and then. One sprinkle of the powder washes several dishes. It foams up and cleans that way. Then rinse. It rinses well and leaves it squeaky clean. I noticed right away that the stain on my coffee cup was gone as well as the stain that had been on a spoon for a long time. Meanwhile I’ve also been using up the liquid soap I have to wash in the same manner. I use a lot less soap and water with this method. I definitely like the job the Blueland soap does better than my liquid soap.

Luckily I had recently tried out BSSG which is written in bash, the command-line interpreter I use on Linux. I’m pretty familiar with bash and I liked BSSG. I kept it in the back of my mind, but I really didn’t want to spend time on the process of converting the website over since it would take a bit of editing. Well, the time for the change arrived and I was so happy to have a new website generator handy and a bit familiar. So here we have it. The same stuff on a new look made with something that I don’t think will break so easily.

I apologize if this RSS feed gives those who use it more than just this one new post. I tried to keep the dates the same as the old one, so maybe we’ll be lucky. I only had 20 posts, so it shouldn’t be too bad.

The link to BSSG by Stefano Marinelli is in the footer.

• Signed up for Discussion: Facing Ruthlessness and Ourselves on March 29th
• Buying E-books from Kobo instead of Amazon.
• Getting epubs instead of Kindle format from Library through Overdrive.
• Added a “Reply via Email” link to contacts in footer on blog.

Reading:

My profile on The StoryGraph

Read:

• The Emergent Christ: Exploring the Meaning of Catholic in an Evolutionary Universe by Ilia Delio.
  • This is not an easy read, but for someone like me who has been moving away from the institutional church and searching for connection to Reality, it was very helpful in nudging the mind shift I needed. Teilhard de Chardin’s thinking is included and explained. Evolution is a big part of the discussion and science, love, and God as an open system where change happens is a mix that fits with where I’ve been going with religion for years. That has sometimes been a scary, painful transition and it’s good to read why it’s been happening to me.  I did not understand everything I read, but Delio did get a lot across to me. There are a lot of references in the notes she gave for me to look into.
• The Awakening Call by James Finley.
  • I first read this book nearly 30 years ago. It is one of the few books that I have kept over the years. I decided to read it again, because I remembered that it had profoundly impressed me as did the weekend silent retreat I attended that was led by James Finley. I find that the parts of this book that I grasp are grasped intuitively. There is a resonance with what I see in the words on the page. It’s like I say “Ahhh”. Then there are parts that I fail to grasp. It’s not that it is complicated. I think it is more that this is about intimacy and it’s not something that translates into words, but comes into our understanding in another way.  If the title of the book nudges you, you probably will find the book worthwhile. It enticed me back in the ’90s and it still grabs me. It looks to be hard to find, so I’m glad I kept my copy.
• Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls: A true life novel about the life of Walls’ very resourceful grandmother, Lily. I loved this story of a very tough, resourceful, and determined girl/woman.
• The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance by Dorothee Soelle: This book is so powerful in the truth and is explained in simple, eye-opening terms, descriptions and stories. I was knocked over reading this.
  • “Exploring the religious impulse known as mysticism - the”silent cry” at the heart of all the world’s religions. Mysticism, in the sense of a “longing for God,” has been present in all times, cultures, and religions. But Soelle believes it has never been more important than in this age of materialism and fundamentalism. The antiauthoritarian mystical element in each religion leads to community of free spirits and resistance to the death-dealing aspects of our contemporary culture.”
• Living Beautifully: with Uncertainty and Change by Pema Chödrön
• Meditations with Meister Eckhart by Matthew Fox: Short excerpts from Meister Eckhart’s writings. Something to ponder in a quiet moment which I used just before sleep at night.

Currently Reading:

• Scotus for Dunces: An Introduction to the Subtle Doctor by Mary Beth Ingham
• Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine by Alan Lightman
• Critical Traces by D.L. Keur: Mystery story of a woman and her Search and Rescue Dogs. Book 10 in the series
• Strength to Love by Martin Luther King Jr.
• The Mystics Would Like a Word: Six Women Who Met God and Found a Spirituality for Today by Shannon K. Evans. (For a book reading group.)

Music:

• Heart of Gold - Neil Young cover by Elle & Toni - YouTube Their latest monthly offering. One every full moon…

Boox - E-reader and Note taker

I wanted something to take notes on the non-fiction books I’ve been reading. I was writing notes on paper and then typing them into digital format. I thought about getting a tablet to write notes on instead. Those are expensive, so I first opted for Rocketbook Filler Paper. I actually like this better than paper, because the writing shows up darker and I can reuse the sheet 500 times.

But I still wanted that tablet/E-reader combination. I especially wanted something to read pdfs with. I ended up getting a BOOX Go 10.3 which is monochrome and uses E-ink. It’s big (7” wide, 9.5” long) with nearly the entire area available for reading. I can split the screen to have a note page open with the reading. I can write on pdfs as well. There is no front light which saves power but means I have to read in a lighted area. I usually do that anyway, so it’s not a problem for me.

I installed Cantook and Hoopla easily on the Boox – Cantook for reading .lcpl books from Open Library (pdfs) and Hoopla for some books from my library that aren’t available on Overdrive. Overdrive handles most e-books from my library and provides formats for e-readers.

Kindle use

• I had been using a Kindle to read e-books from the library and samples from Amazon. I had been downloading and converting books I bought to epubs to read on the Kobo and save.
• This month Amazon did away with downloading, so I looked into using Kobo for all books except those of a couple authors I know who are on Kindle Unlimited and therefore can’t provide e-books on another outlet. I’ll still buy and read their books and just do without keeping a copy. Getting library books is as easy on Kobo as it was on Kindle. I can download and save the epub format of e-books I buy from Kobo.

Kobo Plus

I am trying out Kobo Plus, but probably won’t stay with it. It’s similar to Kindle Unlimited though not with the same books. (Authors cannot have their books on both.) Most of the books I found interesting on Kobo Plus are also available on Hoopla which I have with my library. So this is not a good deal for me except that it is more pleasant to read these books on the e-reader than it is on the Hoopla app. Is it worth 7.99 a month? We’ll see.

From Meditations with Meister Eckhart by Matthew Fox, p. 14

I read this short meditation last night before going to sleep. As I drifted off I felt my surroundings and had a realization of a presence in all of it and then in my own being.

It was like I was engulfed at first in what I experienced as living atoms, the very make up of the sheets, blankets, pillows and clothing. And then the living stuff that I am seemed to merge with this living stuff. There was a calm warmth, a gentle joy in this union where I did not disappear, but I felt one with my environment.

I thought of those words, “God is in all things.” The words transformed into an awareness that felt more physical than mental. I had a brief experience that I and all around me are made of the same stuff.

This is something I’ve often thought about with awe–how everything I see is made of these same tiny particles. Now what I felt was more alive than how I had envisioned these particles in the past.

I could easily call this “God” or “Being.”