Mindfulness is a big deal in today’s culture. Businesses such as Apple, sports figures such as basketball player Kobe Bryant, and the popular press such as Time magazine have all given it their stamp of approval. Governments are spending hundreds of millions of dollars researching it, and it has become a billion dollar a year business. In fact, Apple chose a mindfulness app as their app of the year for 2017. But…
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image by SnoCountry
Disoriented
I began skiing in my early twenties at the old Blue Ridge Ski area in SoCal, and then thought that our California Concrete—heavy, icy, and packed—was normal. Then I moved to Taos and discovered powder. Totally different than California Concrete: so dry you could hardly pack it into a snowball, so soft you’d sink a foot deep as your skis compressed the fluffy cotton. One night Taos got inundated with over four feet of snow so I grabbed my ski gear and headed up the mountain.I exulted in unweighting and making S turns, until…
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Tim Riter, age 45
Gear Up!
I’ve played a lot of football. Pickup tackle games in HS and college and later, wearing just T shirts and shorts. Intramural in college, even several seasons in a competitive flag league in my mid 50s. But the pic above depicts a different way to play football. In my mid 40s, Temecula had the Over the Hill Pigskin Shoot Out, where guys over 30 strapped on pads and played for charity. The pic above was the first game—and the first time I…
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“Water into Wine” by Leilani Strong Smith
Turbulent Transformations
A fellow teaching compatriot, Leilani Strong Smith, has crafted a new skill since we both left the school—painting. That’s her “Water into Wine” above. I easily saw the blue of water, at the top right, and the red of wine at the bottom left, and the turbulent mixing of the two in the center. But she neither intended nor noticed the …
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image by scroll.in
A Challenge
Graham Staines left his Australian homeland in 1965 to minister to the least in India—the lepers and tribal poor. His goal: to demonstrate God’s love. The Least of These, a film based on his life, premiered this week: showing him tending the wounds of lepers, traveling to jungle camps. Even more, he contributed to translating the New Testament into the Ho language of India, and proofread the entire text. He met Jesus often along the way, since …
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Past Wounds
Wounds. We all have them. Deep ones that we can’t seem to get over. Not really unexpected in a world of fallen people. Wounds that stick and never fully heal. Wounds that try to tell us something about us. The wounds may come from friends or family members or anyone that touches our world. They may come from our own bad decisions that shatter our lives (see last week’s post). And they arrive by chance. Life happens. Some heal with time, but many persist. And often, the closer the wounder, the deeper the wound. But…
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image by Pass My Exams
Shattered
Sheila and I have built a tradition of a day trip on our birthdays. In May, we usually hit the beach or coast. For her. For January, I choose the mountains, usually wherever we get the most snow. This year, four days of storms preceded the day, but the storms stayed in liquid form. So between Big Bear and Julian and Idyllwild, I went with the latter. The Cranston Fire devastated the region last summer so I wanted to discover the extent of the damage, hit the local candy store and our favorite mountain restaurant. South of town…
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image by silvertoneworld
Rock Star!
The guitar in that pic above was to be my ticket to fame and fortune. Determined to become the next big rock star, back in high school I bought a guitar. A Sears Silvertone, black with an orange starburst . Pretty cheap, about $25. My good friend Ken and I began practicing, and the first obstacle emerged. I couldn’t tune the blasted instrument! Oh, I knew where to press the strings and frets to match the tones of adjacent strings, but my ear couldn’t hear the differences. A minor obstacle, but…
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