Crestfallen

My community of choice would be one that lives up to (or at least conscientiously holds mindfulness about) these principles:

The inherent worth and dignity of every person;

Justice, equity and compassion in human relations;

Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations;

A free and responsible search for truth and meaning;

The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large;

The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all;

Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

Unfortunately, my experience is that the first principle goes out the window as soon as someone feels "wronged" in some way. Then, the inherent worth and dignity of the "OTHER" is discarded in the righteous indignation of the offended party. And nothing seems powerful enough to pull us back on course, back to mindfulness that we are all striving to live by these principles -- that this is what we have in COMMON. Only what divides us, what makes ME better than THEM, is important anymore.

I'm so disappointed. And I'm not exempt from transgressing in the same way. I want to have my wrongs righted, and when I'm whipped into this righteous indignation myself, I forget completely that the OTHER also has inherent worth and dignity.




It makes me want to live on a deserted island, sometimes. It's so much easier to be mindful, alone.

And yet, community is something I value so highly ....

Pondering imponderables.

Can these principles and human nature be reconciled? Or are they ideals unreachable by mere humans?

Reality Check

Eighteen pictures of me (taken with the auto function), superimposed over one another with the collage tool in Picasa. The individual pix are too depressing to post here, but seeing them helped me decide NOT to wear that outfit to work.

No photo journal = heartburn? Really?

I admit that I ate mindlessly, for the most part, yesterday. Not badly, necessarily, just mindlessly.


No photo journal, no accountability?


Well, not quite.


But when I reached what would have been (during a photo-journal day) the end of eating (partly because of mindfulness, partly because it's a pain to pull the camera out and modify the photo journal for a handful of candy!), I kept going. Not a "binge," in the sense of "out of control." But definitely more than I've been indulging for the past 3+ weeks.


And, for that, I suffered. Heartburn. The trigger? Innocent-looking pink and while candies.


I knew better. I did it anyway. This is how we learn.













Photo is used under the creative commons license.

Food Choices - Photo Journal: Day 15

Breakfast was just a quick banana - over-ripe and sweet, but ugly:



Lunch wasn't lunch; it was an attempt to keep me going when my stomach started growling around 10:30 this morning. It was too cold to go outside to get some real food, so I settled on a rock ... I mean a bran muffin from the coffee shop in our building. It tasted awful, but the real reminder about why I don't eat these bran muffins came about an hour later when the heartburn started. Ugh.



Dinner was a choice. Four-cheese ravioli with red pasta sauce, Italian bread and butter, green beans, and a special ravioli filled with butternut squash and Vermont maple syrup. Very good, but the portions were too large for comfort.



And, after too much dinner, I regret now that I did indulge in leftover ice cream cake. I did leave most of the fudge layer on the plate, though.