Writing Reality

  A few first things that I do every morning are stretches, yoga, meditation and five days per week I do some Qi Gong. All that aside from my usual self-care, household chores and prayers which are constant. To the point a priest in my office said to me, “You’re the most prayerful person I know.” I remarked, “You know what God says when I pray?” He wagged his head ‘no’. I continued, “Oh my Me! It’s her again.” We laughed. Last week I called one of my former military superiors, it was minus 37 degrees not including the windchill factor she’d remarked. She stated, “Jody, it was so cold as I was pumping gas and the wind picked up a little. I was wearing long johns, regular pants over them and snow pants over that and I felt the cold go right through me as I set the pump. I got into my car and waited as the gas pumped into my car.” I remarked, “Well, you were around metal, plastic and the ground was either cement or macadam in a shaded area, right?” She concurred. We talked about...

  I've been watching professional football since about end of 1966. Yeah me, I was once a 4-year-old white girl in suburbia from a blue-collar, lower middle class family with two parents and eventually being the middle of two siblings.  One parent was a white, idealistic, functional alcoholic, or so he'd lead you to believe that he was idealistic. The other a schizophrenic, bipolar- alcoholic-waiting in the wings, trying her best to run from evil, yet trashing the very thing she should protect, and fight for. Soon self-medication would catch up to her. And disabilities of denial would give him everlasting freedom and a delayed death, to enjoy money we didn't see. The lies a white man tells himself to protect anyone knowing what is deep inside their soul. This all brings me to the reality of how I had become a patriot or maybe I’m not. Yeah, that thing, ‘a patriot’. The thing that haunts some of us Americans in our idealistic sober minds no matter what. Trust me, most of...

  I’d been practicing Qi Gong since November 1998.1 I started with a Daoist Priest, a Daoshi.2 I worked with him every week for a minimum of 30 minutes over a six-month period. And I practiced Qi Gong everyday during that time from 30 minutes to six hours every day on my own. Yes, I worked full-time and as much as 80 hours in a week, but I made the time for that practice and my husband and my athletic long-distance career as well. It was prior to having children. As 1999 rolled along I practiced the meditation/movements of Qi Gong less. I would practice ten minutes to forty minutes four days per week near the end of 1999. Then I began to keep to 5-10 minutes per day 4-5 days per week. I maintained some semblance of Qi Gong practice over the years till about 2017 on my own even if for only a few days a week for 5-15 minutes each practice. Then it was once a week, as I’d become more distracted with family, business and the like. I’d gone back to yoga practices at home and stretching ...

  As one of our children is still home from a college winter break, I’d wondered how much of the news was she taking in? Then I thought if she had, what was she hearing? And how did she process it? As a mom who feels much older than dirt, based on my living more than most. My soul feels tired. I look at people like Bernie Sanders and wonder, how the hell does he do it? All that energy he expends. It’s simply amazing. I marvel at it because he’s about twenty years my senior, and I cannot imagine having that much vim and vigor at that age, much less my still being alive at his age now. I’d had a ton of energy for a majority of my six plus decades. Yet life in its seemingly unusual combination of events and experiences thrown my way has helped reduce that energy. Even as much as I have forged ahead to gain energy through diet, exercise, meditation, and entering a couple of new fields of work in the last few years. One energized me and the other tore me down. However, that energy n...

  As I watch “Walk for Peace” on social media videos some are live; some pre-recorded. I watch them daily, later in the day. I watch Aloka, the Peace dog in his videos with them as well. As I watch some of the live footage or footage taken just an hour or so prior tom my viewing my stomach quivers. Yes, it quivers. My stomach shakes as if it were crying. And then I feel the depth of the desire for peace. I watch the faces of the crowds watching the Monk and Aloka do their “Walk for Peace”. There’s this feeling of odd connectivity that I feel with the people witnessing in person the “Walk for Peace”. Then my stomach quivers even more. They want what I want. We have something in common. That something in common is needed and we hope it’s not too late to agree on that. Those moments, there are no political parties. Or so it appears. I ask myself, “What percentage of people feel the quiver who are watching?’ I know those that have not scrolled past such videos or have gathered in p...

  Photography by Melody Reed My fourth new running watch arrived a week ago. I couldn’t wait to set it up and use it in the next day’s run. I know the mileage of my routes; however, nothing like having all the information of pulse and what-not arrive onto your app on your phone when you’ve finished. I am a little paranoid. So, at the very least I write down the mileage for the run and for the day. And if the run was comprised of a speed drill or hill drill during or at the end of it. This is for my balancing hard running and fatigue as to not overdo and end up sick or injured. Been there done that over the past nearly 50 years of running. My emphasis here in the writing is to bring attention to what someone could expect from something so fascinating and nearly seeming so free as the Fitbit app. That is, keeping track of your logged in exercises, mileage and so forth on a gadget in place of what I’d been doing at great length in logbooks, the computer printouts I’d devised and t...

  Peace and Persistence work. No, America is not at sleep. Not everyone is as vigilante as an American; however, our appearance of complacency is not the truth. I’ll venture out to say a good 40% of us living in the United States are terribly unaware for a variety of reasons. Yet that number of unaware Americans is decreasing. This crisis that our current administration has created is snapping our stiff, provincial necks all the way around. It’s forcing us to witness and admit that we have to be not just concerned but involved in our understanding of our country’s politics and the rest of the world’s as well. Yes, we’ve been overwhelmed, some of us all our lives. We get a respite from one thing one week and then Bam! Something else occurs in our seemingly significant lives. But remember, it’s our lives. Not someone else’s. It is hard to step out of our living in a sometimes happy yet contentious living of life. But that is life. The only difference between our present-day human b...