Notes from Around the Block- Olive the trees have olives
- Wanda Hickey and the Frog Pond
- A recently discovered DNA thread: forwarding news articles
- A Bride in Blue
- The Gates to a President’s Hell: Water and the IRS
- Marriage in Oxymoronica
- The Present Moment
- If your life were a book
- From the mouths of old babes
- The Atlanta Teachers’ Onion, then and now
-
Tag Archives: mindfulness
Marriage in Oxymoronica
by cheri block I live with a logical man who speaks in logical vocabulary, thinks to himself logically, and espouses logical fact-based opinions often; that is, his posturing takes place about as often as I think intuitively, elliptically, and emotionally. … Continue reading
Tagged intuition, mindfulness, scales, self-discipline, weight-gain
29 Comments
The Present Moment
by cheri block Yoga has taught me to push my mind back to the present moment every time it strays. I find this effort rewarding but challenging. Staying in the present moment is experiential; that is, we guide ourselves into, … Continue reading
Posted in Life, On fiction
Tagged Buddhism, mindfulness, Naturalism, Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage, yoga
19 Comments
If your life were a book
by cheri block We all have a life story. It has a plot and subplots, many settings, and a host of characters. Most of us like to focus on our life theme. We might remember ourselves in this way: My … Continue reading
Vantage Point
by cheri block What would your current frustrations look like from the vantage point of the final days of your life? I read this quotation this morning in a little book of Eastern wisdom. The point, obviously, is that our … Continue reading
Tagged 1st person, death, Eastern wisdom, mindfulness
12 Comments
Lonely Highway 50: Southern Nevada through Utah
by cheri block The dry and endless desolation that I had expected in Nevada never materialized and this morning, as we headed southeast from Ely, Nevada (birthplace of Patricia Nixon) on a sparsely traveled road, we feasted on some of … Continue reading
Posted in Life, My photography
Tagged 1st person, Delta Utah, description, Green River Utah, mindfulness, photography, Scipio Utah, Southern Nevada
14 Comments
A missing hard-boiled egg
by cheri block I hard-boiled a dozen eggs on Tuesday. One broke when I dropped it into the pot, leaving eleven. The water bubbled steadily, changing their nature from fragile to hearty and tearful to solid. Maybe I should take … Continue reading
Does Ivan Ilych live a “real” life?
by cheri block Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych is worth the read. In my paper, How to Live a Real Life, I evaluate Judge Ilych’s life (which is really a death) and his death (which is really a life). … Continue reading
Posted in Education, On fiction, Writing and Teaching
Tagged a real life, mindfulness, Tolstoy
20 Comments
How to live a real life
by cheri block sabraw For the first forty years of my life, I operated on automatic. Whatever needed to be accomplished, I did. Serious problems–financial ruin, death, divorce, betrayal, disease–only occurred in the rich literature I was teaching to my … Continue reading
Posted in Life, People
Tagged 1st person, Criteria for living a meaningful life, ego, mindfulness, Mrs. Sabraw
65 Comments
The Meaning of Life: Can we find it in great literature?
by cheri block sabraw Last year, I visited the marvelous San Francisco Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park. Along with a shockingly gorgeous white crocodile and a room full of butterflies, was a human skull time line, illustrating the … Continue reading
Posted in Education, On fiction
Tagged literature, mindfulness, Scotty McLennan, Stanford
44 Comments
My Fifth Yoga Class
by cheri block I left my yoga class Tuesday evening shaking my head. While the class had been satisfying as I stretched new muscles into forms my body has never experienced before, there had been an annoying interruption. Let me … Continue reading
