I had lunch yesterday with my Yoga teacher Natasha at a great Thai restaurant in Orangeville called Thai For You. I recommend the food, services and prices at the restaurant and I recommend Natasha as a yoga teacher. I've been to many yoga sessions with many teachers in the past and there are good ones and really bad ones. Natasha measures up with some of the best. She calls her business Yogalaya.

They're so tiny, I have never found a nest, but I love hummingbirds and encourage them to visit between May and September. This person found a nest and took pictures of the growth of the young ones. These eggs are only 13mm (1/2") long.

Image credit: Velpics
Link.

Guidelines for what I want this blog to be and not to be. It is:

• about my interests - what they are and why they matter to me. Since my interests are often changing, the blog can help me define who I am right now.
• pretty personal. It's not an extension of my work, and not about selling myself. It's about being myself, expressing myself. But there will be bleedthroughs. It can't be helped.
• not about being popular - I don't need anyone to read it. But if they do, I hope they can get something from it.
• a place to share tidbits I have come across or come up with through my day. Anything that inspires or interests me. I used to put them up on my website but there were too many of them.
• a repository for my creativity - projects I'm working on that I might want a friend to see, drawings I have done, recordings I have made, pictures I have taken, poems or prose.
• a place to organize my thoughts and put reminders.
• going to redefine itself as I go along. I started the blog last year, made a few posts and then found it too much bother. But that was because I was trying to use it as an extension of my work. I hope this use for it will work better.

A few moments later, I was given the framework I asked for. It was so perfect and I was so grateful. The healing sessions went quickly and beautifully.

As I walked back to the house, I felt wonderful - like I'd been handed a little miracle. I realized that while my doubts might return, I knew an inner shift had taken place and they would never have the same power.

The last thing I expected to see as I walked through the back yard was a rainbow. I have lived here for 33 years and never before have I seen a rainbow in that part of the sky or at this time of day.

It was beauty.

Appreciation doesn't ask anything of life. It just enjoys it.

I've seen the crows throw a few peanuts (in the shell) back into their throats so they can pick up more to carry away. But until tonight I've never seen a blue jay do the same thing. I had four peanuts and two jays came calling. The first took a peanut and flew off. The second did the same. Then the first came back, tossed back the smaller of the two remaining nuts, took the last in its beak and flew off. The second one came back expecting to find the remaining peanut. It hopped from one spot to the next looking to see if it had fallen beside the tree. It was gone.

I am a twin. For my whole life, I have been the edgy one, not the compliant one. I was the first to get into trouble and the first to lie about it. But I was born edgy. I don't know what karma I brought with me when I was born, but I found it hard to accept unfairness, and then adding to that was the unfairness that others didn't worry about how unfair things were. Like I said, I was born edgy.

While sick in bed with a cold the other day, I watched one of those reality shows about a big family. One of the kids reminded me of me when I was a kid. She struggled to be generous when her brother cut himself in on the game that she and her sister were playing. Her sister was fine with the change in game. But she was not. I saw the brother's innocent arrogance that he could do whatever he wanted and I saw the girl's struggle with the unfairness of that reality.

I wanted to take that girl's hand and reassure her. I wanted to tell her that her struggle doesn't make her flawed any more than being a girl makes her flawed. I wanted to reward her for the tremendous effort it had to take to be kind to her brother. It's hard when we are judged by who we are, and not by what we do.

I thought the blackberry season was finished. It was a poor crop since the weather was cool and wet, but one afternoon last week, I caught a glimpse of a single late berry glistening in the angled sun. Wild blackberries taste sweet. This one was even sweeter because it was unexpected. Yum.

Like a message in a bottle, a slip of paper fell out of the old sci-fi paperback I picked up at a used book store. Until then, the book seemed impersonal. But now, I know that someone named Peter read this book. He also bought a couple of small items from a hardware store in Toronto, 50 miles away on December 29, 1988 and charged them to his credit card.
Hello Peter, wherever you are. I wonder if you enjoyed the book as much as I am enjoying it now?