Brain Development and Technology

I admire the way experts speak for TED Talks. I always learn something.

This is a 16-minute video presented by Dr. Dimitri Christakis, a Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Washington who started out as a pediatrician, became a researcher of early childhood behavior and thinking because he became a parent! It seems like parenthood brings forth interest in child development because we want the best for our children.

Through the ages, parents always try to nurture and bring up their children to the best of their abilities. Culture, socioeconomics, and the parents' perspectives have always guided and limited these efforts. As culture changes, we may not even see choices about ways to engage or not. That's the big question with technology, which occupies and enhances modern life--like right now, with me blogging!

Technology seems mostly beneficial, but is it? I am always reminded of Walter Wink saying that the principalities and powers are composed of goodness and wrongs, and need to be redeemed. I think that applies to people and everything else, because nothing is totally good or completely bad and everything could/should be improved. And I am starting to look at the use of technology in my life--How much time is superficially occupied or is it used productively? Both/and. . . . . .

Now here is the video, which I would have appreciated when I was the parent of young children, especially because he talks about the development of the brain, even showing how it grows dramatically until we're in our 20's AND reduces after the 50's and 60's (even though I am learning to play the piano!).

Blog Action Day: Oct. 16, 2013

Let us all support and speak/write about HUMAN RIGHTS on October 16, 2013:

Excellent Soup Recipe!

I had this wonderfully delicious soup at the Finn Bakery in Magnolia Village, in Seattle, last week:

Spicy Chickpea and Butternut Squash Soup

3 Tbsp. olive oil

1 large Spanish onion, peeled and diced

4 carrots, peeled and sliced

½ cup diced celery

4 cloves garlic, minced

1 lb. butternut squash, peeled and diced into chunks

2 cups (16 oz.) canned diced tomatoes

2 cups (16 oz.) canned chickpeas, rinsed and drained

12 cups vegetable stock

2 cups tomato juice

½ cup soy sauce

¼ cup freshly squeezed lime juice

1 Tbsp. ground ginger

1 Tbsp. ground coriander

1 cup flaked coconut

½ cup packed brown sugar

1 can (14 oz.) coconut milk

1 tsp. minced Scotch bonnet chile pepper*

½ bunch fresh cilantro leaves, chopped

Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste

Heat stockpot over medium-high heat. Add the olive oil, onion, carrots, celery, and garlic. Saute for 10 minutes.

Add the butternut squash and sauté an additional 5 minutes.

Add the tomatoes, chickpeas, stock, tomato juice, soy sauce, lime juice, ginger, coriander, coconut, and brown sugar. Bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to medium and simmer until the squash is tender, 35-40 minutes.

Remove from the heat and add the coconut milk, chile pepper, cilantro, salt, and pepper.

Makes 12 servings.

*Scotch bonnet chile peppers are loaded with heat and an exotic flavor and aroma. A close cousin is the habanero pepper. You may substitute bottled habanero hot sauce (available at supermarkets and Caribbean specialty shops) if you cannot find fresh Scotch bonnet peppers.

Druker, Marjorie and Silverstein, Clara. New England Soup Factory Cookbook. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, Inc., 2007. 128-129.

My Parents' House

In this blog post from a few days ago, I tried to put a picture of my parents' house from my Iphone, but it was lost in transit. Now I am getting pictures from my camera of the house my parents and/or I owned from 1965 to 2013 in Bellingham, WA:

Going Home!

Today I am flying back to Texas. I'll go from Seattle to San Antonio. Chuck will meet me at the San Antonio Airport and drive me home to Corpus Christi on Sunday night.

It is always nice to go home.

Big Changes

"Sometimes God's love is experienced not only as peaceful creativeness, but as violent breakthrough, overcoming blockages and bringing to birth new realities."

Vacek, Edward Collins. Love, Human and Divine: The Heart of Christian Ethics. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1994. 59.

Chuck and I had a "violent breakthrough" in our lives in the last few weeks when I decided that I would sell my parents' house in Bellingham, WA. I have owned it since my father died in 2002 and renters have been in it off and on since then.

Once a drug dealer was renting it, which we only learned much later when the next door neighbor (who is a police officer) informed us of strange activities, and we had to evict him. Since it was built in 1951, it has recently developed major problems with its infrastructure, which we have tried to mend.

After the decision to sell, things moved more quickly than anyone could ever imagine, because someone bid on the house less than 24 hours after it was listed. There wasn't even a "for sale" sign in the front yard yet.

It turns out that the buyer had been looking for a new house to move into for 3-4 months. When she saw the house and the backyard, she was in love with it all. I was greatly touched that she could see the remnants of my mother's gardens (including a Japanese garden), which were left when she died in 1992. It seemed like the buyer would love this property, which had been sorely lacking in the last 11 years.

Selling the house means we won't move there from Texas. Chuck and I had had half-baked dreams of living there in the summers and the rest of the year in Corpus Christi, TX. That never materialized because a house should not be empty for so many months, and it didn't seem possible to rent it for just a specified number of months rather than years.

I did not realize the burden the house had been for me until it sold. Suddenly, I felt a big weight lifted from my shoulders--something I had not even been aware of.

It also opened up possibilities for Chuck and me that did not appear to us previously--buying a condo with a water view! A condo could be left more safely for months at a time.



We feel movement and possibilities in the future, while we have felt stuck for years.

Love

"The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them."

--Thomas Merton

Not God

"For silence is not God;
nor speaking is not God;
fasting is not God;
aloneness is not God,
nor company is not God;
nor yet or all of such opposites.

He is hid between them, and
may not be found by any work of your soul,
but only by love of your heart." (6)

Englert, Robert W. "Scattering in the Works of the Author of the Cloud of Unknowing." Contemplative Review, Spring 1983, 1-8.

( I found this quote while reading the bound journals at Lebh Shomea in December 2006.)

You Keep Us

You keep us loving.
You, the God whose name is love,
want us to be like you--
to love the loveless and the unlovely and the unlovable;
and most difficult of all, to love ourselves.
So thank you. . . for the loving time.

And in all this, you keep us,
through hard questions with no easy answers;
through failing where we hoped to succeed
and making an impact when we felt we were uselss;
through the patience and the dreams and the love of others;
and through Jesus Christ and his Spirit,
you keep us.
So thank you . . . for the keeping time,
and for now, and for ever. Amen.

~~Iona Community, Scotland

Soul Weavings: A Gathering of Women's Prayers. Ed. Lyn Klug.  Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1996.18.

Seattle!

The last leg of our trip will be spent in Seattle. We'll stay with Terry and Dennis, who live on Magnolia Hill. Chuck is going back to Texas on Thursday, and I am flying there on Sunday. There are high school friends to visit, daughters to see, and familiar places to enjoy.

When Chuck and I were first married we lived in Seattle. He painted houses and I had a long-term substitute teaching job, as requested by my supervising teacher from my student teaching.

Let Us Pray

"Overwhelm us with your beauty, 

Lord and make us to shine like the stars."

Common Prayer: A Liturgy For Ordinary Radicals

Keep Our Questions Alive!

It seems to me Lord
that we search much too desperately for answers,
when a good question holds as much grace as an answer.
Jesus,
you are the Great Questioner.
Keep our questions alive,
that we may always be seekers rather than settlers.
Guard us well from the sin of settling in
with our answers hugged to our breasts.
Make of us a wondering, far-sighted, questioning, restless people
And give us the feet of pilgrims on this journey unfinished.

~~Macrina Wiederkehr

Friday Five: Habits

The weekly church reading group I facilitate has just finished reading and discussing The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg. It is a fascinating book with research about business and people's habits or routines. The author bases much of his book on recent brain research.

Although this is a secular book, our discussions led to greater awareness of God and of mindfulness in our lives. After all, spiritual disciplines are to help us form habits that will foster greater recognition of and living in the ways of  God.

The author writes, "Some habits yield easily to analysis and influence. Others are more complex and obstinate, and require prolonged study. And for others, change is a process that never fully concludes." (276)

So for this Friday Five, let us look at our habits, both personal and/or in our organizations:

1. Good habit(s)? 
Sending birthday cards to friends and family. I used to write long letters to many people, but now I still enjoy sending notes.

2. Habit(s) you wish to change, add, or delete? Do you struggle with this?
I would like to get back to daily centering prayer. I once was in the routine for three straight months, daily. But I've let it slide. One way to help me is to use the timing app on my Iphone, Equanimity.It has a timer that can be set anywhere between 1 minute and 12 hours!!

3. Tell a success story about one of your habits.
When I started reading The Power of Habit book back in May, I began to walk at a shopping mall each morning. I've kept that up, even before church on Sundays. The air conditioned space allows me to walk in comfort, even though the stores don't provide the natural scenery I prefer, though I don't want to be outside in the heat and humidity (and sunshine) of Corpus Christi, TX. My walking has increased in pace and distance, plus I pray much of the time I am walking.

4. Have you noticed different habits or routines that are in churches or where you work?
When I was a teacher before I had children, I found that individualized instruction was allowed when I taught in Oregon, but when I moved to TX, the teachers for each grade would meet daily to plan curricula so it would be the same. 

I also notice the atmosphere of openness and opportunity for questions at my current church, which was not as evident at my former one.

5. What would you like to become a practice at your present workplace?
Other forms of prayer times that meet on a regular basis, instead of only Christ Centered Prayer sessions, which are attended by the same few people.

Bellingham, WA!

We will fly from Portland to Bellingham today, while generous friends Terry and Dennis will drive back to Seattle in their car. Even though I didn't move to Bellingham until high school, I consider that both Chuck and I grew up there.

Chuck's parents are living in a senior living complex in Bellingham, and we are staying in a little room there for our three day/night visit.

The Right Time

"As we know, revelation itself is progressive, not because God chooses to withhold His truth, but because personal development is necessary if truth is to be received as true." (12)

Beha, Marie. "Formation for Contemplative, Part 2." Contemplative Review, Winter 1980, 8-18.

(I found this in the library at Lebh Shomea in the bound journals way up on the third floor of the mansion back in December 2006).

Same Journey, Different Paths

"Because we are made in God's image, therefore we share in his mystery. If we all have different fingerprints, it is not so surprising that we should also have our own unique way of knowing and understanding God. We are all making the same journey, but the route is different for each and we have to discover it in freedom."

Hughes, Gerard W. God of Surprises. NY: Paulist Press, 1985. 33.

Be Open!

I need to remember this on our vacation, especially with my perceptions of how people are acting towards me.

Portland, Oregon!

Today we will arrive in Portland, Oregon. Our good friends from Seattle, Terry and Dennis, will meet us at the airport. They will travel with us for the next four nights and days in Oregon.

Our Vacation So Far

Since I am at a desktop Apple computer, I can easily blog. So I will quickly write about our vacation so far:

Las Vegas:

• Chuck and I flew to Las Vegas from San Antonio on Wednesday. We left Corpus Christi at 7 am to get to the airport in time, though we were early enough to buy sandwiches at Whole Foods to eat on the plane.
• Two nights in Las Vegas. We are "foodies" and so loved the restaurants we went to there. The first night we paid more for taxis than for our meal at a faraway spot I found on TripAdvisor called Off the Strip. Fantastic and reasonably priced meals had us wishing we could eat there frequently. 
• The main reason we came to Las Vegas was to see the Cirque de Soleil show of the Beatles Love.  We enjoyed it so much that we would even go to Las Vegas again to see it, and we didn't like the smoke-filled casinos. The show was beyond our expectations--we are Baby Boomers, after all!
• Since Chuck and I don't smoke, gamble or drink (much), Las Vegas is not really "our" town. To get to the elevators to our room, we always had to walk through all the slot machines and smoke. 
• One good thing is I got up early both mornings and walked for an hour along the Strip. It was fun to see all the buildings with few people around.
• I was disappointed by the lack of recycling depositories on the streets, because bottles of water were sold on every street overpass. People were drinking all the time in the heat, and all those plastic bottles were thrown in the trash or on the sidewalks. (On my early morning walks, I observed people cleaning all the streets and sidewalks.)

Salt Lake City:

• We flew here on Friday, with MJ picking us up at the airport. There was the quickest delivery of luggage at the terminal, which impressed us with Salt Lake City.
• MJ was kind about ferrying us around today to the Farmers' Market, the Salt Lake City Library, and to the card stores I love to frequent. 
• We bought fresh nectarines and raspberries that are so flavorful that we are sad to think of the more tasteless fruit we've become accustomed to in the stores in south TX. The raspberries remind me of the ones we picked in my parents' backyard in Bellingham, WA.
• Next to the Salt Lake City Library is The Leonardo Museum, so went and saw their current exhibit from Australia about the 101 most important inventions of the world.  One of the major inventions was the creations of Legos! I noticed that the refrigerator was invented in 1922, which was the year my dad was born; when he was a teenager in Arkansas, he delivered cubes of ice for ice boxes.
• We had a light meal tonight so that we could have dessert! Chuck had molten chocolate cake; MJ and I had salted caramel gelato between toffee chunk cookies with chocolate dunking sauce. That was a dessert worth the calories!!

Prayer is a Life-Decision

"Prayer is a life-decision made and persevered in, not an occasional petitioning of God. In order to be a prayer, as to be a writer, I must be willing to 'put in time,' and that involves decisions that are sometimes hard., but which are good decisions for my prayer life. An example of one such decision involves time itself; simply the decision to set aside time for prayer every day. Such a decision is in the end the most important decision one can make regarding an ongoing conscious relationship with God.

"But like all decisions that become a way of life, the decision to set aside time for God each day must be renewed again and again. Otherwise, after a while prayer time becomes simply a time for 'getting' in one's prayers--another compartment in our life that we try to squeeze God into. Most of the time, in order to really secure a prayer time, you need to go apart to pray. There must be both an outer and an inner movement that is like entering another dimension of time and space. Ultimately, it involves a restructuring of your life in some way in order to enter a contemplative, prayerful space."

Bodo, Murray. Poetry as Prayer: Denise Levertov. Boston: Pauline Books and Media, 2001. 93.